Shannon Leddy
And what I’m really, what I’m really thinking about and worried about is, how do we return to civil discourse? How do we take this idea of slowness, to use it to think before we speak, to think about the impact of our words, the weight of our words. How would we apply those seven sacred teachings in every conversation that we have, whether it’s public or private, and I think particularly in this era where people can be anonymous on the internet, it’s, it’s, it’s really, it’s troubling to think about what where we are going to land up if we don’t course correct at some point and really take responsibility for our words and for how we are in the world.

Keith Edwards
Keith, hello and welcome to Student Affairs NOW I’m your host. Keith Edwards, today, I’m joined by Dr Shannon Leddy and Lorrie Miller, co authors of teaching where you are weaving indigenous and slow principles and pedagogies. Their book offers broad approaches and concrete suggestions about how we can bring indigeneity into teaching for K 12 college classrooms and learning beyond the classrooms. I’m really looking forward to this conversation today. Student Affairs now is the premier podcast and online learning community for 1000s of us who work in alongside or adjacent to the field of higher education and student affairs. We release new episodes every week on Wednesdays. Find details about this episode or browse our archives at studentaffairsnow.com This episode is brought to you by Evolve. Evolve helps senior leaders in higher education release fear, gain courage and take transformative action through a personalized cohort based virtual executive leadership development experience and here on Huron, education and research experts help institutions transform their strategy, operations, technology and culture to foster innovation, financial, health and student success. As I mentioned, I’m your host. Keith Edwards, my pronouns are he, him, his. I’m a speaker, author and coach, helping hire leaders and organizations Empower better tomorrows through leadership, learning and equity. You can find out more about me at Keith edwards.com and I’m recording this from my home in Minneapolis, Minnesota, which is at the intersections of the current and ancestral homelands of both the Dakota in the Ojibwe peoples. And we’re going to hear more about Indigenous ways throughout this entire conversation, I want to bring in our guests, Lorrie and Shannon, to tell us a little bit about themselves. So Lorrie, I think we’re going to begin with you.

Lorrie Anne Miller
Thank you so much. It is such an honor to be here. And I’d like to start with a land acknowledgement from where Shannon and I presently are. We are in the Musqueam tooth and hakamenum Speaking people’s land. I’m presently just outside of the UBC and in British Columbia, Canada. I should probably also mention that it is a deep pleasure to be where we are and when we are in this time of complicated world dynamics and climate crisis and also a time of deep reconciliation here in Canada with our indigenous peoples. And I’ll tell you a little bit about myself. I am an instructor at UBC sessional instructor presently, as I am gradually working towards my retirement, so I teach textile art and pedagogy in the Faculty of Education. I am a mom of four kids. Two of my kids are have crea ancestry. I’m the birth mother of both of them, actually, all for my kids, and I’m now a happy grandmother of two lovely little granddaughters, also with Cree heritage, so their part of my life is has deeply informed my passion for engaging in Indigenous education, and it raised my awareness very much about the past in Canadian education history. What else I can tell you is I taught for a long time in adult education before coming to the university to teach there while I was working on my PhD, and it was there that I saw students trying to complete their their high school education and feeling pressured to stay in time, to meet a timeline, and feeling guilty and ashamed around their education challenges. And it was that spark for me that was like, there is no judgment about your individual timeline. Where does this push to have to finish with this age cohort? And yes, it does become more challenging, but if we keep those barriers up, then people don’t find ways to succeed. So that was part of the slow down. Give yourself permission to take the time that it takes to learn what you need to learn when you need to learn it. And so that kind of was in the background of my thinking, going into university teaching, and then came teacher education. So I’m going to leave that with Shannon to pick up, because that’s where our paths started to intersect with, with working with teachers post secondary program to become teachers at the University of British Columbia at Penn State.

Shannon Leddy
My name is Shannon Leddy. I am a member of the Metis nation. I am originally from treaty six territory in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. And have been an uninvited guest on the lands of the Hun communism, speaking Musqueam people since 1994 I met you on my father’s side. My father was Patrick Kane, and his father was John Kane, whose mother was Mabel Monkman, and she was from St Louis, which is one of the traditional Metis communities in Saskatchewan. And on my mother’s side, I am third, third generation Canadian of Irish heritage. I am, I like to say, a recovering high school teacher. I taught high school art and social studies and English for about 12 years with the Vancouver school board, and then finished my PhD in arts education, focusing on how we can work with the art of Indigenous artists to start the process of decolonizing and thinking about how what the impact of having indigenous voices excluded from curriculum for so many years has been, and I have now brought that to my work at the University of British Columbia, where I’m an associate professor in Art Education in the Faculty of Education, and as with Lorrie, I’m just delighted to be here and to get to share our work with you all. I it was definitely a project of heart and passion, and I think we were both really glad when we finally got it done. But so now it’s out there, and I’m glad to know that people are thinking about it and talking about

Keith Edwards
it. Yes, a good book is a done book for the authors, right, getting it finished out there. And so, so, how did this project emerge? How did this come to be you’ve already highlighted the connection with helping teachers become teachers, and preparing them for that, and educating them about that. And both of your your focus on art, which is all throughout the book, from your own illustrations and paintings to the textiles and weaving that you shared throughout it. But Shannon, maybe you can begin us with, how did this project emerge? How did it start to become?

