First Peoples Principles of Learning
Diversity and inclusion are critically important across the enterprise. We can enhance our Digital Learning habits by learning from others.
As we start this conversation, I would like to take this opportunity to acknowledge the traditional territories of the people of the Treaty 7 region in Southern Alberta. The City of Calgary is also home to Métis Nation of Alberta, Region III.
This seems like the right way to start this post as we’ll be taking a look at the First Peoples Principles of Learning — produced by the First Nations Education Steering Committee. If you’ve not done so already, I highly recommend reviewing this resource. When thinking about Digital Learning (aka new ways of learning), it can be beneficial to look broadly for inspiration and embrace diversity and inclusion.
This has a been a great resource for helping me to think about learning — both for myself as an individual and as I think about impacting learning across an organization. Here are a few of my favourite parts:
- “Learning involves patience and time.”: Yes, the pace of change is faster than ever — and accelerating — but it still takes patience and time to (truly) learn. We need to have patience for how we learn and as we design new learning ecosystems, we need to incorporate time and patience into the ecosystem itself. In the discussion about MS Teams, I highlighted how we introduced patience and time into an Agile Coaching Academy.
- “Learning is holistic, reflexive, reflective, experiential, and relational….”: I see each of us, our teams, and endeavors as part of a larger ecosystem within an organization. Further, we also are part of the larger ecosystem of our individual lives, governments and other organizations. Our interconnectedness brings the potential for enormous complexity and nuance. To learn, we need to be able to reflect, experience and relate our efforts to other people, organizations, situations, and ideas. It is interesting to see how many of these ideas (“see the whole”, retrospectives, experiments, etc.) are embedded into agile and DevOps approaches.
- “Learning requires exploration of one’s identity.”: Knowing who we are as learners can help us to find better ways to learn (which reminds me of the Introverts Guide to Mobile Learning). Further as someone creating learning solutions, we need to be mindful of our learners. Drawing on design thinking and human centered design are reflections of the need to explore identity.
- “Learning is embedded in memory, history and story.”: We’re surrounded by context, experience, relationships, legacy thinking and our stories. Our learning is shaped by these aspects and then shapes them for future learning.
And considering the set of items above (and the larger set of principles) — it highlights the importance of considering our culture (values, norms, behaviors) as we embrace and support new ways of learning.
Which of the principles resonate most with you? How would you use them in your learning? How would you use them with your organization? What other principles do you consider in guiding how your organization learns? How do they guide your learning?
Originally published at https://blogs.ubc.ca on January 23, 2020.
