Last Thursday, McGill’s Aboriginal Sustainability Program and the Sauvé Scholars Program hosted a talk by Louellyn White, who discussed her time studying the Akwesasne Freedom School as part of her PhD dissertation.

White, who is part Mohawk, is an assistant professor in First People’s studies at Concordia University. In the talk, she shared her experiences visiting the school and suggested that other schools could learn from its example of holistic cultural education. 

White first came to do research at the freedom school because of her interest in its Mohawk language immersion program. Soon, however, she became fascinated by the school’s unique approach to education. 

“The school itself is about so much more than language immersion,” White said. “It’s about cultural identity, self determination.”

The school is located on the Akwesasne reserve, which straddles New York State, Quebec, and Ontario. Akwesasne, which literally means “land where the partridge drums,” underwent a period of extreme unrest in the 1980s when a group of Mohawks set up a two-year barricade to protest the arrest of their people following protests against an imposed system of governance. 

During these two years, a group of parents decided to start their own school rather than send their children across the barricades to school. 

“They did it in the most grassroots of ways,” White said. “They used living rooms. They used garages. They used toolsheds.”

Today, 30 years later, the school still exists and has managed to stay true to its mission of providing an authentic Mohawk education.  

“The most unique thing about this school is that it’s self-sufficient,” White said.  “They’ve stuck with those original goals of self-determination and self-education.”

The school receives the majority of its money through fundraising. One of their biggest fundraisers is a quilt auction that can bring in as much as $20,000. The school owes much of its success to the dedication of parents and other members of the community. 

“There are parent committees for everything,” White said. “Parents have to be very, very committed … This is how it’s really sustained itself over the years … because it’s driven by this organic place. People are very immersed in it.”

The school itself is very small, with only 60-65 students at a given time, and goes from pre-kindergarten until grade eight. From Pre-K to grade six, all the students are in complete Mohawk immersion.  

During her time at the Akwesasne Freedom School, White learned that language is not the only way the school helps students regain their Mohawk identity.  

“When I talked to these students I said … ‘does language make you Mohawk?’ and the majority of them said ‘no,’ it’s ‘do I know my songs? Do I know my dances? Do I know my history?'” White said. “The language is important but it’s just one part of identity.”

White explained how the school cultivates values such as respect, responsibility, co-operation, leadership, and stewardship through this type of cultural education.

“I think other communities, non-native communities, can look at situations like this, at schools like this and see [a] culturally appropriate curriculum, grassroots experiential forms of education, [and] value systems,” White said. 

White spoke about the importance of self-governed Aboriginal education, especially in light of the fact that many Aboriginal people are still suffering from their experiences at residential schools. 

“Education is very important within the Aboriginal community,” Allan Vicaire, project co-ordinator on the Aboriginal Sustainability Project, said. “It is a topic that we continue to address to our youth, to educate oneself. I think that there is such a strong stance on education because of the realities that we live in.”

While the transition from Akwesasne to high school can be rough at first, White said that the freedom school students have better values and a stronger sense of their own identity than many students from other schools.  

David Searle, a McGill graduate in history and political science, in attendance enjoyed the talk, as did many others.  

“It’s really wonderful how they’ve integrated their local culture [and] their history into their education,” Searle said.

Alexandra Allaire / McGill Tribune

Last Thursday, McGill’s Office of the Chief Information Officer (CIO) held an event for staff to introduce the new MyCourses software, which will replace the current system on May 1, 2012. The old software, WebCT Vista, was implemented in 2005, but its vendor will no longer be supporting the outdated program as of Jan. 2013. 

Ghiliane Roquet, McGill’s Chief Information Officer, explained that this need for new software also presented opportunities to upgrade its features. A majority of the upgrades are intended to make it easier for instructors to disseminate information, from course-related materials to announcements.  

“We want to be able to provide [staff and students] with a stable environment … with at least a parity of what you have now—and hopefully a lot more,” Roquet said.  

The software selection process included software demonstrations on campus and opportunities for staff and student feedback. Finally, Desire2Learn (D2L), a Canadian e-learning company located in Waterloo, Ontario, was signed to a 3-year renewable license to supply McGill with a new version of the MyCourses software. 

Some new features of the software include a completely new look, the introduction of widgets, and a revised discussion board that can link up to specific content on MyCourses. The discussion board is the most used feature on MyCourses by students, tallying nearly 33 million hits per semester. There is also a new option for staff and students to have a display picture that will then show up on discussion boards and class listings. 