Shannon Leddy
Lorrie and I have kind of a funny story, because we met each other probably 20 years ago through a mutual friend, one of my girlfriends, was working at the architectural firm that Lorrie’s husband is a partner in. And so we met one another because we were both writers and both working for the Vancouver school board. And then, you know, life gets busy, and we lost touch. But when I landed at UBC in 2017 Lorrie was working there as a program advisor. I think that’s right, yeah, and so, and we reconnected, and soon realized that we had a lot of shared interests, particularly around student well being and around, you know, the the need to continue to decolonize teacher education practices. When I started at UBC, my first job was to oversee the required course in Indigenous education. And so through that work, teaching multiple sections a year and working with other instructors in their sessions sections, rather, I recognized, as I had when I was going through Teacher Education myself, that there was still a really profound need for resources and pedagogical approaches to help non Indigenous teachers take up this work in a good way, work through some of the fears and anxieties they had around getting things wrong or not knowing enough, and be confident that this isn’t something that’s unfamiliar indigenous pedagogies. The reason we link them with slow pedagogies is because they’re they’re so beautifully paralleled, and show that this is these are not wildly different ways of thinking. So I don’t know if you want to add anything. Lorrie,

Lorrie Anne Miller
yeah, yeah, sure. Thanks. Shannon, so I was working in advising teacher educator or teacher candidates, and they usually didn’t come into my office unless they were in crisis, and so my my door seemed to be very busy helping students navigate a condensed program, and they wanted it to slow down. Now, the consensus is students don’t want it to slow down because they want to get out teaching, but they still feel the pressures of being in a condensed program, and again, my I felt like a broken record, just reminding them, it’s your journey. Take it. Draw it out if you need to. There’s no judgment on if you need to. Slow it down. If nobody’s going to ask, Oh, why did you take two years to finish? You finished? That’s all that matters is this. Find that success. And so Shannon, I had conversations around that. We started doing some writing together, and then we presented our a paper to the A, E R A, American Education Research Association in Toronto, and we were then approached by the the University of Toronto press during that time. Now, what was interesting is we have been previously challenging notions around publishing and writing so that it could be more accessible and challenge the idea of first author second author. Or notions of sibling or sister scholarship, where we can all bring people up together, rather than having a hierarchical competitive nature of education and scholarship. So we had some interesting conversations at the A era, not everybody was on board with not following the prescribed order and line of an academic paper, right? Remember, forgot about that? Yeah, yes.

Lorrie Anne Miller
We wanted to tell a story here. As people, we are storytellers. That’s how we connect with people, and that’s how people learn is if they can integrate their own lived story with what they’re hearing, then it will make sense, because then you’re integrating it. So the book started there, and then COVID hit, and everything slowed down. So we started that in 2019, and that the seed of the book was already begun. And then we really said, Okay, this is very timely. Let’s take a look at this through multiple lenses, so reconciliation, climate change and Pandemic all together, so that it is set within its place, which is in our world context, and in this time. So that was kind of where it all came from, and we took our time to write it like it took a few years, and recognizing that the process was really important to kind of go back and forth. I think later on, we could talk a bit about how we wrote the book, because that was actually really fun. I really appreciated that well.

Keith Edwards
And the book, again, is teaching where you are weaving indigenous and slow principles in pedagogy. And having read the book, I imagine that you fussed over every single word in the title and the subtitle along the way, because they all show up, and the weaving and folks who are listening and not watching, Lorrie has paintings behind her, and Shannon has weaving and textiles behind her, and so many art is just fluttering about. I’ve got books and plants, but those are art too. Those are art too.

Lorrie Anne Miller
I also have a mixed master, so

Keith Edwards
it’s making me hungry. Um, but I do want to invite you to unpack two of what I found to be the key concepts that the book was organized around, the first being this notion of slow principles and slow pedagogy, and the second being the medicine wheel, which is an organizer for the book Lorrie I think you want to start with the the slow pedagogy. Yeah, sure.

