From my own experiences, courses, and the readings I have a sense that the FNIM world-sphere has a greater appreciation for ‘non-traditional’ academic endeavors. I want to deepen my relationship ship with visual art both for my own piece of mind and for the sake of my future students. Knowledge itself is not attached to the written word as much as we may feel it is tied up in books. Students have all kinds of interests, experiences, and talents that they can use to interact with the world and express themselves.

Even in the working world I’ve found that little actually decision-making or problem-solving is done wholly through numeric analysis, even if only through additional oral discussion. There’s always interceding factors, relationships and more that influence, synergize/empower, and circumvent cold analysis. This is beneficial to businesses, employees, and the world because it is more flexible and responsive. Otherwise computers would be better at predicting climate, investments, and crime than they are now. Beyond that though, work isn’t/shouldn’t be the most important thing in anyone’s life, and personal lives rarely rely on cold hard facts if ever. Even financial decisions require judging the validity of information and predicting the future stability of non-monetary factors.

All this is to say, that while cold hard facts can be powerful, they are useless on their own and often not actually applicable at all when it really matters. I think it is important to be informed but as this year has shown us, we are still led by our heart more than information we’ve gotten from the ‘information age’.

I feel like my own culture, colonial European culture, has left behind lots of its traditional and aesthetic pursuits while running in the global rat race. For this reason, I’m hoping to learn more from other cultures, especially Canadian Indigenous cultures, about the role are can play in our lives and in our learning.