George Brown Polytechnic is located on the traditional territory of the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation and other Indigenous peoples who have lived here over time. We are grateful to share this land as treaty people who learn, work and live in the community with each other.
Welcome to the Relational Knowledge Journey
When you enter the river, you begin with the shore – pausing to reflect before moving with the current. Each step deepens your relationship to knowledge, community, and the land. This journey invites you to unlearn individualism and engage with knowledge as a living, relational process. You will move through cycles of reflection and action in a circle format with your colleagues, returning with gifts that ripple through your classroom, institutions, and beyond. Welcome to the journey.
Who Am I?
Hello and welcome! My name is Leslie Wexler and I am a Métis woman from Treaty 6 territory and the Manager of Indigenous Pedagogies at George Brown Polytechnic. Rooted in relational ways of knowing, I guide faculty through the Relational Knowledge Journey with care, humility, and a deep commitment to reciprocity. I hold a PhD from the University of Toronto and bring years of experience in integrating Indigenous methodologies into higher education. My current work bridges Indigenous and Western knowledge systems, creating ethical spaces where faculty can reflect on their own positionality, cultivate meaningful relationships, and engage with Indigenous perspectives in a good way.
Why a relational knowledge journey?
Indigenous Knowledges, including pedagogies are not something to be extracted or consumed, but rather are “relational,” or built through relationships over time. This journey invites you to sit with complexity, move with the rhythms of reciprocal learning, and cultivate practices that honour Indigenous ways of knowing.
How this Journey Unfolds
Gathering at the Shore
In our first learning circles we reflect on self-location and positionality
Deepening the Current
We continue by building reciprocal relationships and ethical space.
Navigating Change
We deepen our understanding and commit to institutional transformation.
The Give-away
In the final phase of the journey, we apply knowledge through practical commitments in the classroom
- Phase 1 – Gathering at the Shore: Grounding in Relationship and Self-location
- Phase 2 – Deepening the Current: Attention, Land Relationship, and Relational Responsibility
- Phase 3 – Navigating Change and Institutional Transformation
- Phase 4 – The Give-away: Building Practical Applications
Phase 1 – Gathering at the Shore: Grounding in Relationship and Self-location
The Relational Knowledge Journey is a series of five experiential learning circles that invite faculty and staff to explore Indigenous pedagogies through relationship, reflection, story, and shared practice.
Rather than approach Indigenous education as a collection of concepts or technique to master, participants are invited to learn in relationship: with one another, with place and land, with Indigenous teachings, and with the responsibilities that emerge from our learning.
Across the five circles, we begin with self-location and land, spend two circles with the Seven Grandfather Teachings and mino-bimaadiziwin (living a good life), explore Indigenous Storywork and different ways of seeing, and conclude by making visible the circle pedagogy we have been experiencing throughout the journey.
The circles draw upon Indigenous scholars, Knowledge Keepers, stories, and pedagogical traditions while remaining attentive to the diversity of Indigenous Peoples and knowledge systems. They are spaces for learning, reflection, deep listening, and thoughtful conversation – not for claiming Indigenous knowledge expertise or credentialed authority.
Each circle is approximately two hours. The circles are designed to build iteratively upon one another, and participants are encouraged to move through them in a sequence (although it is not necessary). Reading and resources are offered as invitations for continued learning; no advance preparation is required.
Circle 1: Positionality and Land – Beginning from Where Our Feet Are Planted
Drawing on Jo Chrona’s Wayi Wah! Indigenous Pedagogies and Gregory Cajete’s Look to the Mountain, participants are invited to explore positionality as more than social identity. This circle considers how land, ancestry, community, identity, and responsibility shape how we learn, teach, and relate to others. Through reflection and a positionality activity, participants begin with the question: Where are my feet planted, and what relationships shape how I enter the room?
Resources:
Jo Chrona, Wayi Wah! Indigenous Pedagogies
Gregory Cajete, Look to the Mountain, Introduction
Terminology note: Published in 1994 and grounded in a U.S. Tribal context, Look to the Mountain uses terms such as American Indian, Native American, and Indian education that reflect its time and setting. Read alongside Jo Chrona’s Wayi Wah!, we invite readers to focus on Cajete’s relational and holistic argument while remembering Chrona’s caution that Indigenous Peoples and knowledge systems are diverse, place-specific, and should not be treated as a single pan-Indigenous tradition.Format: This is a two-hour, in person, experiential circle.
