3B Design Studio: Learning from Reconciliation - Envisioning Northern Education

The Canadian North faces many challenges: housing, health, economic development, education, and cultural sovereignty, amongst others. Education has long been at the center of discussions across Inuit Nunangat (the non-state country of the Inuit people in Canada), where high school graduation rates remain low, and access to post-secondary education is limited. The challenges are also deeply intertwined with the history of residential schools in Canada and the role they played in imposing, in our Prime Minister’s words, a “cultural genocide” on our Indigenous peoples. Rather than a place of learning and empowerment, schools were the site of innumerable abuses. Today, the road-blocks to education in Inuit Nunangat are multiple: access to post-secondary education often requires leaving one’s region and family, and travelling 1500 kilometers south; compounded with low high school graduation rates; high rates of student absenteeism, and a lack of teachers, particularly Inuit ones. The challenges are not simply related the classroom. Housing, both for students and teachers is scarce in northern communities, women have children much younger and hence may need child-care while they pursue their education, and leaving family members and community to study can be emotionally challenging. Some of these challenges lie outside the scope of architecture – but a key question motivating the studio is the question of what is the agency of architecture in such complex questions? Where can we have impact as professionals?