Advancing Truth & Reconciliation in Education

logo designed by Carla Rae Taylor

In 2016, John Humphrey Centre for Peace and Human Rights (JHC) engaged in a collaborative pilot project with five schools in Edmonton Catholic and Edmonton Public Schools called Advancing Truth and Reconciliation in Education. We have created a meaningful process whereby students explore reconciliation from a rights-based lens. The pilot program consisted of nine learning sessions and three student-led Call to Action sessions. We invited elders and community members to share their knowledge on a variety of important topics such as Indigenous language, worldview and treaty.

Our goal in Advancing Reconciliation is to create safe spaces for Indigenous students and their peers to discuss, recommend, and develop student-led initiatives that promote reconciliation in their schools and communities. These are the participating schools’ Calls to Action, which use interactive arts-based learning approaches that focus on Indigenous voices and issues in Canada.

In addition, the 2019 Zine explores some of the themes and ideas in JHC’s Advancing Truth and Reconciliation Toolkit. Within these pages you will find perspectives from youth, knowledge keepers and community members we worked with in 2018/19. Art and dialogue were important tools for transformative learning throughout this project and helped participants understand and unpack some of the complex ideas related to our own role in advancing truth and reconciliation in our communities.

The program is designed to build the capacity of students and teachers and to provide opportunities to connect with the rich and thriving network of Elders, Indigenous Knowledge Keepers, community members, artists and activists that work tirelessly to promote Reconciliation in their communities.

In addition, one of the goals of the project was to create a toolkit with the intention to share some our learning’s from the pilot project and provide administration and teachers with a framework to introduce these important topics in the classroom. It is intended for grades 5-12 and is meant to be adapted for the appropriate grade. Each section has links to the Alberta Program of Studies for each grade.