Session

This campfire session will discuss the development of a Collaborative Online Indigenous Intercultural Learning (COIIL/VE) Special Topics Framework as a tool to explore what it means to be Indigenous serving within an academic institution. This Framework interweaves Indigenous pedagogies, intercultural perspectives, and land-based approaches with academic expectations that can be adapted to any community/context within which the Framework is utilized. This collaborative Framework is being created through dialogue with stakeholders and communities across five BC partner institutions. Drawing on existing expertise within the network ensures intercultural competencies and agreed-upon Indigenous pedagogical approaches are prioritized, in culturally appropriate ways across contexts. Embedded within Indigenous ways of knowing, the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are integral to the framework development, enhancing our ability to connect with Indigenous needs and goals on a global level.

Understanding the complexities and diversities involved in being an Indigenous-serving institution requires ongoing dialogue; however, at the heart of the Framework lies the commitment to reconciliation, decolonization, and Indigenization, with the voices of Indigenous communities leading the conversations.

In this campfire session, we will explore the origin story of this project, including:

• what it means to be Indigenous serving
• why an Indigenous COIIL/VE Framework is important in the Canadian context

By describing the connections between the partners, we hope to plant the seeds for discussing how this Framework might be shared, expanded, and adapted when collaborating with global Indigenous communities and when used in other institutional contexts.(Project funded by the CiCan Innovation Fund).