Lorrie Anne Miller
So when I’m telling people that might be new to the idea of slow pedagogy, I say, Have you ever heard of Slow Food? And a lot of people have heard of Slow Food that came out in the actually, it’s been around forever, but being popularized in the 1970s out of Italy, and that means knowing where your food comes from, knowing the land where it’s grown. Eat what’s in season, eat together socially, work with your hands and enjoy the food, taste the flavors, and know that that social interaction is all part of it. So if we imagine slow pedagogy, pedagogy meaning thinking about teaching and learning, slow pedagogy is, where are you be connected to the land? What are the stories that are here to care about the people in the community that you’re teaching and learning with, and to learn through your lived experience, and also to taste your food and enjoy that learning like you would a meal. So you’re really absorbing that sitting with that new knowledge. So that’s part of that. So if you think about slow pedagogy as having two overarching umbrella themes, where there’s a deep ethic of care and a naturally paced timeframe, so not clock timed, but more holistic. And underneath that, we have lived experiential, place, conscious, relational, social and connecting to one’s inner self. So that’s all part of that. And you’ll see that this, these are not separate from the Medicine Wheel. They’re all kind of part of that. Well,

Keith Edwards
I really like your analogy of Slow Food and the meal, because I’m thinking more dominant ways of thinking about learning is just sort of consuming the knowledge or information, which might be just like getting the nutrients and, you know, getting on with that, but not just the food and where it came from, but also enjoying the experience you. And the relationship and the community, and who are we having the meal and letting the meal not just be a means to an end, but an experience in and of itself, is that what we’re talking about here absolutely

Lorrie Anne Miller
so if you think about, I had that thought, just give me a moment here.

Shannon Leddy
Yeah, I’ll jump in to say it’s sort of like the difference between skip the dishes versus, you know, assembling the Sunday roast together like there’s, you know, you can get the package deal, but when you actually interact with the food, when you have the sensual relationship with the food when you go through the effort of processing, I think there, our gratitude can be more deep for what we receive, because we’ve actually been participant in its preparation. Absolutely

Lorrie Anne Miller
I remember what I was thinking. So if you can recall your favorite class, you or something where that comes to mind your favorite class, your favorite teacher, you can just kind of think for a moment that if you ask a class of students, that they will be able to tell you who it was, how old they were, the topic of the class, but they probably won’t be able to tell you some facts and figures that they gained from that experience, but they’ll tell you how they felt that they were probably they were in a safe, caring learning environment, and that is so important. It’s that relational piece. How did you feel in that class? I felt challenged, I felt engaged, I felt creative. I felt inspired to do more. You say, Well, did you learn your grammar? Did you probably yes, but that wasn’t what made it the favorite class. You’re right. Skip the dishes. I love that. Thank you. Don’t skip the dishes.

Keith Edwards
Well, let me just and I know you mentioned these, but I just want to highlight them. The two overarching features, one is a deep ethic of care, and the other is naturally placed, naturally paced experience. As you said, Not clock time. And then the four tenets. And there’s lots of and here, so I’ll try and separate it around. The first four of the four tenants is lived and experiential. The second is place, conscious where and when. The third is relational, social, and then the fourth is connecting to one’s inner self, right? And so I find that really helpful, and I start to create a map in my head and visual and start into my own art, but Shannon, maybe you can take us from there into the medicine wheel, which is another big organizer for the book,

Shannon Leddy
you bet. And I’d like to start by saying that, you know, one of the one of the most clear parallels to, I think both Lorrie and I, between slow and indigenous pedagogies is the experience of sort of learning at the knees of your grandparents or your parents or aunts and uncles, and this kind of scaffolding, scaffolded experiential learning that that takes you from being a novice to eventually being able to be a master and and so you know, anything that you’ve ever learned how to crochet or cook or, you know, taught any of those skills by someone in your family, you’ve actually experienced both slow pedagogy and, to some degree, indigenous ways of learning as well. The Medicine wheel in particular, though, is a kind of a visual organizer that is used by a number of different first nations across mostly the Central Plains area of this continent. And it is sometimes the attributes are different, sometimes the colors are different, but normally we see the Medicine Wheel depicted as black, red, white and yellow, and it and the you know, the order varies, but generally the teachings are similar that those quadrants of the medicine wheel are the four aspects of selfhood, the intellectual, the spiritual, the emotional and the physical. But we can also look at the medicine wheel as something that might remind us of seasonality. So for those cultures that have four seasons in the year, we can match those up to the medicine wheel. We can also match the stages of life, from infancy to youth to adulthood to old age. Also match those components. Recently, actually, I was in conversation with Belinda Daniels, who is a Cree woman who teaches at the University of Victoria, and she said that now in her community, they’re no longer using the term Medicine Wheel. They’re using the term celestial wheels or stone wheels, because that seems to be the origin of our present thinking. But I think in this last century, the medicine wheel has become known by both many indigenous communities who have traditionally used it and who have not, and is, you know, quite. Widely available. We relied very heavily on the book The sacred tree, to sort of inform our thinking, because we knew that that was a widely available resource, that if anyone was interested in our book and wanted to dig deeper, the sacred tree is available as well, and talks about the attributes of the medicine wheel.

