Examples at Seneca | Curriculum Integration | Seneca Polytechnic

For faculty who are interested in exploring land-based learning, a land acknowledgement is a good place to start. When developing a meaningful land acknowledgement for yourself and/or your students, Chelsea Vowel author of the book “Indigenous Writes”, offers four considerations.

Purpose: What may start out as radical push-back against the denial of Indigenous priority and continued presence, may end up re-purposed as “box-ticking” inclusion without commitment to any sort of real change.

Practice: The way in which territorial acknowledgments are delivered must matter. Are they formulaic recitations that barely penetrate the consciousness of the speaker and those listening?

Spaces: It is interesting to note where territorial acknowledgments are absent; namely rural spaces. Rural counties throughout Canada, where there is arguably the most tangible Indigenous presence, do not tend to open council meetings or publish notices acknowledging the traditional territories on which they reside.

Into the Beyond: Maybe now it is time to start learning about your obligations as a guest in this territory. What are the Indigenous protocols involved in being a guest, and what are your responsibilities?

For more on engaging students through land acknowledgement, visit this edition of the Curriculum Newsletter.

Broadcasting-Television program: Promotion of ethical storytelling and engagement with Indigenous communities

Strategies

• Involve representation and consultation with Indigenous communities
• Incorporate case studies or workshops on ethical considerations in media production
• Provide opportunities for students to collaborate with Indigenous artists or communities on projects

Deliverables

• Develop a module on ethical storytelling, including guidelines for respectful representation of Indigenous cultures
• Students create a media campaign promoting cultural sensitivity
• A workshop where students collaborate with an Indigenous community to produce content

Community of Practice: Facilitate a Curriculum Integration circuit (virtual or in-person) to generate small, yet effective, integration strategies faculty can incorporate into their course content or teaching practice. 

Strategies

• Participants rotate through stations representing each of the curriculum integration pillars. Each station interval is approximately 15 minutes long.
• At each station, participants are asked to consider integration through the lens of the respective pillar and share their ideas or current integration practice(s).
• Facilitators can provide prompting questions at each station to help faculty consider the area of integration. 

Deliverables

• Participants share their integration strategy ideas in different ways (post-its, whiteboard markup, chart paper, digital whiteboard, Padlet, etc.).
• Facilitators will collate the ideas collected at each station and provide them to the faculty in the course cluster/program/school through the Community of Practice hub.
• Here is an example of some integration ideas generated from the Teaching & Learning Day, Spring 2025 CI Circuit.

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