a report really, a position paper, that
said we need to develop the treasures within.
And at the time they wrote it, it was
quite dramatically different than what many countries were doing,
which was to have a curriculum that covered pretty much exclusively
a knowledge base as opposed to a richer set of ideas.
And, in that learning, The Treasures Within, the big ideas
were that we should work together as educators
to think about how we could develop young people
who knew who they were as individuals that had
a personal and social identity that mattered to them,
and they called that "Learning to Be". That we need critically - and
certainly in our country of Canada, this really matters because we're so
multicultural - that we need to learn how to live together in ways
that are peaceful and productive and to know how to work in
groups and in teams.
That, of course, we learned how to know things, and
that's one important dimension that may have a rich knowledge base.
We also have some experiences with hands on kinds of activities so
that we actually learn how to do things and how to accomplish things together.
And that richness of four ways of knowing, doing, being,
learning to live together, become a part of what we do in school.
And it's very interesting some years later, to look at
schools, and see if that's really what happens in schools.
We love to go into schools and see to what extent these ideas are in place,
and the ones where these four ideas are in place,
we find to be very healthy places for young people.
The fifth dimension really comes from indigenous people around the world,
and I think it's a very, very long oral tradition.
And that is, that we need to learn
to live in a respectful way with the natural world.
And we're seeing more and more evidence that
educators around the world are taking from this
aboriginal and indigenous world view - the idea, yes
indeed, if we re going to have a world
worth living in, that we need to add that to the dimensions that we consider.
So, when you think about your own practices and your own planning, thinking
about to what degree these five dimensions are a part of your planning - we think,
and we have found, with educators in our province and
in the Yukon Territory, that these are very, very important ideas.