Exploring the Ethical Standards for the Teaching Profession through Anishinaabe Art

I thought I knew a lot about FNMI history and beliefs, but now I realize how wrong I was. As I’ve learned more about the first peoples of Canada I have grown a profound respect and admiration of them. It wasn’t until I read the “Exploring the Ethical Standard for the Teaching Profession through Anishinaabe Art” resource that I truly realized my lack of knowledge. The piece of art for the ethical standard of care has a drastically different meaning then the one I interpreted. My interpretation was that we need to care for all people (referring to the elderly people on the sides), but in reality those people are caring for the story that is being conveyed by the teacher in the middle. Before that, I didn’t realize the importance of the story, and I knew about the oral history traditions but never applied that knowledge.

This resource is phenomenal, and definitely worth a look since it provides a FNMI perspective on the teaching profession.


The Ethical Standard of Care. Artist Bruce K. Beardy, OCT
Since non-tokenism respects and representation of FNMI peoples and practices is so important (as outlined in the resource Full Circle, page 7) I had the idea to use the art in the Anishinaabe art resource (or other FNMI art, I just noticed how perfect these paintings were for this particular activity) to explore symmetry and asymmetry in math. Rather than the lesson being “today we’re learning about aboriginal art” it becomes “today we’re learning about symmetry through FNMI paintings.”

The Ethical Standard of Respect. Artist Bruce K. Beardy, OCT

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