Introduction: My Residential School unit was largely based on the Residential School Lessons for the Genocide Elective set out by Cheryl Payne. I simply tweaked them a little bit to suit my classes. I taught this unit last year in April. The main areas of change were primarily how I prepared and debriefed the students to see the NFB movie We Were Children. The other change was including a summative assignment based on the questions found in Facing History and Ourselves’ book Stolen Lives. Creating this summative assignment was a great experience in professional collaboration as all of the history teachers at my school collectively designed it.
Brenda Ohngemach
I am a History, Visual Arts and Native studies teacher at the Toronto District School Board. I have 19 years experience one year of which was as a teacher exchange in Australia. Over the past four years I have gotten interested and involved in indigenous issues through my connections with the TDSB Aboriginal Education Centre and teaching the NAC1O course.
I simply love learning and using the strategies from Facing History and Ourselves allows me to learn a lot from my students and the process of teaching them.