One of the things to acknowledge in a course of this nature is that Canadians don't know a lot about aboriginal people. And this video resource from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, their series called 8th Fire demonstrated the knowledge gap that the average Canadian on the street has in regards to aboriginal people and their relationship to them. But there's also been some academic studies about this knowledge gap. And one of the ones that I found most interesting was produced by the Coalition for the Advancement of Aboriginal Studies back in 2002, and they released a final report called Learning About Walking in Beauty. It's available online from the Canadian Race Relations Foundation, and we have a link to it on our site. [COUGH] What was interesting about the coalition's work is that they canvassed a number of elders from aboriginal communities and people from aboriginal communities about what should Canadians know about aboriginal people, communities, and issues. And so in this consultation process they amassed a wealth of knowledge and information that it was felt that Canadians needed to know about the relationship. And these issues were then taken into a survey. And this survey included multiple choice and short answer questions and true and false, and it was administered to hundreds of Canadians in the year 2000. And they were asked to try and answer the questions. And so, we'll have a link to that survey so you can see how much you know. [COUGH] What they found is that Canadians did very poorly on this survey. And one of the other things that they discovered was, they asked a number of questions about where people were getting their knowledge from. And this is where, I was most startled to find that people who said their knowledge came from their own reading were much more informed than people who said what they learned, they learned in school. And the ones who credited school with their knowledge about aboriginal people and issues, actually did quite poorly on the factual pieces of the survey. One of the conclusions that I made from reading this report was that it's not just that people aren't being taught well and they're not retaining information. That sometimes the information they're learning in schools is not what the communities deem is important about understanding between the relationship. So it could be that we're even teaching the wrong content. I did an update of the survey in 2006, 2007 over that academic year and we went right into schools. So the thing about the original coalition study is they were asking undergraduates and students in universities to kind of recall back to their learning. So really we were looking at about a generation of difference by looking at current elementary schools in 2007 and giving them the same survey and seeing how well did they do or how poorly did they do and the startling thing was that not much had changed. So in this seven year difference, which actually represented almost a whole generation, people were actually not learning much more about aboriginal people in 2007. So I think this is another reason it's important for courses like this to exist where we're exposed to understanding key moments and themes in African worldviews and education.
