This course is designed to provide candidates with an overview and awareness of First Nations, Métis and Inuit beliefs that lifelong learning will enhance the candidates’ professional knowledge and counselling practice. The conceptual framework for the course content encourages candidates to reflect on their learning process by considering the building of the connections to mind, body, heart, and spirit. The candidates will be given the opportunity to explore counselling supports that meet the emotional, cultural, spiritual, as well as the academic needs of First Nations, Métis and Inuit students that will contribute to school success.
The course begins with the building of awareness through learning about community and surroundings and then progresses to information gathering utilizing those community resources. This information gathering will inform, guide and support candidates as they begin to understand Indigenous ways of knowing and being. Candidates will explore the importance of connections to self, family/community, land, and the world. This course supports inquiry-based learning which honours candidates’ knowledge and contributions through the learning journey. The idea of holistic, cyclical learning is embedded in the foundation of this course based on the Medicine Wheel (Anishinaabe) as the organizing structure and the Two Row Wampum (Haudenosaunee) as the guiding philosophy.