Keith Edwards
You know, many of our listeners are focused not on teaching in an art classroom or social studies classroom, as you mentioned, but are really focused on encouraging and fostering learning beyond the classroom in student organizations, falling in love, falling out of love, disguiding not to be on the soccer team anymore, conflict, student organizations, all of those things. I’m wondering. It seems to me that there’s even more opportunity because there’s, there’s, you know, we’re not bound by a 50 minute clock on the wall where the class begins and ends. This is more expansive, more infinite possibilities, which sounds super expansive, but often can seem sort of like, well, if we can do anything, I don’t know what to do, and the lack of option paralysis, yes, yes, absolutely. So as I sort of share that in some of the ways that many of our folks are thinking about helping students learn and unlearn and relearn. What kind of emerges for you? Shannon, about how to bring some of these approaches to that aspect of learning it?

Shannon Leddy
Thank you for that question. I think it’s a really it’s a sort of thing that maybe seems daunting at first, because for young adulthood is such a fraught time, and all of those things that you mentioned about, you know, the things that we’re maybe encountering for the first time while we’re trying to engage in professional learning and figure out who we want to be when we grow up. So I think this, I think the idea that we need to attend to ourselves and those we interact with as intellectual, spiritual, emotional and physical, is probably a really foundational place to start. We often get trapped in our own brains, or, you know, when we and we we neglect our bodies, or we neglect our spirits, or we get trapped in our bodies and we forget that our brains and our, you know, our hearts need work as well. So I think keeping that holistic, holistic notion of selfhood in mind is really important for bringing a lot of these concepts to the table, whether it’s in formal learning environments or or not, whether it’s in these supporting environments. I want to share too that one of the teachings that I think we mentioned throughout the book, but that I often challenge student teachers to think about, are the seven sacred teachings that we borrow from our Anishinaabe cousins. And when I pose this to students, I say, what would it be like if every day you brought with you to work an ethic of love, truth, courage, humility, honesty, respect and wisdom. What would that do to your teaching practice? What would that mean to the people that you’re interacting with every day? And I think so. I think that’s, to me, one of the biggest ways to and I’m going to Lorrie your phrase. I use it all the time, and you you’ll say it again. But I love Lorrie’s idea that we teach, we teach people, not subjects. So I think that that reconnecting with our humanness, with the humanness of those we’re interacting with, to be to be generous in how we think about them, even when we’re really annoyed with, you know, whatever they’ve done or we’ve got our own little things to go on. We have to be, we have to be thoughtful about one another’s as human beings first. And fundamentally, I think that is the gist of our entire book, that we need to re humanize education. We need to remember it’s not, we’re not, you know, we may exist within a factory model, within a within that wants to uphold colonial logics, but it’s still at the end of the day, it’s kids and it’s adults who love kids and want to protect kids, and we all have to figure out how to do it together

Keith Edwards
before we move on to Lorrie and her beautiful wisdom. I want to invite you to just share those seven sacred

Shannon Leddy
seven sacred seven sacred teachings. They’re also sometimes called the Seven grandfather or grandmother teachings. There’s a couple of really beautiful illustrated books if you want to learn more about them. But they are love, truth, courage, humility, honesty, respect and wisdom. And I had to write them down, because I have said these a billion times, and every single time I go to try to remember them, I forget one so, but I got I got it right this time. You got it

Keith Edwards
great, and you did it twice. So for folks who are writing notes, I got a chance to do that. Do. Seem really needed in these times, don’t they?

