In the increasingly diverse context of North American schools, cross-cultural understanding is of fundamental importance. Most teachers are mono-cultural – typically white, middle class women. To inform teaching practice, these educators draw primarily from personal cultural backgrounds often to the exclusion or detriment of other cultural ways of knowing brought to the classroom by students. Teacher education programs are challenged to interrupt the norms of their conventional practices in order to help dominant culture teachers become more sensitive and insightful towards issues of cross-cultural pedagogy. In particular, the needs of Canadian Aboriginal students require close attention. Indigenous ways of learning and teaching are rarely included in school curricula. This dissertation argues that not only is an indigenous pedagogy useful for Aboriginal students, it also serves to support learning for all students in a multicultural classroom. This phenomenological narrative study looked at the experience of non-Aboriginal preservice teachers enrolled in a university course taught by instructors from several First Nations of Canada. The course took place on Lkwungen Coast Salish territory and provided direct access to indigenous knowledge as the participants worked with earth fibre textiles. The wisdom keepers created a place for the preservice teachers to participate extensively in a cultural approach to learning that was quite different from their previous educational experiences. While engaging in the indigenous handwork, the preservice teachers carefully observed both their own processes as learners and the ways in which the wisdom keepers in the course acted as teachers. The insight gained through this reflexive work troubled the participants’ deep-seated Eurocentric perspectives. Reflecting on personal shifts in attitudes, values and beliefs about the twinned processes of learning and teaching, the participants reported changes in their teaching practice with both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal students. Significant themes in the data revolve around issues of personal and social intent, reflective and reflexive practice, spirituality, the endogenous processes of the learner, learning in community, and teachers’ faith in the learner. The data suggest that implementing an eco/social/spiritual framework is useful in cross-cultural learning and teaching environments as well as in the context of educational research.

Recent studies have shown that there may be evidence that children with reading difficulties have particular compensatory spatial ability, although the exact spatial ability has not been identified. This study used qualitative and quantitative methods to examine closely two spatial abilities, spatial visualisation (mental rotation from memory) and visual realism (three-dimensional drawing and construction ability) in students with reading problems and students with no problems. The aim was also to explore the question of whether students with spatial ability and reading problems were encouraged to use these strengths either in or out of school and whether such abilities could be identified in the early years environment. Equally, the question of motivational failure related to possible unrecognised potential, particularly in the area of non-verbal/spatial ability was also examined. This study used longitudinal case studies with five children and their mothers over a period of ten years. Interviews were transcribed and analysed using a grounded theory approach. Researcher observations as the teacher of the five children in their primary years provided additional evidence of their reading and spatial abilities at an early age. In addition, the study uses a Further Education College survey that examines spatial ability and reading problems in 133 post-16 year olds that provides the quantitative element of the study providing evidence about students with spatial abilities and their career choices. The data analysis revealed that the five case studies had largely overcome their reading problems due to early intervention strategies for reading together with encouragement and support outside school for their spatial abilities. Additionally, they have pursued careers, which for the most part, uses their spatial skills. The data analysis of the College survey showed that the link between spatial ability and reading problems was less secure, although there were a number of students with Specific Learning Difficulties (SpLD) who had high spatial abilities and this proved to be important from the point of view of identifying strengths alongside weakness in literacy, particularly in the early years at school. Early identification and acknowledgement of spatial ability as a perceived strength and used to support learning, as opposed to identification of reading problems, a perceived deficit, proved to be a key finding of the research.