Presenter : Tammy Webster  

 - Équité Director, registered member of Kitigan Zibi Anishnabeg group

Institution:  Let’s Talk Science 

Let’s Talk Science delivers STEM education to Kindergarten – Grade 12 (Sec. V) in English and French. We have partnered with Indigenous communities for over 30 years and continue to deepen and expand our partnerships. 

Volunteer Outreach Sites 

Let’s Talk Science Outreach sites across Canada offer unique, customized STEM-based hands-on workshops, symposiums and events for local classrooms, community groups, libraries, summer camps, after-school programs and community festivals. We have over 50 volunteer outreach sites across Canada, including Aurora Research Institute in the Northwest Territories and First Nations University of Canada. We have visited approximately 10% of First Nations reserves through our Outreach Sites. 

 Professional Learning 

Our free-to-use professional learning offerings include several opportunities that focus on Indigenous Knowledge. We recently developed and delivered a Professional Learning module, Reflecting on Indigenous Science. This was co-created with Indigenous subject matter experts and is a self-paced course to achieve a badge in our Professional Learning credentials. 

We also offer ‘Lighting Learnings,’ condensed learning experiences that ignite educators' skills. Through our Let’s Talk Science Educator Advisory Panel (LEAP), we have educators from schools on reserves, schools with high Indigenous populations, and our recent partnership with the First Nations Education Administrators Association (FNEAA). 

• “ReadAlong Studio” (RAS) software aligns speech and text in audiobooks in Indigenous languages: https://readalong-studio.mothertongues.org/. For instance, an audiobook contains recorded speech from an elder reading a traditional story; after RAS processing, the audiobook highlights in the text the word currently spoken. Students can click on words in the text and hear them spoken at different speeds. RAS has been applied to 100+ languages in North America and the rest of the world