Circle 2: The Seven Grandfather Teachings – Part 1: Living in Relation
The Seven Grandfather Teachings offer relational guidance for living well with ourselves, one another, and the world around us. In this first of two circles, participants explore Respect, Humility, Courage, and Honesty, placing these teachings alongside pressures of contemporary life such as speed, certainty, and individualism. Gregory Cajete’s relational understanding of education and How to Survive the Modern World provide two different lenses for considering how we might live consciously within these tensions.
Resources:
Gregory Cajete, Look to the Mountain
School of Life, How to Survive the Modern WorldTerminology note: Published in 1994 and grounded in a U.S. Tribal context, Look to the Mountain uses terms such as American Indian, Native American, and Indian education that reflect its time and setting. Read alongside Jo Chrona’s Wayi Wah!, we invite readers to focus on Cajete’s relational and holistic argument while remembering Chrona’s caution that Indigenous Peoples and knowledge systems are diverse, place-specific, and should not be treated as a single pan-Indigenous tradition.
Format: This is a two-hour, in person, experiential circle
Circle 3: The Seven Grandfather Teachings – Part 2: Toward the Good Life
This second circle turns to Truth, Wisdom, and Love, bringing all seven teachings together through mino-bimaadiziwin – living a good life. Participants consider how care, responsibility, relationship, and balance might orient our work within systems often shaped by productivity and independence. We also connect the teachings directly to George Brown’s Indigenous Education Strategy, which centres the Seven Sacred Teachings and mino-bimaadiziwin within the College’s vision for Indigenous education.
Resources: George Brown Polytechnic, Indigenous Education Strategy
Format: This is a two-hour, in person, experiential learning circle.
Circle 4: Circle 4: Indigenous Storywork – Coyote’s Eyes and Ways of Seeing
Drawing on Jo-Ann Archibald’s Indigenous Storywork, this circle explores story as a way of teaching, learning, and making meaning. Our central story is Terry Tafoya’s “Coyote’s Eyes,” as retold by Jo-Ann Archibald, which invites reflection on perspective and what happens when different ways of seeing are held unevenly. We then place the story in conversation with the Mi’kmaw guiding principle of etauptmumk (two-eyed seeing), asking how distinct ways of knowing might remain distinct while being held respectfully in relationship.
Resources: Jo-Ann Archibald, Indigenous Storywork, “Coyote’s Two Eyes” excerpt
Etauptmumk: Two-eyed seeing
Format: This is a two-hour, in person, experiential circle.
Circle 5: Circle as an Indigenous Teaching and Sharing Pedagogy
After experiencing circle throughout the journey, participants turn their attention toward circle as pedagogy. Together, we explore practices that support relational learning, including deep listening, consent, the right to pass, shared responsibility, and appropriate boundaries around story and disclosure. Participants will experience and design a small circle practice while considering when circle can support learning – and the responsibilities educators take on when holding this kind of space. Circle resources such as “What is Circle Pedagogy for?” and “Relational Learning & Circle Practices” will be distributed in the circle.
Format: This is a two-hour, in person, experiential circle.
Phase 2 – Deepening the Current: Attention, Land Relationship, and Relational Responsibility
Phase 2 moves from self-location toward relationship with the lands, waters, communities, and responsibilities that shape our teaching. Rather than approaching land acknowledgement as a statement alone, participants are invited to consider what it might mean to deepen acknowledgement through attention, repeated return, and relationship with place.
The phase begins through a collaborative land-based learning pilot with George Brown Polytechnic and Coast Mountain College, grounded in Darlene Naponse’s wordless film AKI, shared circle reflection, and local noticing. Participants will explore how land, season, story, responsibility, and more-than-human relations can become part of how educators understand their practice. As the phase continues, we will also begin to examine how we notice: where we direct our attention, what enters or remains outside our frame of reference, what becomes visible through repeated encounter, and how our own acts of interpretation shape the stories we tell about place.
Later circles strengthen this learning through return to place. In Toronto, emerging learning at Biidaasige Park (the Don River Mouth Naturalization site) will offer an opportunity to attend to water, restoration, land memory, Indigenous place-keeping, infrastructure, and ongoing stewardship. Participants practice noticing in this Indigenous-named and co-designed area before considering how those encounters might inform their teaching.
The phase eventually returns to the question with which it began: what can a land acknowledgement responsibly hold once it grows from something we have actually attended to, learned from, and entered into relationship with?
