Building and strengthening relationships in education with Kathryn Crawford

by Laura Mushumanski, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter

(ANNews) – An Indigenous understanding of relationality is that everything is connected, that there is a degree to which everything on Mother Earth is connected all the way down to the concepts we use, the way we think, and how we share knowledge. Embedded in this understanding, this Indigenous Worldview—that is made up of philosophy, psychology, and spirituality—is that with relationality comes accountability. And when we do things with a good heart and in a good way by building and strengthening relationships, we are able to walk gently in the world and take care of all our relations—including the bees, water, animals, and Mother Earth.

Learning is an action associated with how we engage with knowledge, and when we are open to learning new things, we are also open to vulnerability. This vulnerability is part of  a learner’s  journey as an exploration  into self-discovery and how the learner will walk in the world. As learners, both our lived experience and our knowledge that has been passed on becomes part of our own medicine bundle.

A medicine bundle is a concept and understanding that the knowledge we walk with is an accumulation of blood, sweat, and tears that come with unlearning—where it is finding courage to sit with ourselves and reflect on all that we have experienced, both heavy and light, all to come to know things differently. Wisdom, usually within the body, is the lightbulb moment of realization, clarity, and calmness similar to what comes after the rain.

One of our sisters, Kathryn Crawford, educates from an understanding that “seeing each other as extensions of community [creates] depth and richness [by] walking alongside a [person’s learning] journey.” Crawford, a kindhearted and compassionate educator at Ambrose University in Elbow River (aka Calgary), questions “How do we understand how we are interacting with the environment?… How do we change the content that we are working on?”

Crawford applies care and thought into how she engages with learners by honouring each learner’s story and creating a space for people to learn and find meaning in place. This is how Kathryn engages in Indigenous Ways of Being—bringing worlds together to unlearn and relearn in different ways.

Over time, when engaging in concepts of relationality, Crawford came to know that the starting point to building and strengthening relationships, is to be open to being present to learn from others. As Indigenous educators, we walk with Indigenous pedagogies that support the understanding of humility and how we can help others along their learning journey.

Within higher education, Crawford became curious about how to build relationships and try to walk alongside others who are doing meaningful work. One thing that Kathryn always engages in is following protocol by consulting Elder’s different opinions and perspectives on how to build and strengthen meaningful relationships.

Initially Crawford never wanted to be a teacher. She started her learning journey within academia by studying genetics and found herself being drawn to the body. That grew her interest in neurodiversity thinking through psychology that led her to engaging with learners to “building a whole new structure with their thinking [by] seeing possibilities of seeing things differently.”

Within Crawford’s own learning journey, her medicine bundle became an accumulation of her own lived experiences and the richness of knowledge that was shared with her in a good way, shaping her perspective of how to dismantle barriers within a learning environment as a transformative nature and process.

Over time, walking in ceremony has taught Kathryn that it is a “response(ability) to have the ability to respond” in a good way as a sharer of knowledge.

Crawford offers this advice when leaning into exploration and learning of our own self-discovery: “As you move into different things, your relationships change with people. Be okay when these [relationships are] falling away, grieve them and continue to move forward…trust who you know yourself to be—hold that tight. See and spend more time with [yourself]. Recognize, acknowledge, pay attention and be in reciprocal relationships with people who see you for who you are, places that see you and foster creativity…[and spend energy] where you are meant to be.”