Journey to the honour song: stories of first nations student success
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2012
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Abstract
The 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.
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Bibliography: p. 313-333
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Citation
Dobson, M. A. (2012). Journey to the honour song: stories of first nations student success (Doctoral thesis, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada). Retrieved from https://prism.ucalgary.ca. doi:10.11575/PRISM/4998