Huston - heart pedagogy

Heart work is this doing, this relationship and reciprocal core, and making sure that those teachings have a place. Because I really feel that the Anishinaabe heart work can really inform how we teach early childhood education across Canada. So that’s the method, their heart work. 

When I speak about heart work within the Indigenous… everybody knows exactly what I’m speaking about. They know their heart work. They know that it’s it’s a commitment to the community. They’re in service to ensure the wellness of their people and to bring benefits and to do the best work they can, ethically.   

So heart pedagogy is about getting to the heart of the story, and it’s about raising those voices, those marginalized voices, and to allow space for their traditional knowledge systems to have the value and beliefs to have place within our early childhood education systems in a way that all educators can take up this work in a respectful way. Heart pedagogy for me, is only going to come from the Indigenous voice, that Indigenous lens. And so that’s going to look like a lot of personal narratives. And it’s also in their language, it’s embedded in the way that they talk, in the way they express themselves, and the way that their pedagogies as a knowledge system come to be, in order to navigate some of the barriers that they’re dealing with in child care in First Nation communities. So, it’s a beginning stage, but I feel really passionate about bringing it forward as a way where all educators can stop and think about coming from their heart with this intention of doing good work. Being open to learning new perspectives coming from your heart is an intuitive experience. Where the Western perspective would be more of our mind.  So this sits within our intuitive knowing, when we have to sometimes stop and check as early childhood educators like should this be happening right now? Or how can I navigate this? That’s the heart teaching.