Treaty Education and Minecraft with Curtis Bourassa

Feb. 6, 2023

CoryB

                                                         

                                      https://katiepippus.files.wordpress.com/2016/11/canada_treaties_map.jpg?w=300

Curtis Bourassa is an instructional coach for Indigenous and treaty education for South East Cornerstone school division in Southeastern, Saskatchewan. In the 21st century, he follows the 4 C's collaboration, creativity, communication, and critical thinking. He also follows the Iterative Design Cycle, imagining, creating, playing sharing, and reflecting when using Minecraft ED. The three dimensions of how treaties are taught in Saskatchewan are the information plane (The facts about Treaties), The interpretive plane (To make room for interpretation and dialogue), and the depth plane (To engage in Treaty pedagogy throughout one's life). 

A question that Curtis asks is, Why Minecraft?  High levels of student interest and engagement, taps into student knowledge, skills, and proficiency in Minecraft, resulting in greater retention of content due to the construction of a meaningful product, positioning teachers as facilitators rather than experts, and encouraging students to step up as leaders. A couple of other good reasons are that it builds teamwork and communication skills and integrates ELA skills including writing, speaking, listening, and presenting. 

Treaty Education and Minecraft in the classroom and how it might look in your classroom that he had in his presentation: 

-Students engage in a mini-lesson focused on Social, Treaty Ed, Arts Ed, or ELA outcomes.

-After the lesson, students work with a small group to plan their build.

-Groups build something to represent their learning in Minecraft Education. 

-Groups include boards and/or NPCS that explain their build

-Each group builds in their own Minecraft world and is asked to connect their build challenges together in a creative way. 

Some build challenges he does are reasons for treaties, treaty rights, promises, and benefits, broken treaties promise, and TRC call to action to name a few. 

The planning process includes:

-Group members brainstorm and share ideas on the build challenge topics

-Each group decides on their chosen topic with the building challenge

-Next, students would design their build by creating a rough sketch

-Finally, students would divide up jobs to ensure each member had a task to accomplish

https://treatyeducationandminecraft.wordpress.com/ (Most of these things he talked about and other things you might be interested in can be viewed at their site)

 

                                                                    

                                    https://static.techspot.com/images2/news/bigimage/2020/08/2020-08-10-image-6.png

Minecraft Education can be used for Treaty education and social studies but also can be used for many other subjects and topics to use in your classes. All you have to do is check it out and practice your skills and get a little bit of background knowledge to build up your confidence, and feel comfortable using it in the classroom with your students. Minecraft Education is a game-based learning platform that will be used to spark creativity and allow students to create things that are specific to your instructions. It also comes with a lot of already premade lessons that teachers have made, that teachers can look through to see if it fits their learning outcomes for their own classroom.