Facilitating Essential Action Skills Training (FEAST)

What is the overall impact of the initiative and how is this measured?

In 2018 completed 25 workshops for a total of 180 of participants

Acknowledgement that we all have Essential Skills – starts from inception
• Once we accept that we have these innate Essential Skills we can recognize ourselves, our cultural identity and our strengths within them
• With this foundation, recognizing your Traditional Essential Skills, an invitation is extended to explore Workplace Essential Skills: an organic process guided by each participant. As a result of being learner-centred, FEAST is never completed the same way twice.

What challenges have you faced and how were these overcome?

• Mindfulness is necessary since only a finite number of FEAST workshops can be delivered. This is due to availability of traditional materials (such as Cedar ), seasonal determinants, and the protocols for gathering and processing traditional materials.
• Workshops must be delivered by those who have either; been mentored by Elders and Knowledge Keepers OR hosted by Elders and Knowledge Keepers who have received training in FEAST and Workplace Essential Skills.
• There is a great deal of unseen pre and post work related to the use of traditional materials. Traditional materials must be harvested and cared for in appropriate/respectful manners. There can be no intentional waste of the materials. Every bit must be collected after workshops and looked after in a good way.
• Space for host communities/agencies to invite their own Elders and Knowledge keepers to be involved in the workshops is very appropriate and welcomed.
• Having diverse age groups in the same workshop means to go at a pace that works for everyone.
• The learners control the timing and pace and teaching to preferred learning styles is paramount.

What are 3 key lessons you learned from developing or delivering your initiative? What advice from those lessons would you share with others?

• Take your directions from the participants. The workshop’s flow and conversations need to emerge from the participants. There is a delicate balance between what emerges from the group and meeting the learning outcomes within the dominant themes.
• Facilitator(s) need to touch back to their own community; to mediate their own learning by connecting to the Elders and Knowledge Keepers. FEAST is an evolving curriculum needing time in reflection, as well as expanding on/revsing the expressions of interconnectedness and the learning/sharing activities.

What have participants, stakeholders and partners thought, felt and/or said about your initiative?

Feedback indicates that the Nuu-chah-nulth values and principles reflected in FEAST align with similar teachings that are recognized and practiced by many Indigenous cultures and communities around the world. Therefore, FEAST provides a foundation for meaningful discussions within specific communities.

Which Essential Skills are covered by the initiative? Reading Text Document Use Numeracy Writing Oral Communications Working with Others Thinking Skills Computer Use Continuous Learning

How are the Essential Skills integrated into your initiative?

Essential Skills concepts are explored through “tools”
• Importance of tools throughout time,
• traditional tool-making (cedar bark rope),
• collective story-telling,
• traditional essential skills in origin stories,
• traditional virtues and principles,
• importance of balance,
• first jobs and transferability of essential skills,
• An Aboriginal Essential Skills Journey (Douglas College),
• (Nuu-chah-nulth specific value and teaching… “when you are in the act of preparing before you do something” )
• blood memory

How do you assess participant Essential Skills?

Informally participants’ Essential Skills are assessed through observing people in the act of “doing” (working with their hands, demonstrating all of the Essential Skills i.e. repetition leads to skill, thinking skills, working with others, continuous learning. ) Debriefing occurs with participants to bring the Essential Skills to life; those being demonstrated in their activities and sharing that learning in group. The ha-aah moments come forward through conversations and reflections on our activities.
Use Douglas College course materials – Aboriginal Essential Skills Journey – Activities from this material are not graded. Participants hand in their work and/or share with each other. Facilitator and other participants look over and see how they are doing with the concepts. This is shared back to the full group.
We incorporate Measure Up Worksheets– TOWES-like activities

What are the components of the initiative? Life skills Career and/or educational planning Cultural, language, and tradition awareness and/or training

How do you support participant success in the program? After program follow-up support

How was Indigenous culture integrated into the program content or delivery?

The curriculum is guided by the Nuu-chah-nulth principle and values of uu-n’a-hey-chilth “when you are in the act of preparing before you do something,” Lena Jumbo, Ahousaht Elder.

Examples from the week long training are:
 traditional tool making (cedar bark, cooper, shells and beads ) reflecting on connections
 traditional story-telling, look at the Essential Skills of the story characters that are introduced in Nuu-chah-nulth origin stories

We start each session by making cedar bark rope. Rope is introduced as one of highest forms and oldest forms of technology throughout the world. Participants begin to see the traditional Essential Skills that go into making rope: this high-level technology. Rope connects us all as human beings.

What do you think are the most important competencies and attributes for staff involved in this initiative to have?

Wisdom keepers of traditional knowledge.
First Nations people lead the delivery of the workshops.

Who are your partners, and what is their involvement in the initiative?

My spouse, my family, my community and my Elders.