While the primary goal of the CAAS is public education of continuing generations of Canadians, we must never lose sight of that fact that many Aboriginal students sit in those 'mainstream' schools. These youth urgently need to see Aboriginal Peoples reflected in a positive light in the school environment.

Student Awareness Survey funding approved!

The CAAS has just received, from the Canadian Race Relations Foundation (CRRF), a contract funding our Research Project proposal: a Student Awareness Survey (SAS). As part of the contract, the CRRF will review the finished study and retains first right to publish the findings, but the CAAS 'owns' the work.

The SAS will be developed, under the guidance of our Aboriginal and Academic advisors, to measure the actual learning achievements of first year university students, relative to a set of learning expectations that CAAS is currently developing. This set of learning expectations will be drawn from the experience of Aboriginal educators and traditional teachers, the recommendations of the Final Report of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, an extensive literature review, and other research.

The SAS will provide a baseline analysis of what students are currently learning about Aboriginal Peoples in school board-operated schools across Canada that are mandated with curriculum from Provinces and Territories. A screening process will be used to ensure that students attending First Nations and other Aboriginal controlled schools are not included in the study, and every effort will be made to capture a representative regional, ethnic/cultural, and linguistic sample (the survey WILL be administered in both English and French).

As part of the SAS, we will certainly discover some students who provide high quality responses to our questions. Through them, we will be able to identify some teachers in classrooms across Canada - including some non-Aboriginal ones - who do a REALLY good job with Aboriginal Studies. In a later phase of our work we will follow this trail to its source, and interview and document the strategies used by these successful, or 'exemplary', educators.

Throughout 2000, we will be recruiting volunteers to help administer the survey across Canada.

Meet Angela: our education student intern. She is working on the website and the learning expectations for the survey.

This Spring, our Coalition is being assisted by an intern, Angela Bosco, on block placement from the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto. Angela is helping us establish our website - of critical importance for the 'action research' or network-building portion of our project.

Angela is also working, under the guidance of Dave Anderson and in consultation with our other Academic Advisors, to research and define the set of learning expectations that will be used as a measuring stick for the SAS. She will also be helping us draft the survey.

We welcome any documentation or comments that will help her with this research, or with the website design. Please forward any relevant materials, or any ideas you have been percolating on these topics, to us at the coordinates on the letterhead.

What are the Coordinators doing?

Over the next few months, our Coordinators - Renee Abram and Ann Pohl - will be using countless strategies to spread the word and the workload... The priority task is to recruit the volunteers from our network who will help this Fall, by administering the "Student Awareness Survey" in their communities. Over the Summer, the Coordinators and Research staff will be working with the Academic and Aboriginal advisors to develop and field-test the questionnaire that will be used for this study. As the real results start to flow, in the early Fall, staff and volunteers will be very busy 'crunching' the data to produce a draft of the study during the winter of 2000/01. In their spare time, the Coordinators and other members of the Coalition will be busy setting up the administrative structure of the CAAS, doing outreach, writing up funding proposals, and seeking new partners in this work. We currently have applications in to the Millennium Fund and the George Cedric Metcalf Charitable Foundation, to alleviate the financial crunch. We are grateful to the Quaker Aboriginal Affairs Committee for helping finance this newsletter, and to the Public Justice Resource Centre for agreeing to act as financial trustees for the CAAS. We welcome new individual and organizational partners - so avoid the rush, and join us now!