Inuit student teachers' agency, positioning and symbolic action: reflections from a qallunaat on music teaching in the Canadian Arctic

Abstract

This article examines how three Inuit student teachers in the Nunavut Teacher Education Program invested their social and cultural capital during a music course for classroom teachers, which the author taught in the Canadian Arctic. She describes how, through the musical games they invented for use in Inuit classrooms, these students positioned themselves as agents of their own learning and as wielders of power in the context of emergent Inuit education. Three examples of their invented musical games are presented to illustrate these processes. The author concludes that in increasingly culturally diverse teaching contexts it is important to be conscious of our students' habitus – the embedded history, the unconscious set of ideas, beliefs and emotions that guide how we think, feel and act – in our decisions regarding content, goals and evaluations of achievement.