Rowan - creating curriculum

So Kativik Regional Government collaborated with Avataq Cultural Institute, and Avataq Cultural Institute is the organization that was established in Nunavik to promote, protect, and support Inuit language and culture. And in, at their Annual General Meeting that year, in August of 2000, I traveled with my colleague from Kativiq Regional Government, Margaret Gauvin, and we went and we met with the Elders at Avataq’s AGM –Elders conference – and asked the Elders, “How should we proceed?”, “What, what are, what’s important in working with, in developing, programs for Inuit early childhood educators and children Inuit families and children?” And they said, it has to be linguistically appropriate and culturally embedded. So, we had that direction. So, we knew that the curriculum had to go in that way. Then when we went and found money and I said, well, if we’re going, we realized, okay, so we want to create a curriculum that comes from the communities that is very local, that is, you know, accessible in the Inuktitut language and that is embedded in Inuit knowledge. So, we thought about it, I suggested, well, maybe the best way to do this is to hire an Elder who could travel with a teacher or an early childhood educator and go around to the communities. And the idea was that this work would be done all Inuktitut and that they would collect stories, that they would look for songs, find out about games, but that were coming from each of the communities. So, we sort of made a plan for these weeklong visits in communities to collect data.