We’ve never been about the one-offs. At Ampere, we want to help find sustainable, long-term approaches to bridge the digital literacy gap and share tools and techniques with communities.
Our Lifecycle shows this – we are prepared and eager to support learners through all stages of their journey, be it through Advocacy, Mentorship, Productions, Education, Resources or Employment. In this case, local teachers are the learners.
Working with Nunavut Arctic College (NAC) and Nunavut Teacher Education Program (NTEP), Ampere connected with people from Northern communities who want to support the learners around them – their peers, their neighbours, their families. We helped these educators-to-be with their own education as they prepare for employment.
In the Fall of 2023, Mary McDonald, Ampere’s Community Delivery Partnership Manager, taught a course session in partnership with NAC, with future educators from across six different communities. In December, Ampere also started a professional development course for the instructors themselves. There were two course sessions between January and April for teacher education students.
These sessions allowed us to help bridge the digital literacy gap while modeling various teaching methods and tools for the future educators to consider bringing to their own classrooms.
“It was a fantastic opportunity to work directly with folks who want to be teachers. What I found most exciting and inspiring was that most are mature students, most are parents and already active in the community, and it’s been identified to them that they would make good teachers,” says McDonald.
“They’re Inuit, of the community, working with the communities. In feedback from the students, the resounding thread through the process was about them being able to continue the work as teachers and continue the language, keeping the traditions alive, sharing education that is rooted in their language and culture.”
McDonald says the value of supporting educators from within the community in which they’ll teach cannot be underestimated.
“These are people in and of the community. It is their culture, their language, not someone coming from outside and trying to teach within that framework…They get to learn from within their communities,” she says.
“It allows building sustainability and capacity in their communities in a very exciting way.”
McDonald looks forward to the partnership with NAC continuing and is excited to see how it can evolve, potentially a holistic support model that contributes to Indigenous education in ways other than Ampere-led courses.
“We’ve learned a lot, really enjoyed the impact and learned from education students about what they need,” says McDonald, noting how meaningful the experience was and how she’s hopeful about where we can grow from here.