Shannon Leddy
Don’t they? I think you know, particularly truth, courage, humility and respect. Where did we? Where did we forget to stay in touch with those things that we all proclaim to be our values, I think most of us, but sometimes we forget ourselves these days. Yeah,

Keith Edwards
they seem uncontroversial and also more rare than we would like them to be. Yeah, go ahead. Lorrie,

Lorrie Anne Miller
so building on that, those are brilliant notions. And I think if we think about our one’s moral compass and kind of bring that into that concept. And those can be applied outside of oneself. You know as you’re being kind and loving to another, but they also need to apply to one’s inner self, to and I throw in forgiveness and as to as part of that. Because can you be really loving if you cannot also be really forgiving? They all. It’s all part and parcel. So if you have those attributes to yourself as the teacher or the learner, so that you’ve got both sides, then you are more available to be generous, loving, kind, forgiving of another. And so with with my teaching, this is one of my another one of my broken record moments is I use a lot of textile metaphors. This is be be willing to pull out your stitches and start again. And so if I’m teaching embroidery, and this could be teaching how to write an essay, it doesn’t matter the topic, let’s just go with embroidery to take a look at your work. What was your goal? What did you have in mind as your outcome? Now, your aspirational goal would be, I want to be able to do clean, tidy, beautiful lines using a variety of thread colors, where the work is finished in a high quality level. So that’s an aspirational goal. The outcome is, you have a finished piece with quality embroidery. But part way along, you need to take a look at your work with a hard, critical eye. Is this really where it needs to be? What do I need to do to find, refine and retune this so that I can see that it’ll actually achieve what we want to do? And if it’s not working, applaud yourself for recognizing it, pull your stitches out and start again, because it’s not a race with that. It’s about quality, and you can do that with whether you’re doing an experiment or because I asked the students, I said, How many of you went past every time you do a science experiment, that the results are always exactly what you predicted, and they laugh at me. The I teach students from all across the campus, so they’re mixed faculties come into my classes, they laugh. They said, No, they’re they fail all the time. I said, so let’s reframe failure as a not a negative, but an opportunity to discern what happened and where, what are the next things that are informed going forward, and these are things that can be taught no matter what subject area, area it is, and no matter what age level or what grade level, whether you’re advising a student about, should I be in this program or not? Say, Well, think about, how does that resonate in your heart? Predict, you know, project a couple years down the road that you’re in a field doing that now, project this so that you’re actually connecting to your inner qualities, your inner and putting them into your daily practice, so that this comes back to that lived experience and to be kind to yourself so that you can move forward and share that with others.

Keith Edwards
There’s a you mentioned forgiveness, you just said kindness, the slow, not being timeless. There’s a real generosity that I’m hearing here about being, you know, with the learners, letting it happen at their pace, at their time of their lived experience, some grace, some forgiveness, some kindness. This is this is reminding me, in a conversation with a colleague, around this very topic, we were talking about Indigenous ways of knowing and learning and wanting to explore that, and what we sort of realized was there’s learning Indigenous ways of knowing and being and some of the values that we’re talking about in this conversation. But then there’s also unlearning the colonized ways of knowing and being, and sort of the hierarchies and the very time pressing and focusing on the content versus the people and some. Of those things. And so we were talking about, here’s, here’s some of the things we want to learn, but if we’re not conscious of what we want to unlearn, and also not all of that is bad. So how do we hold on to the best of both of that and maybe weave it together, which is a metaphor the two of you, I know, love, but I guess I wanted to shift the conversation. You know you you said this book emerged over years from conversations, 20 years of knowing each other, conversations a paper. I love this notion that you do a paper at a era and publishers rush up afterwards and say, write a book for us, especially when you criticize publishing that sounds beautiful and rare. So good job. And then, and then the writing. And I’m imagining, from the idea of a book to the finishing of the book, things shifted a lot. And so I just wanted to invite each of you to reflect. You know, what did you learn, relearn or unlearn through the process of writing the book? Laura, do you want to start us here?

Lorrie Anne Miller
Sure, sure. So Shannon, I both come to writing from different areas. Shannon’s a poet. I write fiction and non fiction. I’ve done editing, so a real mix of our writing styles, and I think we have both. I’ll speak for okay, we’ll see if it’s both of us itself without big egos. So yeah, so confident with who we each are. And so we shared, we divided the book up into quadrants, and Shannon assigned me the east, which is the spirit, which I thank you for that, because that challenged me in that notion of that inner self, because I was a person who lived very much in my head, and I have now moved it down into my heart center. So thank you. Thank you for that. So we wrote it in chunks. We assigned different tasks, and then we would write, and then we would swap edit and rewrite, and swap and edit and rewrite. So we just reworked each other’s stuff we kept so that you can as you’re reading the book, hopefully you see that the the voice is pretty similar, except for when there’s the narrative pieces, and that’s because we really worked that. And then we took our work to some critical friends, some indigenous and non Indigenous scholars and thinkers that were very generous with their feedback along our first drafts, and that was before we took it out to the publishers review panel. So it was a grow, a process of growing, you know, and I took my I wrote by hand a lot of time. Then I would go and type it up after take it out sailing and like these were written in situ, in a field spinning, or in the the bay, like I wrote that exactly when this storm was raging. So there’s a passage in there where there’s a raging storm, and I loved it. To me, it was a deeply personal book, because it was not only here’s our ideas, but here’s our here’s part of our life. You know, we’re putting ourselves out and being vulnerable. And we invite readers and teachers of all capacity in school, out of school. We’re all teaching and learning from one another to be vulnerable and to sit with that work. And so we we kind of engage with that. So that’s part of our process, was the sharing back and forth, very deeply collaborative. Yeah. Over to you Shannon,

