Content area
Abstract
The focus of this dissertation is the teacher education program of Nunavut, until 1999 the eastern part of the Northwest Territories. Through interviews and personal experience as a participant observer within the program, this longitudinal qualitative case study, influenced by social constructivist theory, of the Nunavut Teacher Education Program attempts to provide an account of the program's growth and development, its strengths and its weaknesses and possibilities for the future. However, in order to locate the program in its time and place, it is necessary to examine the nested contexts of traditional, colonial and post-colonial worlds from which and in which it has developed.
Consequently, I begin by tracing the political and social development of Nunavut to its present day realities, realities that are far from the often overly romantic view of the Canadian arctic. I then outline the impact of colonialism upon the Inuit and their pre-contact traditional lifestyle before reviewing the growth and development of education. I commence with precontact traditional education and what it may have been like before embarking upon a description of the education experienced by Inuit, first from the missionaries, and then by the Federal government followed by the Territorial Government of the Northwest Territories and finally by the government of Nunavut. Data for the study was collected, in part, from fifty interviews conducted predominately in Iqaluit, the location of the institutional program.
The Nunavut Teacher Education Program (NTEP) is a key element in the development of education in the territory. There are therefore great expectations put on the program, expectations that may exceed its ability to fulfil them. In my account of the program and its effect, seen through the lens of critical pedagogy, upon students' academic, linguistic and cultural knowledge, I examine the pressures and the tensions caused by these expectations upon on the program and its students.
