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Reading, writing and... publishing?

Chronic shortages put materials-making into teachers’ hands

SARA MINOGUE

Saimata Arlooktoo, a Grade 2 teacher at Nakasuk School, holds up a sample from a binder full of worksheets she’s made herself. This worksheet talks about the health effects of smoking. (PHOTO BY SARA MINOGUE)

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Nakasuk School is fortunate in that it has Inuktitut-speaking teachers at all grade levels who are able to teach the language, but materials for teaching in Inuktitut are still “chronically short, until the government throws huge buckets of money at it,” says Nakasuk School principal Carol Horn.

It’s not just reading materials that are missing, but the basic grammar and phonetic workbooks that would be standard fare in an English classroom.

The department of education’s curriculum department in Arviat is working to get more Inuktitut resources into classrooms to support their bilingual education strategy. For now, however, individual teachers still produce much of their materials themselves.

Grade 2 teacher Saimata Arlooktoo said she spends about two hours a week translating, photocopying and designing Inuktitut materials to use in class.

“It’s starting to develop, but slowly,” Arlooktoo said. “I have to make worksheets all the time.”

And although she is beginning to share some materials with some teachers in the same school, there are still no formal mechanisms to do so, and few materials are shared with other elementary schools in the territory, or even in town.

At Alookie School in Pangnirtung, principal Lena Metuq is lucky to have the second Nunavut elementary school with an all-Inuit staff (Pond Inlet was the first), but even there, Inuktitut materials are in short supply.

“It always has been [difficult to get materials] but it’s slowly starting to build up.”

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