Across the phase, the invitation follows a rhythm: listen, notice, return, frame, reflect, and then consider what responsible action or design might follow. Further, Throughout the phase, participants are invited to engage not only intellectually, but through attention, emotion, sensory experience, creativity, and reflection. Indigenous approaches to education often understand learning as involving the whole person—mind, body, heart, and spirit—and as unfolding through relationships with human and more-than-human communities. The circles make room for these dimensions without prescribing a particular spiritual practice or asking participants to adopt teachings or ceremonies that are not theirs.
Circle 6: From Land Acknowledgement to Land Relationship [Online]
George Brown Polytechnic + Coast Mountain College
Land acknowledgements can open important conversations about territory, Indigenous presence, treaty and territorial responsibilities, and the places where we gather. This circle asks what might happen when acknowledgement becomes not only something we say, but an invitation into an ongoing relationship with place.
Faculty and staff from George Brown Polytechnic in Toronto and Coast Mountain College in Terrace will gather together online while remaining grounded in their different local contexts. Through circle dialogue, participants will explore what it means to begin from where we are: the lands and waters around us, the histories carried there, and the responsibilities that accompany teaching in place.
We begin without asking participants to write or perfect an acknowledgement. Instead, we will hold the question open across the phase and return to it after spending time attending to, learning from, and representing place.
Guiding questions: When you think of the land and water where you live, what relationship do you experience—not only what facts do you know? Where do gratitude, humility, responsibility, or reverence enter that relationship? What might change if land acknowledgement became a practice of land relationship?
Shared encounter: AKI [ONLINE & ASYNCH]
Film viewing: AKI
Between circles 6 and 7, participants will view Darlene Naponse’s AKI (2025), a wordless documentary filmed through the seasons in Atikameksheng Anishinaabeg territory.
Without substantive narration, the film invites viewers to attend differently: to land, water, ice, animals, community, industry, ceremony, and seasonal change. Toronto and Terrace participants will view the film locally, with asynchronous access available where needed.
Rather than approaching the film as something to analyse, participants will be invited to simply notice what remains with them: an image, sound, rhythm, absence, discomfort, relationship, or question. At this stage, we are less interested in explaining the film than in becoming aware of what happens when we are asked to look and listen without being told what to see.
Viewing invitations: What does land ask us to notice when nobody explains it for us? Were there moments that felt meaningful before you could explain why? What kinds of knowing did the film invite besides analysis?
Circle 7: What did AKI ask us to notice? [ONLINE]
Attention, Season, and Learning from Place
Following the local viewing of AKI, Toronto and Terrace participants will return to online circle to share what they noticed, what challenged their habits of attention, and what the film left unresolved.
Together, we will consider what changes when land is encountered not as a setting or resource, but as relation, teacher, memory, and responsibility. We will also begin to notice something about our own attention: seeing is never neutral. We look from somewhere. We notice some things before others. We frame, interpret, remember, and sometimes overlook.
The conversation will then turn gently toward our own places. What become available when we slow down enough to notice what has been present around us all along? What might repeated return allow us to see differently?
Guiding questions: What became visible when explanation stepped aside? Where did you experience the film – in thought, body, feeling, memory, spirit, or somewhere else?
This circle closes our fall pilot and opens the next movement of Phase 2: returning to local through repeated, place-responsive learning. In the circles that follow, participants will explore not only what they notice, but how they notice, frame, represent, and ultimately carry learning from place into teaching.
Circle 8: Learning to See a Place [ONLINE]
Attention, Framing, and Return
After learning with AKI, participants begin the practice of returning to a local place and noticing how perception itself shapes relationship. Before framing anything, notice what your body is doing in the place. Where do you slow down? Where are you drawn? Where do you feel distance, ease, discomfort, curiosity, familiarity, or awe?
For Toronto participants, Biidaasige Park becomes one possible shared site of return. Rather than approaching the park as scenery or as information to collect, participants will attend to its layered relationships: water and infrastructure, restored wetlands and contaminated ground, Indigenous place-keeping throughout the park and industrial memory, visible life and hidden systems, ecological return and ongoing stewardship.
Drawing on visual storytelling practices, participants will also explore a deceptively simple idea: every frame is a choice. Where we stand, what we notice, what remains outside the frame, how long we stay, what we hear, and what we choose not to record all shape the stories we tell about place.
Participants will begin with a short Place Notice practice, using accessible forms such as short video, still images, ambient sound, and/or minimal language. The goal is not technical filmmaking, but greater awareness of how choices about frame, duration, sound, sequence, and absence shape what we notice and communicate about place.
Guiding questions: How does the way I look shape what I am able to know about a place?
Encounter: Return. [ASYNCH]
Return to your chosen place at least once
Between Circles 8 and 9, participants are invited to return at least once to the place they have been noticing.
