Today EDUC 405 brought in Kelsey MacDonald as a guest speaker to discuss her experience within the Bachelor of Education program at UNBC and her experience with finding her path in the field of Education. She started off her presentation with a beautiful personalized land acknowledgement that was both vocal and visual. Her reasoning behind her land acknowledgment was behind the “Why?” Why do we do land acknowledgements and what does it mean? She demonstrated it beautifully. Kelsey also dove into her own personally journey of what led her down the path of education. Her story was extremely relatable as both her and I come from family living in Newfoundland and we both started our journey working as an Education Assistant. It was eye-opening to listen to her connection between Newfoundland culture in relation to Indigenous culture as I have never looked at it that way before. Both cultures are invested in family, music, and food. When looking at it from that perspective, diving into the Indigenous culture seems less intimidating as I am still in the learning process of how to recognize and incorporate Indigenous teachings into my own classroom. Her story on how she ended up working as the SD57 Indigenous land Based Teacher was quite comical but it showed how she was ready to face anything and how she knew it was where she was meant to be. She had mentioned as well that her goal moving forward in her current position is to have teachers lead the way in land based learning, which showed how passionate she is about her role as an educator.
Kelsey’s pubic speaking skills are extremely impressive. Her humour and passion shined through the entire presentation. As Kelsey is a recent graduate from the program it made her feel extremely relatable and it was interesting to listen about all the opportunities we could have after we graduate. My main take-aways from her presentation include: showing our personal passions within the classroom, bringing in outside resources into the classroom whenever possible is important, network as much as we can (connections are key!), we as teachers get what we put in (our students will see our hard work and dedication to them and we in return will get the same back),and know our “Why” and the reason for our path into education. Why are we here? Why are we doing what we are doing? Everyone has their own journey, we just need to follow our heart.
