Wander with me on my journey...

Month: December 2019

Reflection

“Learning ultimately supports the well-being of the self, the family, the community, the land, the spirits, and the ancestors”, I have explored this quote through self exploration and discovery and feel that we as a group expressed this through personal experience and learned or passed down knowledge. As a group, I feel that we worked well together, we had an array of personality types but one common ground we all had was respect for each others ideas and viewpoints.

When we first got our group together we had originally decided on a different piece to use, unfortunately one of the group members had gone ahead and put a fair amount of work into the project on their own. Upon our first meeting we learned that the piece was put to rest and no longer available to be used, we then recognized how “learning involves patience and time”, the student had put their patience and time into our assignment and we were not able to use any of it due to the song being put to rest. Seeing as one of the group members had already made us a template, it made it very simple for each of us to choose an area to work on, and, with google docs we were able to work collaboratively and remotely. As a group we discussed all of the components and shared ideas for each part of the assignment. My final job was to write in the assessment portion of the assignment and to open and close for the presentation.

I thought it was important to highlight the territorial acknowledgement into our introduction due to the topic and with the land on which we study. I was nervous and only practiced speaking it a couple handfuls of times and with that I learnt that “learning involves recognizing the consequences of one’s actions” – I should have practiced more.

Furthermore, I have been connecting with the elders in the first peoples house on campus and from our conversations I have begun to realize that there is not one “right” way of doing things, this touches in with “learning recognizes the role of indigenous knowledge”; as a closing piece I wanted to remind our learners that any tool can be used if it seems appropriate. The first people did not deem a certain item to be solely used a specific way, it would be used as needed. I wanted to acknowledge this as I personally struggled to understand the meaning of this.

From a personal example, I have been smudging with our elders and was gifted sage and sweetgrass, I had smudged many times with my elders but never at home on my own. I don’t have an abalone shell, I don’t have an eagle feather. How could I do this without these tools? One day I laughed at myself and figured, why not? I can do this, I can make it work. There I was with a wooden lid to a piece of home decor and an oven mitt, these were my substitutions for a shell and a feather. It didn’t work the best, but, that was my first time trying to do it on my own and I did it MY way. I went back to my elders the next week and we laughed about my experience and how I choose an oven mitt to fan. A week later, grandmother and grandfather brought me a shell so I could smudge with more success, which brings me to “learning involves generational roles and responsibilities”, I know this was not fully represented in the means of our presentation but it was something that I experienced along my journey and what I carried with me into my presentation and why I wanted to make a point of bringing it up at the end in my closing points “there is no one or right tool to use, the first peoples way of being is to use whatever tool is available and whatever feels right to you.”

 

Learn, Do, Teach

As we know, the best way to master something is to work with it and then teach it to another person, this is what I have done to get better with my guitar skills. I figured that if I thought about it in a different manner (from a teaching point of view) I may perform better. I still have more practicing to do until I will feel fully confident but I do believe this has helped me grow.

I was caring for my niece and nephew over the weekend, (grades 4 and 6), and they saw the guitar in my living room corner and asked if they could try it and if I could play. Of course I was thrilled they were interested, and so I offered to show them what I could do and started working with them each with the guitar and had them strumming all of the chords I knew and we even worked on strumming patterns! The confidence I gained from sharing what I knew and being able to be the “expert” was incredible. I can be very tough on myself and it was great to be able to feel proud and knowledgeable in an area where I have felt struggle and defeat, I was able to put things into perspective when I switched from learner to teacher and at the same time was empathetic to the difficulties the kids were having when I was working with them and they were trying to learn.

I have been enjoying learning to play the guitar and now that I will have more free time as the semester is coming to an end, I plan to continue to practicing and learning. There have been times where learning to play has been very frustrating, I have wanted to throw the guitar out the window and switch to a different instrument, and on the other end, I have had some amazing times playing, when it just works, and it sounds good, and it feels good, there aren’t words that can describe that feeling. The experience I’ve had has been so intouch with the arts as I know it and I truly appreciate the struggles alongside with the appreciation that I have found and felt.

Thanks for keeping up with my journey through the strings…