The Student Awareness Survey (SAS)
The SAS will provide a baseline and analysis of what students in school board-operated, Provincial and Territorial schools across Canada are presently learning about the perspectives, history, culture and contemporary issues of Aboriginal Peoples.

We are surveying the Spring, 2000 high school graduate population. To ensure that our findings are useful, we will get a cross-section sample from all Provinces and Territories (the survey will be translated into French), from a cross-section of ethnic/cultural groups, including Aboriginal students.

The SAS Study
The objective of the SAS Study is NOT to prove that most existing elementary and secondary Aboriginal Studies programmes are inadequate or flawed. We already know this. The various advisors and members of the CAAS have compiled their own professional evidence to support this view. As well, many reports - especially the Final Report of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples - stress this problem repeatedly. When we arrive at the stage of identifying obvious shortfalls and translating our SAS Study findings into recommendations, we will NOT seek to 'find fault', Neither will we make recommendations to uninterested or under-resourced government bodies.

The SAS Study report WILL call on the education community to use information, dialogue, and understanding - through heart, spirit and mind - to "Transform the Relationship" between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Peoples living in Canada. The proposals flowing from our findings will be directed towards OUR OWN (the CAAS') future work programme, and that of our member organizations.

Finally, we anticipate that the SAS will identify some students who have had quality learning experiences. We hope these positive findings will enable us to identify some of the teachers, across Canada, who are doing a really good job with Aboriginal Studies (see Teachers Teach Teachers, below).

Volunteers Needed Across
Canada Less than eight weeks from now - by mid-October - we will be ready to circulate our SAS across Canada. The SAS format will enable it to be self-administered in first year university and community college classes - essentially like a pop quiz or other short test.

The questionnaire will take about 30 minutes to complete. Some instructors may want to use additional class time for debriefing and discussion. Our prepare materials will include a Thank You Answer Sheet for the students, for dissemination AFTER they finish the questionnaire. In addition, professors and instructors will receive a support sheet that talks about the historical exclusion of Aboriginal perspective from Canadian history, curriculum texts and education policy, and includes a useful bibliography.

The SAS will be administered by V-O-L-U-N-T-E-E-R-S, through the CAAS decentralized grassroots network across Canada. Some graduate students, professors and instructors have already expressed a preliminary willingness to support this study.

However, to get a good national sample, we need more volunteer 'surveyors'. The tricky part of finding these volunteers is that we DON'T want to survey primarily "Native Studies" students. A large sampling from these courses might affect the objective value of our sample. The students' personal interests and the post-secondary learning opportunities these students might already have had by October, could set this group of students above the norm we are seeking to define.

This is where YOU come in. Can you help us find classes willing to take part in this exciting project? Can your class participate? If you teach Native Studies or in another area that might skew our findings, can you approach someone else - perhaps in a different faculty - to help us out? Can you suggest someone we should ask directly? To succeed, we will need YOUR help.

Key to the SAS Study: Current & Proposed Aboriginal Studies Learning Expectations
The SAS will give us a measurement of "REAL WORLD" learning outcomes - the actual levels of understanding and awareness about Aboriginal Peoples achieved by graduates from Canadian schools - but, on its own, that will not be too useful.

In developing the framework for 'The Study' - of which the SAS is just one, albeit important, piece - we recognize the need to measure our findings against established standards. Our Working Group concluded we need to compare the SAS findings to TWO sets of learning expectations:

CAAS' Proposed Learning Expectations (PLEx):
- 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,
- these are essentially a definition of what students ought to know about First Peoples' history, culture and contemporary concerns by the time they graduate from high school; and