Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to announce that the Strategy for Teacher Education in the Northwest Territories: 2007–2015 Action Plan has been approved and that priorities have been set for the upcoming year.
The two primary goals of the strategy are to increase the number of aboriginal teachers and to increase the numbers of aboriginal language teachers throughout the Northwest Territories. We currently have 109 aboriginal teachers and 30 aboriginal language teachers across the Northwest Territories.
Other goals include preparing education assistants, aboriginal secondary teachers and program support teachers for NWT schools and increasing the number of aboriginal school administrators, college faculty and administration, Education, Culture and Employment consultants and management.
The action plan includes actions such as employing elders in residence to support students, increasing funding by $300,000 to develop an online library database to support community based programs and implementing a student recruitment program throughout the territory.
Last April marked the first year for graduates from the Bachelor of Education degree program at Thebacha Campus through a partnership with the University of Saskatchewan. This is a strong partnership that will continue to strengthen and evolve to meet the needs of the students and future teachers of the Northwest Territories.
This fall committees will be reviewing proposals for community based teacher education programs and aboriginal language and cultural instructor programs.
The goal is for each region to deliver community based programs, as is currently happening in Behchoko, on a rotation to ensure the goal of a representative workforce is accomplished sooner. The Behchoko model will be used to inform future community based programs. Behchoko has included a unique healing and wellness component that may be of interest to other regions.
We anticipate nine students will graduate from the two year Aboriginal Language and Cultural Instructor Program in June 2009 and five students to graduate from the three year Teacher Education Program in June of 2010.
Mr. Speaker, I wish to congratulate our graduates and all those who have worked and are working to make the Teacher Education and Aboriginal Language and Culture Instructor programs a success.
