Donna DesBiens

Welcome to Wednesday, Day 3!  The end of today is the suggested timeframe to post your draft acknowledgement to the Sharing and Feedback Forum. 

It's great to see all the activity happening in the course: more people checking in, reflecting on the learning resources, asking questions, sharing their acknowledgements, and giving collegial feedback. 

If you have already posted your draft acknowledgement, please go ahead and review others' shares, and start thinking about feedback you'd like to offer others and/or receive yourself.  We have provided some questions that you may use to frame your feedback; however, you are welcome to other appreciative or generative responses that come up for you. 

    Image: Meme Generator - imgflip

Appreciative feedback may include observations about things you especially like or that inspire you in some way. Generative feedback may include reflective responses to questions that people have asked about how thy might evolve their acknowledgements, or points of clarification. 

Remember the Open Forum is there for you to ask questions, make comments, share resources etc. anytime you like. 

Your facilitators, Dianne & Donna 

Wow, it's already Day 4 of our microcourse and we're in the home stretch.  I guess it's true that time flies when you're having fun! 

If you're following the suggested timeline, you will have spent time reading and thinking about the what, how, and why of meaningful acknowledgements.  Many people have already also posted their own drafts.  We'd like to note that it's great to see the diversity in the acknowledgements posted so far, both in geographical location and application contexts in classrooms, meetings and workshops, as well as personal style.  (No worries, if you just joined in yesterday or today, the activities should very doable in the remaining 2 days).  

Today it's time to post your acknowledgement and start actively engaging in the feedback process in the Sharing and Feedback Forum if you haven't already done so. Once you have posted your acknowledgement, we suggest you select a few of your colleagues' posts that resonate with you in some way for your feedback.  This feedback can brief; the only expectation is that it be authentic and respectful.  


      Meme Generator - imgflip

We are both impressed on how heartfelt people's acknowledgements are, and how much learning is being shared in the recognition of diverse Indigenous peoples across Canada and in two of our American neighbour states.  It's heartening to experience the respectful tone in all course conversations and sense of accountability for historical oppression and relationship repair that's coming through.   We also love the greater humanity that has emerged so quickly in this community as people share a bit about their personhood in the cultural introductions compared to the typical impersonal business intro that's restricted to work role and employer.   

Once again, please feel free to use the Open Forum to post any questions, comments,, or resource shares. 

Warm regards from your facilitators,
Dianne and Donna  

Thank you to everyone who has said hello in the Who’s Here forum and kudos to folks who have already posted their land acknowledgements and contributed to the feedback process.

This morning I was looking at the ZeeMap of where in the world participants live, work, and have cultural connections. While building the map over the week, I was curious to learn how our connections to diverse places and cultures might influence our work and relationships with others and be reflected in our acknowledgements.

When I look at the map now, one thing that stands out is that participants represent learning institutions and agencies across the country and across the border in neighbouring States. I also notice the weight of European cultural roots with a sprinkling of African and Caribbean connections. To me, this map reflects a commitment to reconciliation among the children of settler cultures, some of whom were also oppressed in their own ancestral homelands and recognize the damage done.

We have both noticed this commitment also shining through your acknowledgements, the quality of the dialogue, and - maybe most encouraging of all – the ways you are putting this commitment into action. As Willie Ermine (2010) tells us, people have a deep yearning to be ethical, i.e. to try and do good; but the challenge is to do something about it, which is quite different from just talking about ideas the way we usually do in the academy.

  Image: CC0

If you haven’t yet posted, no worries – there’s still time to do that. If all you’ve got is a rough idea, that’s okay, post it anyway. We have a little overflow time into the weekend as we will also be continuing to participate in the feedback sharing process.

Thank you for taking this learning journey with us. Eye? Sqâ’lewen.

Your facilitators, Donna and Dianne

Hello colleagues,

Here's a ZeeMap of where participants in this course work according to initial registration info. 

It's wonderful to see so many people interested in this conversation and truly amazing to try to wrap our minds around the diversity of places and distance we're connecting across. 

On the first day, this distance between workplaces seemed mind blowing. Yet, as people continued to check in and name places they feel connected to in some way, whether roots, relations, travels, or meaningful experiences of choice, the map started looking more like this:

As of Thurs evening, at least two-thirds of our 47-strong community have checked in and the diversity of connections to places and cultures has expanded across a big part of the Northern Hemisphere. The red markers show where people work now; the blue markers show more personal connections people shared in their check ins and cultural self-locations I'm so curious to learn about how this influences our work and relationships with others, and whether it will be reflected in our acknowledgements. 

At RRU, we also give land acknowledgements at the start of all regular meetings as standard practice, and it's usually done by whoever is chairing/facilitating rather than requiring any Indigenous staff present to do all the work. Sometimes, a brief cultural self-intro is also given.

However, it's only appropriate for local Indigenous leaders welcome others to the land, unless they give special permission for a representative to do it. I think the RRU practice is in the References & Resources; just in case, it's also here.   

In all our online courses for both students and faculty development, we include this Traditional Chiefs' Welcome video as the first entry on the landing page.  Course instructors / facilitators are also beginning to include a land acknowledgement more regularly. Sometimes its a text statement that reflects the formal institutional acknowledgement and on the same LMS page as the Traditional Chiefs video. Or, it may be shared more personally, along with a cultural and/or disciplinary self-location in Course Welcome/Intro videos. (Kinda like Derek's draft course intro!)

Online practice so far is fluid and tends to flow with the nature of disciplinary practice, as the research shows - Dimitrov & Haque, 2016.  Intercultural teaching competence in the disciplines. In Pérez, G. & Rojas-Primus, C. (Eds.) Promoting intercultural communication competencies in higher education. (pp. 89-119). Hershey, PA: IGI Global. (Sorry not OER, but available via uni libraries).