Shannon Leddy
yeah, no, that, that describes it really well. Yeah, I wrote all over the place and but, but I think that strategy of divide like it, you know, the the Medicine Wheel, naturally lends itself to being able to think in these discrete sections. We also added an overlay of vernaculars, four R’s of respect, reciprocity, relevance and relationship. And we also worked with one of the British Columbia First Nations education steering committee, created these first people’s principles of learning, which are very common in schools, very common in I think we actually are required to teach them across curricula within teacher education, so we try to overlay that as well. And I know that it’s very it’s been criticized for being somewhat pan indigenous. We’ve got more than 36 first First Nations in British Columbia alone, much less across Canada. But I think it does get to some, some distilled general values around, you know, indigenous approaches to teaching and learning and what education means. So, yeah, I think that process of systematically thinking in these discrete sections about the book of acting. As one another’s editors, I know one of the one of our critical friends was a girlfriend of mine and a former teaching colleague, Gene Quan, who is Chinese Canadian, and in reading our work, she helped me think through, okay, what do we mean if we’re using the term settler? How does that apply to, you know, families that maybe have arrived on this continent just in the last 100 years and who are not white. So, what, you know, what, how? So it was really interesting to think about, how are we using language? How are we calling people in rather than calling people out? I think that was a that, that was an ethic at the core of our book as well. How can we write in order to to support our readers, rather than to, you know, horse with them or poke at them too much. And then, oh, I had another thought that just left my little brain. There was another element that I was going to add to that it’ll come back to me.

Keith Edwards
Well, Lorrie, do you want to add anything else about your learning, relearning and unlearning in the process?

Lorrie Anne Miller
Sure, sure. And you got it. Shannon, okay, so after so, one of the things was we were writing about slowing down and being present, and yet, the irony of, I have to finish these, I’ve got these deadlines, and so we’re being pulled back and forth between our own set deadlines in working with the publisher and the timing say, Okay, hurry up and slow down. So recognizing this is not a clean and tidy thing, and to be kind, recognizing that there’s some times where we rush in order to slow down so that it’s it’s not perfect, and I think that was what a learning for for me, was that in the process, that’s all we have, is process. If we have good process, the outcome will likely reflect a good process, and that’s no matter what we do. So So I think we had a good process, and in the end, I’m very pleased to have this book out in the world. Can I hold it up? Yeah, there we go, with all my little notes on the side.

Keith Edwards
Looks so well loved.

Lorrie Anne Miller
It is well loved. And when I reread pages, it’s like, oh, that’s we wrote that, and it’s still in my brain. So, you know, I’m still enjoying and sitting with it. So thank you for your work. Shannon on this, it was a deep pleasure, and so honored that people are reading it and finding wisdom in our words like that is just all you can do is put it out there and hope that it resonates.

Shannon Leddy
It’s true, I often tell my students on the first day of class, I can’t teach you anything, so I immediately want to lower their their expectations, but I also kind of enjoy that look on their faces like, wait what? Because? But it’s about getting at the idea that teaching and learning are a reciprocal relationship, and you can’t, you know, you can’t open someone’s brain and pour stuff in and shake them up and send them on their way. So I think that is a really important, you know, component of the way we were thinking about this work. I know what I was going to say earlier, because we do both have art brains. I think it was one of the challenges was to try to appeal to people who are not focused on arts education, and also considering the fact that we’re both women, so men also are teachers, and people that are somewhere in between also are teachers. So how do we also make sure that we’re not over feminizing these ideas, but that we’re still, you know, speaking with our female voices, but, you know, finding ways to also be inclusive of those who occupy different identities. So I think that was all part of the deep thinking and consideration that had to go into writing this book and trying to make it accessible and meaningful to those who are in different kinds of subject areas within Indigenous education, it was often the secondary science and math educators who felt most challenged to bring Indigenous education into the classroom. Because, of course, their worlds are about logic and reason and and I think you know, often through conversations, I was able to help them find ways in you can’t build a long house or raise a totem pole without physics, you know? So there’s, there’s like, there is a lot of indigenous science learning and ways of thinking and knowing that we just have never been allowed to give indigenous people credit for because it hasn’t been included in our curriculum. Their voices have been erased, and then the stereotypes and mythologies around indigenous people being dirty or ill educated or lazy or whatever like. That’s the kind of stuff that we have to help people unlearn so that they can see the brilliance that indigenous thinking brings to the table, and particularly in this era of concern over climate change and environmental stewardship, we really have to. Sit down and do a better job of listening. Well, I just

