This Deep Dive invites participants into an immersive, land-connected, and story-based learning experience rooted in relational pedagogy. Rather than learning about relationships as a concept, participants will learn through relationship itself, with land, with story, with one another, and with their own evolving teaching identity.
Educators will experience a series of interconnected relational practices including a land-based arrival, a Four Directions Walk grounded in the Medicine Wheel, Story work Circles, and the creation of a Learning Bundle, a tangible artifact representing reciprocal learning and accountability. The session models learning as a living, participatory process shaped by connection, belonging, and responsibility rather than content transmission alone.
Grounded in the work of Shawn Wilson and Gregory Cajete, this Deep Dive explores learning as ceremony, participation, and relationship. Participants will experience how story functions as pedagogy, how circle builds collective meaning, and how learning can be assessed through relational accountability rather than compliance.
By the end of the session, participants will:
• Experience relational pedagogy as participatory, story-based, and land-connected learning
• Engage in circle processes grounded in respect, reciprocity, responsibility, and reverence
• Create a Learning Bundle symbolizing mutual learning, gifting, and accountability
• Reflect on how relational pedagogy can transform assessment, inquiry, and classroom culture
• Leave with both a tangible artifact and an embodied understanding of relational teaching
Connection to Deeper Learning Competencies
Integrated Disciplines
This Deep Dive weaves together Indigenous pedagogy, land-based learning, story, assessment, leadership, and inquiry into a single living practice. Learning is not siloed by subject area, participants experience how place, narrative, reflection, and material making naturally integrate across disciplines. The Medicine Wheel structure models holistic thinking that educators can adapt into curriculum design, inquiry projects, and assessment frameworks.
Collaborative Care
Relationship is the curriculum. Through circle processes, object exchange, partnered reflection, and collective meaning-making, participants directly experience learning as relational, reciprocal, and emotionally grounded. Vulnerability, listening, gratitude, and accountability are not added on, they become central pedagogical tools. This Deep Dive builds educator capacity to cultivate belonging-driven classrooms and leadership cultures rooted in care rather than control.
Inspired Authentic Learning
Participants engage in authentic, meaning-rich learning that is personal, emotional, symbolic, and reflective. The Learning Bundle serves as both artifact and metaphor, representing how learning moves through giving and receiving. Rather than consuming a strategy, educators become the learning, connecting deeply to purpose, identity, and ethical responsibility. The experience is intended to reshape how participants understand assessment, engagement, and what “rigor” truly means.
What Participants Take Away
• A Learning Bundle symbolizing relational commitments• Practical circle and story work structures for immediate classroom use• Language for discussing relational assessment and inquiry• A renewed understanding of teaching as ceremony, relationship, and responsibility• A deepened sense that who we are in relationship matters as much as what we teach
