Seasons of Learning: Rural Indigenous Teacher Preparation

We, four teachers in Ojibwe or majority-Ojibwe schools and three teachers in teacher preparation at a small ecologically focused liberal arts college, tell stories to reorient ourselves, centering place in ways accessible to our emerging practice. In these narratives, anchored in the seasons, we describe our challenges and successes in adapting education programs to better evoke the lifeways that predominate in our shared part of rural northern Wisconsin immersed in the lands of the Ojibwe. We relied on experiences, both ours and of Ojibwe learners, to illuminate the rhythms of our place and the seasons of learning defined by boreal forest, an inland sea, the sugar bush, and the wild rice harvest, in the hope of better outcomes for Indigenous and non-Indigenous teacher candidates (and their future students) in our evolving program. This narrative work cobbles a frame enabling connection to create rural, fugitive, decolonized teacher preparation that centers respect, reciprocity, and agency.