For Toronto participants, this may be Biidaasige Park, but it does not need to be. Participants should choose a place that is meaningful, accessible, and possible within the realities of their body, time, and daily life. Coast Mountain College participants will similarly return to a local place available to them.
On the second visit, return to something you noticed or recorded before.
Ask:
- Has it changed?
- Has the place changed?
- Have I changed?
- Do I frame it differently now?
Circle 9: Place Notice – What We Choose to Show, What We Choose to Carry [ONLINE]
Visual Storytelling, Responsibility, and Teaching
In this circle, participants return with fragments gathered from a place they have visited more than once. Drawing on visual storytelling practices, they consider how framing, sequence, sound, silence, duration, and minimal language shape what a viewer is invited to notice.
The goal is not to produce a short film. The creative practice, rather, becomes a way of making our own acts of interpretation visible What did we choose to show? What remained outside the frame? What changed between visits? What did we initially misunderstand? What relationships or responsibilities became more visible over time? What did this place give me? What, if anything, have I given or owe in return?
Participants will create a short Place Notice (under two minutes) and share it in circle, reflecting together on what this changed way of attending might mean for their teaching.
Guiding question: What do I become responsible for once I see a place differently?
Circle 10: Returning to the Acknowledgement [ONLINE]
What Do We Say After We Have Learned to See?
At the beginning of Phase 2, participants asked what might change if land acknowledgement became a doorway into land relationship. After AKI, repeated attention to local place, and the creation of a Place Notice, this final circle returns to that question.
Participants will consider how their understanding of acknowledgement has changed through the experience of noticing a particular place: its lands and waters, Indigenous presence, histories, living relations, damage, restoration, infrastructure, memory, and ongoing responsibilities.
Rather than asking participants to produce a “better” land acknowledgement, the circle asks what an acknowledgement can responsibly hold once it is grounded in something actually encountered and learned.
Participants might ask: What do I know now that I did not know when we began? What has become specific and situated rather than general? What relationships, histories, or responsibilities have entered my awareness? What did my Place Notice reveal about how selectively I see? What remains outside my knowledge? What can I acknowledge truthfully? What responsibilities follow from what I now know? Has gratitude entered my acknowledgement differently? Has my understanding of relationship expanded beyond human relationships? What do I now understand that cannot be adequately expressed in an acknowledgement?
Guiding question: How might an acknowledgement change when it grows from relationship rather than preceding it?
Resource Coming: From Land Relationship to Land Acknowledgement
Phase 3 – Navigating Change and Institutional Transformation
As we transition into deeper systemic work in Phase 3, personal stories, relationships, and experiences with land from Phase 2 provide the emotional grounding needed to sustain commitment to long-term transformation.
This phase moves from relational learning into direct application, guiding us all toward meaningful institutional change. It begins with cultural humility, encouraging educators to reflect on their own biases, privileges, and power relations. By the end of this phase, we move from learners to active participants in reshaping education. Through humility, accountability, and advocacy, they become part of a larger movement to transform institutions in ways that honor and uphold Indigenous ways of knowing.
Circle 10: Cultural Safety through Cultural Humility
Encourages educators to examine their own biases, privileges, and power relations. Lays groundwork for creating safer, more inclusive spaces for Indigenous learners (and all learners).
Cultural safety is an essential practice that moves beyond cultural awareness and competency. This circle will explore how cultural humility fosters deeper understanding, respect, and responsibility when engaging with Indigenous students, colleagues, and communities. Participants will engage in critical self-reflection and dialogue on power, privilege, and the importance of creating safer spaces in educational institutions.
This 2 hour circle is capped at 15 participants and includes a material practice to continue a beaded “badge.” Those wishing to participate can sign up at: [coming soon]
Reflection Assessment
Where have I grown and changed?
Circle 11: Supporting Indigenous Learners in “a good way”
Indigenous learners often navigate spaces that do not reflect their identities, histories, and ways of knowing. This circle will guide participants in understanding how to create safer and more inclusive spaces where Indigenous students feel seen, heard, and supported. Drawing from the work of Sheila Cote-Meek's Colonized Classrooms: Racism, Trauma and Resistance in Post-Secondary Education (2014), on Indigenous experiences in post-secondary education, we will discuss the impacts of colonial structures and systemic barriers on Indigenous learners. Through storytelling and shared experience, we will explore ways to respond to difficult conversations, disrupt harmful narratives, and uphold Indigenous learners in a good way.
Participants are invited to share their experiences and learn from one another in a respectful and inclusive space.
