Browsing by Author "Dobson, Margaret A.E."
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- ItemOpen AccessHonour song: Native graduates voice success(2004) Dobson, Margaret A.E.; DePass, CecilleThe success achieved in university by Aboriginal graduates is the subject of this qualitative study. The increasing number of graduates was the catalyst to document, improve understanding of, provide insights about and celebrate Aboriginal student success. Story telling is the strategy invoked in the study, which features the researcher's personal historical narrative about teaching and learning in the Aboriginal student community, and the narrative recollections shared by Aboriginal graduates about the university journey, their experiences and their achievement of success. The stories voiced by the graduates are shared within the conceptual model of a medicine wheel, and reveal an interactive pattern of the graduates aspirations, their challenges met and overcome, their growth achieved, and the resulting changes which took place in their lives. The process of success emerging from the graduates' stories, illuminates the way for Aboriginal students who go to university, and is an empowering vision for change.
- ItemOpen AccessJourney to the honour song: stories of first nations student success(2012) Dobson, Margaret A.E.; DePass, CecilleThe study is an interpretive work regarding the cross-cultural and paradigmatic experiences of First Nations students attending and graduating from university. It is an arts based, imaginative and philosophical presentation of clusters of stories concerning the journey of First Nations students through university when they are expected to conform to Euro-Canadian post-secondary academic culture. The inquiry depicts and evokes the lived experience of successful First Nations graduates through the medium of fictional story. Storytelling is engaged to investigate and celebrate ways of knowing valued by and integral to Aboriginal cultures, and in order to contextualize and convey insights about the journey of First Nations university students in a manner that makes the pathway accessible to future generations. The inquiry results from twenty years of acculturation among First Nations students, learning from, adopting and appropriating many First Nations perspectives and understandings shared by the courageous students who taught me about their experience in my capacity as educator and university programme co-ordinator/instructor between 1984- 2005. Beginning with a conventional Euro-Canadian thesis format, the study, moves across knowledge cultures to weave First Nations myth, legend, poetry and song with contemporary fictionalized accounts of the experiences of Aboriginal students in postsecondary learning settings. Embedded in the stories is information that may relate to educational processes such as admissions, or course selection, and to more personal and learning matters such as motivation, First Nations history, acquiring success and the esoteric of power. The stories highlight the perspectives of First Nations students on the interactions between their cultural paradigms and academics. The empowering stories of university success carry the potential to inspire, to teach, to create change and promote healing for prospective First Nations students and educators who work beside them.