Digital Promise Signature Workspace
English: Understanding Contemporary First Nations, Métis, and Inuit Voices
This workspace, created by Lynn Thomas, features her thinking through the most important factors to support her students when planning for a new course.

This course explores the themes, forms, and stylistic elements of a variety of literary, informational, graphic, oral, cultural, and media text forms emerging from First Nations, Métis, and Inuit cultures in Canada, and also examines the perspectives and influence of texts that relate to those cultures. In order to fully understand contemporary text forms and their themes of identity, relationship, and self-determination, sovereignty, or self-governance, students will analyze the changing use of text forms by Indigenous authors/ creators from various periods and cultures in expressing ideas related to these themes.
Over the duration of the course, students will create various oral, written, and media texts to further explore their own ideas and to solidify their understanding with a focus on the development of literacy, communication, and critical and creative thinking skills necessary for success in academic and daily life. Check out this wakelet for more resources!
Lynn Thomas is a secondary school English teacher at Dunnville Secondary School in Dunnville, Ontario. Lynn writes a blog at www.wordsgrow.com covering her many interests and experiences in education including making learning relevant and supportive by teaching the UN Sustainable Development Goals, incorporating mental health and wellness, collaborating globally, and using educational technology to increase accessibility and inclusivity.
My factors
Students build knowledge from their experiences both in and out of school.
Critical Literacy is the ability to identify purposes, motives, and potential biases of a particular text to enhance overall comprehension and critical thinking.
The trauma that comes from experiencing adversity in childhood releases stress hormones that can lead to changes in the body and brain.
Texts
Literacy 7-12
Providing access to a variety of multimodal texts that align with the interests of learners allows them to practice digital, information, and Critical Literacy.
Literacy 7-12
With figurative language and creative sentence structure, poetry supports the development of a deeper understanding of the different ways language makes meaning.
Literacy 7-12
Selecting culturally responsive reading materials, including multicultural and diverse texts, is critical for supporting all students.
strategies
Literacy 7-12
By talking through their thinking at each step of a process, teachers can model what learning looks like.
Literacy 7-12
During guided inquiry, teachers foster student autonomy by designing lessons centered on meaningful questions in which students locate, analyze, and present relevant information on their own or in small groups.
Literacy 7-12
As students move through multimodal stations pertaining to a particular unit, the social and physical nature of the activity supports deeper understanding.
Literacy 7-12
Writing conferences allow students to fully immerse, share, reflect, and receive feedback during the writing process, promoting Motivation for continuing the sometimes lengthy revision process that occurs in the upper grades.
Literacy 7-12
Audiobooks allow students to hear fluent reading and to experience books that may be above their reading skills.
Products/tasks
Literacy 7-12
When annotating, students engage deeply with a text and make their thinking visible while reading.
Literacy 7-12
For adolescent learners, the Composition process can become more robust, as learners begin to express ideas through multiple media, which includes visual, audio, and digital production.
Literacy 7-12
When students express information visually, they are activating more cognitive processes while problem solving and increasing their experience with alternate texts.
Literacy 7-12
When students write from a non-dominant or marginalized perspective, they consider and give voice to points of view that are often missing.
Literacy 7-12
When adolescents can connect and communicate with authentic audiences about their interests and values, reading and writing become more personally meaningful and relevant.
reflection/metacognition
Literacy 7-12
Student reflection on learning, particularly when done collaboratively, is critical for moving knowledge of content and strategies into Long-term Memory.