This 2 hour circle is capped at 15 participants and includes a material practice to continue a beaded “badge.” Those wishing to participate can sign up at: [Coming Soon!]. The link to Sheila Cote Meek’s Colonized classrooms reading [coming soon]
Reflection Assessment
Where have I grown and changed?
Circle 12: Building Meaningful Allyship and Culturally Responsive Teaching
Final Beaded Badge
Focuses on what allyship looks like in practice, from curriculum design to daily interactions. Reinforces reciprocal relationships with Indigenous communities and avoids performative gestures. True allyship requires ongoing learning, humility, and action. This circle will explore how to build meaningful relationships with Indigenous communities by centering Indigenous voices, honouring sovereignty, and engaging in culturally responsive teaching practices.
This circle shares knowledge around how allyship and culturally responsive teaching shows up for each in practice to inspire one another. A further reading provides questions for reflection and discussion.
This 2 hour circle is capped at 15 participants and includes a material practice to continue a beaded “badge.” Those wishing to participate can sign up at: [coming soon]
The link to Allyship Bill of Responsibilities reading [coming soon]
Circle 13: Institutional Transformation and Indigenous Knowledges
Why This Closing Circle is Essential: This culminating circle expands the relational journey beyond individual practice, inviting institutional leaders to witness, listen, and commit to sustaining systemic change in a good way.
Many circles focus on personal and classroom‐level practice. A culminating session on how to work with administrators, policy makers, and broader institutional structures can help sustain changes beyond individual faculty efforts.
This circle is an invitation for faculty members to bring a person who they feel can effect greater change into the sharing circle. Personal statements of experience in the circles, changes in classroom, reflections upon the journey, and a final discussion of proceeding in a good way shape this circle.
This 2 hour circle is not capped at 15 participants, but invites those leaders in department to join faculty members to hear stories and discussions in the journey and how their support might effect greater change. Those wishing to participate can sign up at: [coming soon]
Phase 4 – The Give-away: Building Practical Applications
"The Give-Away" honors the tradition of giving back to the community as an act of reciprocity, recognizing that the knowledge and growth gained throughout the journey are not meant to be kept but shared generously.
Topics include Indigenous ethics in emerging fields like AI, assessment practices aligned with Indigenous worldviews, conflict resolution through restorative approaches, and building long-term partnerships with Indigenous communities. It reinforces that faculty are not just completing a process but offering their insights, transformations, and commitments to the broader institution, making space for collective flourishing.
Circle 14: Indigenous Teachings, Ethics, and Artificial Intelligence
This application-based seminar considers Indigenous ethical frameworks to a modern context (AI and emerging technologies). Shows that Indigenous principles are not confined to tradition but guide ethical decision‐making in cutting‐edge fields.
This 1.5 hour circle is capped at 15 participants and includes a material practice to continue a beaded “badge.” Those wishing to participate can sign up at: [coming soon]
Link to the TLX conversations about GenAI and Burnout [coming soon]
Check it Out: Vanessa Andreotti’s Burnout From Humans
Circle 15: Honouring Indigenous Ways of Knowing in Assessment and Reflection
This application-based seminar considers shifts into how we evaluate learning: alternative assessments, relational accountability, oral traditions, and community validation. Invites faculty to adapt or redesign their assessments to align with Indigenous perspectives.
This 1.5 hour circle is capped at 15 participants and includes a material practice to continue a beaded “badge.” Those wishing to participate can sign up at: [coming soon]
Check it Out: Gesturing Towards Decolonial Future’s Pedagogical Experiments
Circle 16: Conflict Resolution or Restorative Approaches
This application-based seminar considers how Indigenous circles are often used for conflict resolution and healing. A circle specifically on how to navigate conflicts or challenging conversations with students, colleagues, or community members could be valuable.
This 1.5 hour circle is capped at 15 participants and includes a material practice to continue a beaded “badge.” Those wishing to participate can sign up at: [coming soon]
Check it Out: Restorative practices: Circle as Healing
Circle 17: Collaborating with Indigenous Communities
Final Beaded Badge
While several circles mention engagement with Knowledge Holders, you could expand on protocols for building long‐term partnerships with local Nations—covering how to respectfully invite, compensate, and sustain relationships with Elders and community members.
This 1.5 hour circle is capped at 15 participants and includes a material practice to continue a beaded “badge” that represents Métis beadwork flowers to honour what we have shared, and to gift part of my own heritage to those who have completed the entire journey. Those wishing to participate can sign up at: [coming soon]