Elan Weinstock, a U3 student in the faculty of management and part-time employee with McGill’s IT services, described the two features that he is most looking forward to using: its central calendar and the mobile platform. The mobile platform, he argued, will ensure that students will be overall better informed. 

“When an announcement comes out … it will be sent to me [in] real time to my cell phone,” Weinstock said.  

He added that students will be able to opt into that feature. 

Additionally, the software’s calendar application will now make note of students’ assignments, exams, and quizzes. Students will then be able to “subscribe” to their MyCourses calendars and import them into their personal calendar applications, such as iCal or Google Calendars.  

Staff are working hard to ensure that the software is operational on schedule. The 4,000 courses that take place during the typical school year—fall and spring semesters—are currently undergoing migration to the new interface, at an average pace of two and a half hours of labour per course. 

“There has been a lot of work involved with converting everything from the old system to the new system,” Roquet said. “All courses for the summer have already been migrated.”

The outlook for the software’s use is positive. The staff and few students who attended the event were generally very receptive of the presentation. 

“It’s a time saver,” Carolyn Samuel, a professor in the faculty of education and the McGill Writing Centre, said. 

Provost Anthony Masi, who Roquet referred to as “the sponsor of the project,” emphasized the impact that the new software could make on the McGill community. The switch, he emphasized, is first and foremost in the interest of students. 

“We want to put an effort on the ‘student-centeredness’ of this institution,” Masi said. “We produce new knowledge, and we disseminate it, and that requires that we stay at the front of technological innovation.”

“It should enhance the learning experience of students in all faculties,” he added. 

Students like Weinstock are optimistic about the software. 

“In the test environment, it worked fine,” Weinstock said. “I am expecting it to work really well.”

On Feb. 22, McGill University and the Association of McGill University Support Employees (AMUSE) announced that they had come to a tentative agreement on both the economic and non-economic issues affecting casual workers at the university. The proposed agreement, which needs to be approved by a ratification vote at AMUSE’s next major meeting, includes provisions for wage increases, paid overtime, and sick leave, as well as modifications to the existing hiring and firing process for casual labourers on campus.

According to a press release by McGill University, this will be the first collective agreement for AMUSE, which represents roughly 1,500 casual labourers on campus. These negotiations took a year to complete.

“Something that we keep in mind is that a lot of the advantage to holding a casual position is that it can be a short-term thing … and you’re looking for flexibility in that job a lot of the time,” Jaime Maclean, current president of AMUSE, said.  “But there’s also a lot of inequality between positions on campus, and without a labour union to police the working conditions of their members, an employer can easily take advantage of their employees.”

Maclean, however, was quick to state that while McGill hadn’t been taking advantage of their casual employees, there were still problems in wage equality and job demands that emerged some years ago, leading directly to the creation of AMUSE and the beginning of collective bargaining.

“While there are obviously people who just work once a week and don’t mind that, there are a large number of people who work full-time at McGill in the same jobs as MUNACA workers,” Farid Attar, former president of AMUSE, noted. Attar is also a member of the bargaining team that negotiated the agreement with McGill.

Attar added that AMUSE aims to maintain this flexibility for the employees who benefit from it, while also increasing job security, benefits, and general working conditions for employees who have put four years of their life into their work.

AMUSE’s bargaining committee was elected at their first general assembly in Nov. 2010, whereupon they attempted to draft the terms of the initial agreement. It wasn’t until March 2011 that serious back-and-forth negotiation began. Bargaining on the non-economic issues continued throughout the year until they were finally resolved in Dec. 2011. On economic issues, however, bargaining quickly reached a stalemate, requiring both parties to call for conciliation.

Altar explained that conciliation brings in the government as a neutral third party, in order to introduce a fresh perspective and restart negotiations. 

In this agreement, some of the benefits gained in the non-economic sphere included written contracts, paid sick days for full-time workers with six-month contracts, priority for AMUSE members for contract renewals and promotions, and paid overtime.

More thought was put into considering wage increases, with the membership of AMUSE categorized into three main groups, each of whom are going to see minimum wage increases under this agreement, as well as minimum yearly increases, with the first increase scheduled for the signing of the agreement. For those workers who are already paid above the minimums mandated by the agreement, there is no danger of losing wages.

“People have to come to the ratification vote,” Attar stressed. “Ultimately it’s not the bargaining team who decides, it’s the membership that gave us the mandate to bargain with McGill­—if you want those wage increases, if you want those job securities, you’ll have to come to the ratification vote … during that time, we’ll answer all the questions they have.”

The ratification vote for AMUSE’s collective bargaining agreement is tentatively scheduled for mid-March, with one session to take place in the afternoon and one at night.