Governor General praises Nunavut teachers for their work

“We face some serious challenges in the North,” Johnston says via video link

By PETER VARGA

Canada’s Governor General, David Johnston, at the centre of the screen, takes questions from Qikiqtani region teachers, assembled for the week-long Pilimmaksarniq 2015 professional development conference at Inuksuk High School in Iqaluit. Johnston spoke from Ottawa via internet to some 300 teachers assembled inside the school’s gymnasium. (PHOTO BY PETER VARGA)


Canada’s Governor General, David Johnston, at the centre of the screen, takes questions from Qikiqtani region teachers, assembled for the week-long Pilimmaksarniq 2015 professional development conference at Inuksuk High School in Iqaluit. Johnston spoke from Ottawa via internet to some 300 teachers assembled inside the school’s gymnasium. (PHOTO BY PETER VARGA)

Canada’s overall success is linked to the success of the country’s North, and “education is critical to both,” Governor General David Johnston told Nunavut teachers gathered in Iqaluit, Feb. 19.

“It’s so important that we do everything we can to support student success,” Johnston said via an internet video link from Ottawa.

The link put him in direct contact with some 300 teachers, from Nunavut’s huge Qikiqtani region, gathered at Inuksuk High School in the Nunavut capital for a week-long professional development conference, Feb. 16 to Feb. 20.

“I know we face some serious challenges in the North,” Johnston said. “Attendance and graduation rates are significantly lower than in other parts of the country. Too many students are dropping out of high school, too many are without hope for the future.”

“And so, we must be innovative and compassionate,” he said. “We must be smart and caring leaders and educators.”

Johnston had a career as an academic and university administrator before he took on the country’s top appointed position in government.

He had served as president of the University of Waterloo for 12 years at the time of his appointment, and 15 years as principal and vice-chancellor of McGill University, where he also taught law as a professor.

“Behind every individual or group success, there is usually a teacher, mentor or elder, someone who has served to guide, inspire or inform us in a significant way,” he said.

“This is true in my case, and it is the reason why I spent almost all my life in learning as a student, teacher, or university administrator — and my learning has continued as governor general.”

As governor general though, Johnston said his role was not to offer specific advice on teaching practices at the conference, but to “connect, to honour and inspire Canadians.”

“I hope conversations like this inspire all of us as teachers to say what we do is really important, and how we do it is really important as well,” he said.

A recent visit to he took to Alert, the country’s northern-most settlement, brought to mind four key factors that “remind me of the significance of what is being done in the North, most particularly Alert,” Johnston said, which he called “four s’s.”

Alert is the site of a Canadian Forces Station, an Environment Canada weather station and other scientific laboratories, with a rotating population of military and scientific personnel.

The first “s” is sovereignty: “that we truly are a country, from sea, to sea, to sea, and that the third sea is so important and vast. It gives us the largest coastline of any country in the world.”

Johnston’s second “s” is “signals.”

“We are at that part of the world to gather information from over the border. Security, intelligence and military information. Plus, vast stores of environmental information,” he said.

Next is science, “to learn about the North, and exchange lessons about the North,” which is “so immense and so dependent on your work,” he told the teachers.

Fourth is stewardship, “that we have a responsibility with this particular land and the people who have inhabited it for so many thousands of years, to understand it and to use it to ensure future generations enjoy it as much or more, as the current generation does,” the Governor General said.

Internet technology donated by Cisco Canada, which linked Johnston to the conference, points to new opportunities that could help improve learning across Nunavut, he said.

As well as offering a chance to improve communications between Nunavut’s remote communities, “such technologies provide a window on the world, and equally they provide the world with a window onto Northern Canada,” Johnston said.

It’s important for Canadians in the south, where most of the population lives, to gain greater knowledge of the North, he said, “then they begin to understand this country from sea, to sea, to sea,” he said.

The Governor General’s address marked a highlight of the Pilimmaksarniq 2015 teachers’ development conference, which hosted 329 teachers from Nunavut’s Qikiqtani region.

“I think it’s just a phenomenal opportunity for an interaction with a figure with a vast knowledge, in not only education but world affairs,” said conference coordinator Cody Prusky.

Other keynote speakers at the conference included James Igloliorte, retired judge and head of the Qikiqtani Truth Commission, and Debra Pepler of York University.

Igloliorte spoke of the commission and how its findings related to education, and Pepler was to talk about bullying and healthy relationships.

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