Keith Edwards
want to share a few things, and I didn’t want to jump in there, Shannon, so you wouldn’t lose that thought once you got it back. That I appreciate those open it up for both of you, and then we’ll then we’ll move to our final question. But I really appreciate how you acknowledge the many varied indigenous cultures and backgrounds? And I think that’s one of the things we oversimplify. Is, what is the indigenous culture when there’s 1000s of cultures over so much different place and so many so much time too, right? But what a culture might have been 100 years ago and 800 years ago? Yeah, probably pretty different, right? And so you really acknowledge lots of different sourcing, while also being able to say, and if you look at all of this, there’s some themes here that emerge from that. I really found that valuable. And we talked about the the Medicine Wheel connections to seasons, but also connection to the compass and north, south, east, west, and and some of that. And then, and then, your process sounded very iterative, right? We’re going to start here and write this, and then we’ll send it over and do but also very place based, right? Remembering being on the sailboat, remembering writing during that storm, remember writing in this place, which is a model of some of the things that you’re talking about and bringing in. And I love this is really salient to me right now. Lorrie just mentioned we might have to be rushed to slow down. I just wrote a piece this morning on going slow to go fast, which is the opposite version of that, right? How can we slow down to be thoughtful, Clear, Effective going forward? And so I think that the reciprocity maybe of slow and fast, informing and fueling each other. They seem oppositional, but they can be siblings, to use something you pointed to earlier, Shannon. Does that evoke anything for you?

Shannon Leddy
Yeah, yeah. I was just thinking it’s really easy to conflate speed and efficiency, but those are actually two different things, right? So I think that that, I think efficiency was part of what, what works so well in our process. I often say to you that my the most colonized thing about me is my sense of time. I am really conscientious around adhering to the clock and thinking about how much time things take. And I think when you’ve been a teacher in a, you know, in a K to 12 setting, that the bell regulates your day, the bell even regulates when you can go to the loo, right? So, yeah, it’s a it’s a challenge. But I think living in the real world sometimes we do have to hurry up with some things, as you’ve both said, so that we can get to the thing that we enjoy, or take our time with the thing that we really want to relish. So but, yeah, I think it’s it that that is an interesting thing that we really do tend to conflate speed and efficiency, but they’re two separate, two separate sort of ways of working, I guess, yeah,

Keith Edwards
yeah. Thank you. Is that evoke anything for you? Lorrie,

Lorrie Anne Miller
yes, yes. Lots of things. It’s, it’s the being present and to look within, so that if you can actually really be present with your ideas. So having clear thought, what are you really seeing? What are you really going to say, so that you can have, like, an authenticity to whatever you’re learning and to know that, like there are so many different indigenous cultures globally, there are just so many cultures and subcultures within that, but we’re looking more at also the ways of teaching that indigenous education is not simply the teaching about a history of a people. It is a way of learning, a way of being in the world that can goes beyond the walls of the classroom, and that means, you know, just taking time with it, being aware and being generous with yourself, with your time, and also saying, well, sometimes you need to make those adjustments. So to me, this, it resonates kind of large living, not just teaching. It’s about that kind of a holistic life experience.

Keith Edwards
Yeah,

Shannon Leddy
beautiful, beautiful. I want, sorry, I just want to add, I got off on efficiency and speed. But I think what you mentioned too, about the multiple nations, the whole idea of teaching where you are is exactly that, like, you know, we here in British Columbia. We’re on, we said we’re on Musqueam territory. You know, the Musqueam don’t create totem poles, which are often symbolic of Northwest Coast art. They create house posts. And even knowing something like that is a really important part of acknowledging, you know, this isn’t, yeah, we don’t have planes. Culture out here, pow wows come through Vancouver, because that’s, you know, part of how things have developed over the last few 100 years. But to really get to know who are the nations in the area that you’re teaching, what are some of the words in their languages, what are some specific protocols or specific traditions or art traditions that they may have and, you know, learning really where you are in order to teach effectively where you are and honor the spirit of the people who have been caring for these lands since long before any of anyone else arrived. Yeah,

Keith Edwards
and there’s just so many opportunities. And one of my I follow a Indigenous teacher, Anton truer here, who’s Anishinaabe and Ojibwe and on LinkedIn, he puts out an Ojibwe word of the day. And so every day, I just love learning like whatever that What’s the word for canoe in Ojibwe? And it’s just, it’s short, it’s succinct. I don’t usually remember it, but I delight in that learning and that connection to the history and place. I got

Shannon Leddy
100 days of Cree. So a Cree word every day for 100 days. Yeah, some of them are Star Wars words too.

