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You
are here: Lessons from an Inuit Community on Baffin Island
by Ellen Weber
For eighteen months, I taught Inuit teachers on Baffin Island, as adjunct professor for McGill University. But, in reality Inuit teachers taught me many valuable lessons about learning and teaching. They taught me that humor, life and scholarship can work well together. That learning requires more than listening to lectures or memorizing facts, but does not require abandoning our moral beliefs.
It was two years ago that I completed my work in the North. I left the Arctic with a new appreciation for the richness of Inuit culture, an affirmation of my own faith and abilities, a plethora of new hands-on activities, and some humorous ideas for encouraging students to engage with refreshing new ideas and scholarly concepts.
Through my Inuit students' lives and our work together, I experienced how environment shapes and colors human learning. Teachers in the north often excel in hands-on learning, enjoy easy wit and specialize in keen navigational and hunting skills. Inuit draw wisdom from elders, and frequently consider children's ideas. By contrast, they dislike passive reading exercises, isolated numeracy drills, or socials studies lessons unrelated to community or their Arctic environment. The critical question arises, how can golden lessons from Arctic communities enrich our "southern" classrooms?
Lessons reached beyond any Arctic classroom. After one student, Theo, led a dog team 3000 miles from Igloolik to Greenland, he described the expedition through wind directions, ocean ice depths, and climactic patterns as accurately as if he possessed a compass in his head. Under his leadership, others pressed on through deadly white outs as they wend their way around forty foot pressure ridges. Theo's amazing exploits are recorded in Equinox magazine (Vol. 36 No. 36.) Students like Theo became friends and teachers. It made no sense to set up traditional hierarchies in our classes. Instead we built on amazing proclivities of Inuit to share insights and understandings easily and naturally as polar bears fish.
Humor, hands-on problem-solving, and the development of interpersonal skills ranked high on Baffin. In fact, Inuit respond daily to environmental emergencies with wit and ingenuity. Suspended in the balance between fierce weather conditions which might land ten foot snow drifts against a classroom door, and shut down Igloolik's only taxi, is their willingness to laugh, tendency toward natural curiosity and keen ability to solve practical problems.
The most unpredictable Arctic adventures often set the stage for learning. Once during an amazing skidoo race to the Igloolik Airport, I narrowly caught my plane to another remote community near Greenland. It was Saturday so Cecilia, head of the Government Social Work, was free. On somebody's skidoo, Cecilia, a native Inuit from Igloolik and close friend of my students, roared up to my home in the only vehicle she could find - a skidoo to transport me to the airport. We hopped on, piled four bags on top of us and under us, leaving the big bag for Cecilia to race back for. What a ride! We zoomed through Igloolik's snow-packed, uneven ditches, out of town to the airport, as if we were headed down Aspen mountain in a ski race.
Snowmobile heaving from side to side, we skidded into gullies over bumps and teetered on the edge of snow banks while I held onto blowing bags, and held my breath. Cecilia raced on, undaunted by the tundra's' icy obstacles. Not dressed for a skidoo, in sub zero temperatures I was unprepared for the rugged terrain we encountered. I questioned my own ability to hang on, bags flying in the wind, my frozen face, and Cecilia's expression of sheer conquest over the elements.
As I thawed from under the ice formed over my eyeballs, Cecilia burst through the airport door - red-faced and smiling. Hurling my large bag in front of me, she pronounced. "Hope you don't have breakables, Ellen. Your bag flew off the skidoo three times." "No problem." I shot back, "It could have been me flying off the skidoo"
Arctic tundra is classroom to many Inuit. Inuit hunters circled daily the frozen bay outside my front window, skidoos pulling qamutiqs, and dogsleds racing toward the flow edge, where hunters would return with narwhal, seals, caribou, polar bear. Food, clothing and sometimes tools, for elders whose only currency is wisdom and their land. Elders traditionally taught youth to navigate, build temporary homes on rugged tundra far north of tree lines, know when the lip of an iceberg is calving, and distinguish the roars of ice cracking and falling off a glacier, as it tumbles into the sea. Youth learned from elders to know the sounds and understand patterns in order to hear an iceberg's warning. To not hear might result in your ship torn open, your tiny craft toppled, or failure to return home before a dangerous blizzard.
Not surprisingly, a variety of teaching approaches made practical sense to Inuit learners. But first, I had to learn from my students, about life in Arctic communities, and about their values and beliefs. For instance, we may not see children as gifts to be given to others. But Inuit often give children over to relatives, or close friends who are better equipped at the time to raise the child, for instance. Children are much loved here, and are given often to aging parents as a gift to take care of them in their older age. In return the older women appear to enjoy looking after babies while busy parents work. Adopted children enjoy a continued relationship with biological parents. Louise, mother of several children and a mature student teacher, first told me these stories on a walk. Stories continued at my house for tea and cookies where my students enjoyed dropping by to share a cup of tea on a stormy afternoon.
Lessons emerged even from the midnight skies. As darkness is closed in on Igloolik, there was no way of knowing how to react. The curtains of night simply closed off the sunlight and I awoke morning after morning to a midnight sky. Instead of gloom, though, darkness often clothed us in magically clear, sky sparking with crystalline stars and northern lights. When the sun hid its warmth, the moon filled the daylight gap with a spectacular show of its own. One morning I sat in my living room sipping tea early, amazing pink hues danced against the twilight sky. From my front window I watched a skidoo move along the road pulling a long wooden qamutik (sleigh). On the qamutik sat a woman and man dressed in sealskin clothes, obviously enjoying the morning moonlight show. The qamutik moved against a sky blended in rose and palest lavender. To the right I could see Venus, the last of the stars, twinkling light a dozen stars clustered into one, as if it enjoyed the spotlight on its own. Then, when the summer sun circled our tiny communities without setting, darkness became continuous summer, where brilliant orange, purple red and yellow sprigs introduced spring to life on the Arctic tundra. Together, we sang the Beatles' song, Here Comes the Sun, with new appreciation for a return of the sun's light and warmth.
Depending on problems that emerged, Inuit responded with hands-on unified knowledge of physics, applied solutions with the sleek skill of an athlete, or introduced an elder's wisdom about Arctic environments. Their unique learning approaches, problem-solving abilities and community teamwork, could richly enhance a few gaps in our Southern odyssey about learning and teaching.
Ellen Weber, Ph.D, is Director of the MITA Brain Based Renewal Center in Rochester, NY. She is the author of Student Assessment That Works, which is reviewed in New Horizons' Journal, and of MI Strategies in the Classroom and Beyond: Using Roundtable Learning. She is also author of other articles on brain based renewal with practical strategies for secondary and college levels. Weber's upcoming book suggests parctical strategies to use MITA for Online learners.
Contact:
Ellen Weber (PhD)
MITA Brain Based Renewal Center
PO 347 Pittsford , NY 14534
Phone (585) 421-3656
email eweber1@frontiernet.net
www.mitaleadership.com
Copyright © 1996 New Horizons for Learning
http://www.newhorizons.org
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