AhmedAli
English First Peoples
What is English First Peoples?
​English First Peoples at Palmer Secondary School is a Grade 12 English Language Arts course focusing on authentic Indigenous literature, worldviews, and perspectives, fulfilling a new BC graduation requirement for Indigenous-focused learning and fostering reconciliation by exploring themes of identity, land, history, and justice through oral, written, and new media texts, promoting critical thinking and deeper understanding of Canada's past, present, and future.
What do they do in class?
In Palmer Secondary's English First Peoples classes, students engage deeply with authentic Indigenous stories, oral traditions, and diverse texts to build critical thinking and communication skills, exploring themes like land, identity, justice, and reconciliation, while developing their own voice through various writing and speaking projects, all grounded in the First Peoples Principles of Learning. They analyze text forms to understand how culture shapes meaning, connect with local First Nations, and build understanding for reconciliation.
What do students learn?
At Palmer Secondary, the English First Peoples class opens the door to the vision of the Indigenous worlds through the authentic First Peoples Principles of Learning, mainly the ones which are... identity, reconciliation, and critical thinking and through the voicing and education of diverse Indigenous peoples in Canada and elsewhere, while students develop their own communication skills. This means that the students learn about the first peoples of this land in terms of communication, action, and even what they did. Therefore, learning about the first peoples' ways of living leads to practicing a more original approach to the world.
My comment
I’ve got no opinion about the English first peoples class as I’ve never attended it. Still, when I finally get to it, probably I will assert that the subject is of great importance to us because we are not the first peoples of this land and we have to acknowledge that before we can move on further with our lives. To my mind, this land should be returned to the native people of this nation. To sum up, I consider this subject as a good reminder for all students about who the first owners of this land were.