Keith Edwards
Okay, yes, yes. Well, as you mentioned, time is one of the things. And I feel like we’ve taken our time here today as we were recording this and been present with the conversation, but we know our listeners have other things to move off to and so we are running out of time. And this podcast is called Student Affairs now. We really want to be present with what is happening now. And so we always like to finish by asking our guests, what is it that you’re thinking troubling or pondering now, and that may be related to our conversation or might be related to other things? And then also, if you want to share where folks can connect with you. That’s great as well. So I think we’re going to begin with you. Shannon, what are you troubling now?

Shannon Leddy
Oh, so many things, but I think, Well, what I’m starting to think about now is I’d actually really like to do a lot more writing about how people can connect with indigenous arts and artists and work with those things in their classrooms. So that’s sort of the focus of future research. I’m doing a lot of thinking about, how do we share the survival stories of folks who have encountered cultural and literal genocide, particularly in this continent, through residential schools and that sort of thing. How do we mobilize that? And what I’m really, what I’m really thinking about and worried about is, how do we return to civil discourse? How do we take this idea of slowness, to use it to think before we speak, to think about the impact of our words, the weight of our words. How would we apply those seven sacred teachings in every conversation that we have, whether it’s public or private, and I think particularly in this era where people can be anonymous on the internet, it’s, it’s, it’s really, it’s troubling to think about what where we are going to land up if we don’t course correct at some point and really take responsibility for our words and for how we are in the world. So I guess that’s those are some of the things that I’m continuing to keep at the center of my teaching, in the center of my my thinking about, how do we how do we live in the world in good ways.

Keith Edwards
Thank you, Sharon and Lorrie, what is with you now?

Lorrie Anne Miller
Well, where are we in the world? Thank you. This is a very big question for me right now. Where am I in the world, and how is my world around me? I’m at a transition in my life. I’m at that point where I’m slowing down my work environment and shifting into what is my next chapter. And to be honest, I’m feeling much like finishing high school or finishing my undergrads, like, what am I going to do next? And so it’s very much a spiritual journey for me, going deep into my heart and my soul in my body. I want to live a long healthy time using yoga and meditation as part of my practice and my creativity within my textile arts, and looking at where will we be in the world, and walking lightly at that same time as our family grows and moves on to in their journey. So as a grandmother and a mother of adult kids at this transition point in my life, I’m looking at supporting my students at their transition point as they’re finishing up their undergrad and looking on to their next things, knowing that it’s a place of questions and turmoil and a lot of soul searching. So I’m supporting them in their soul searching, letting them I’m also soul searching. It’s okay. This is a normal part to reconsider where we are and what does it mean to be in the world at this point in time, but to pay. The attention to that feeling on the inside. What does it say? You know, sometimes we talk about our spidey senses, you know, what is, you know, and but also what brings true to your heart. So exercising that heart muscle, knowing that sometimes it knows better than what’s upstairs, because this one might be trying to operate in a place of fear rather than a place of love.

Keith Edwards
Yeah, wonderful. Well, thank you both so much for your book and for joining me for this conversation and your leadership in this space. This has been a delight and a wonderful contribution. So thank you both. I also want to thank our sponsors of today’s episode evolve and Huron. Evolve helps senior leaders who value aspire to lead on and want to unleash their potential for transformational leadership. This is a program I lead, along with doctors Brian Rao and Don Lee. We offer a personalized learning experience with high value impact the asynchronous content and six individual and six group coaching sessions, maximize your learning and growth with a focused time investment, greatly enhancing your ability to lead powerfully for change. And Huron collaborates with colleges and universities to create sound strategies, optimize operations and accelerate digital transformation by embracing diverse perspectives, encouraging new ideas and challenging the status quo. Huron promotes institutional resilience in higher education. For more information, visit go.hcg.com/now as always, a huge shout out to our producer, Nat Ambrosey, who does all the behind the scenes work to make us all look and sound good. And we love the support for these important conversations from you and our community. You can help us reach even more folks by subscribing to the podcast on YouTube and to our weekly newsletter, where we announce each new episode on Wednesday mornings. If you’re so inclined, you can leave us five star review. It helps these conversations reach even more folks. I’m Keith Edwards, thanks again to our two fabulous guests today, and to everyone who is watching, and listening, make it a great week.

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