What is it about?
For over 70 years, post-secondary educators have been using a framework commonly referred to as Bloom's taxonomy to design curriculum at all level of the educational system. This paper re-inserts the spiritual domain to a four-domain construction based on the four quadrants of the Medicine Wheel , a teaching/learning framework that has widespread use in the Indigenous communities of North America (Native American, First Nation, Metis, Inuit, etc.).
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Why is it important?
In December 2015, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada released its calls to action for reconciliation related to the oppressive legacy of Indian Residential Schools. Call to action number 62 asks educational institutions to educate teachers on how to integrate and use Indigenous knowledge and teaching methods into classrooms. Using the Medicine Wheel is one small effort towards meeting that call to action.
Perspectives
I feel honoured to have had Anishinaabe kwe student Charlene Leon in an Instruction Skills course that I was teaching at the University of the Fraser Valley in 2012. She saw immediately the parallels and the gap between Blooms taxonomy and her teachings about the Medicine Wheel. She used that insight to teach me about the gap, resulting in insights that led to the thesis for this article. Bloom’s taxonomy reflects the indigenous structure of the medicine wheel: cognitive (mental), psychomotor (physical), and affective (emotional). Charlene recognized that the fourth domain of the Medicine Wheel was missing; the spiritual. Given that Bloom’s taxonomy utilizes three designations that mirror the Medicine Wheel but is missing the fourth from this indigenous knowledge framework, it is important that post-secondary education systems look carefully at what this means for their work in building capacity for intercultural understanding, empathy and respect in answering the call to action from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
Dr. Marcella LaFever
University of the Fraser Valley
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Switching from Bloom to the Medicine Wheel: creating learning outcomes that support Indigenous ways of knowing in post-secondary education, Intercultural Education, September 2016, Taylor & Francis,
DOI: 10.1080/14675986.2016.1240496.
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