FNWSC communities can strengthen their law-making processes and understanding by sharing each other’s unique assertion histories and current approaches in policy and law development, implementation and evaluation.
Since the late Winter of 2016, delegates from participating nations in the FNWSC dialogue at strategic planning sessions about their law-making processes, education governing experiences, i.e., how they run their boards of education, for example, and what their vision of a transformed First Nation education system looks like in their respective communities.
Through think tanks held on-line through virtual meeting platforms, delegates dive deeper into governance specific topics and share their policies, ask questions and offer valuable insight into each other’s challenges and opportunities in education governance matters.
Delegates raise important questions about current law-making structures that cause even deeper recognition of the work ahead, such as:
- In what ways does our community assert education jurisdiction now?
- How do I ‘Indigenize’ the current education policies we have now because as I reflect on them they are simply mirror images of the public school system policies and do not reflect our Anishinaabek/Haudenosaunee view?
- Are there words in the language that will better express the intent of a policy?
- Does this policy take into account our key principles, values and beliefs as described in our draft frameworks?