Land Acknowledgements

Guiding Questions

How can we show gratitude and responsibility to the land where we live and learn?

• What does it mean to belong to a place?

•  What happens in this place?

• Who has relationships with this place?

• How can we express gratitude and responsibility for place?

• How, and with whom, can we share our learning?

This unit is the foundational inquiry in a longer-term place-based learning sequence intended to deepen students’ relationships with local environments over time. Through repeated experiences in local natural spaces, stewardship inquiry, and storytelling students explore relationships with land, community, and one another. Drawing upon place-based, experiential, interdisciplinary, and connected learning pedagogies, students ultimately create and share personalized land acknowledgements in French.

Learners move through five phases:

1. Building Relationship - Learning about Place

2. Making Observations - Learning through Place

3. Reciprocity and Reflection - Relationship to Place

4. Expressing Belonging - Writing Land Acknowledgements

5. Sharing with Community - Celebration of Learning

Land acknowledgements provide a meaningful vehicle for connected learning by connecting students to local places, Indigenous perspectives, civic responsibility, community relationships, and their own developing sense of identity and belonging. They also create opportunities to explore Indigenous-informed understandings of territory as a relationship grounded in reciprocity, responsibility, and respect, rather than ownership.

The culminating activity, a personalized and multimodal land acknowledgement accompanied by a digital portfolio, becomes more than a recitation. It reflects students' growing sense of connection to place and their understanding of territory as relationship, expressed through belonging, gratitude, responsibility, and participation in community. Students will share their work with family and community guests on the land that inspired their learning.