Virtual Anishinaabemowin courses created by Nipissing Language Teacher

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NIPISSING FIRST NATION – Anishinaabemowin teacher Falcon McLeod has kicked-off 2025 with the introduction of an expanded curriculum for Ontario students looking to learn Ojibwe. Language courses will now be provided online through the Near North District School Board’s (NNDSB) eLearning Consortium.

McLeod, who has been teaching Ojibwe at Nipissing-district high schools and Nipissing University for eight years, says he created the virtual lessons to provide wider access to needed resources for his language students.

“These are resources that I’ve put together on my own time to help make my classes a little bit more doable. Not everyone has access to [language] speakers and not everyone has access to a lot of the grammar materials and stuff like that. There is no dictionary for Nipissing for example.”

Prior to McLeod’s virtual lessons, Ojibwe language courses were only available through in-person classes. That made access to learning the language difficult for many NNDSB students due to timetable conflicts.

Not only are the language lessons now available virtually to NNDSB students, but to students right across the province. Wider access means greater student enrolment which ensures the course remains available.

“I’m really thankful and appreciative for Near North helping us set this up and helping us revitalize our language through these online classes and expanding out,” said McLeod. “We’ve been wanting to do things online for a while and Near North was good to help us get that going and get it set up so if we pull from the whole province, there was a better chance of filling up the seats to facilitate these classes.”

The 34-year-old Anishinaabemowin instructor decided he was going to become a traditional language teacher when he was a young boy.

“My first interest in Ojibwe was when I got my Anishinaabe name, Nishnaabemwin Bemwidood, which means ‘the one who keeps the language’. I got that when I was five years old and so I just kind of like took it upon my shoulders, no questions asked. My dad was really taken aback by a five-year-old just going, ‘Thank you. I’m going to do it!’”

McLeod says he would “harass” his mother, to teach him and his three siblings Ojibwe.

“She was a full-time mum and still managed to find time to make games in Ojibwe, multiple games in Ojibwe, and then also teach us common phrases we could use around the dinner table.”

As a teenager, McLeod attended Nbisiing Secondary School in Nipissing First Nation rather than North Bay area high schools because it provided the Ojibwe classes he was looking for.

McLeod credits the late language teacher and founder of Nbisiing, Dr. Muriel Sawyer-baa for guiding him on his journey to his current career.

“I think I was nearing the end of my first semester of Ojibwe (at Nbisiing) with Muriel Sawyer-ban and I realized, you know what? I could probably make language teaching a career and so I asked Muriel-ban what I had to do and she kind of gave me the roadmap of what I needed to do, and I was off to the races after that.”

McLeod says because there are so few language teachers in the Nipissing district, he has become the “Ojibwe Department” for the NNDSB. As a result, he splits his time between multiple high schools in the area but mostly works out of West Ferris Secondary School.

His new online language course is broken into lessons requiring the students to use a toolkit of resources.

“The students are going to be accessing the YouTube video that I share and the PowerPoint [presentation] taking notes from those materials and then they’ll be given a worksheet where they can work through it and get their minds ready for what’s coming. And then they’ll be given some audio files that they can transcribe and translate and that’ll be their worked assignment.”

McLeod says students gradually build their Ojibwe vocabulary through a series of linked exercises.

“For example, first week, we introduce a set of nouns to be the actors for our sentences. The next week, we have those same nouns doing actions and that’s how we introduce verbs. From there, we introduce commands, then prepositional phrases, etc. Within about four lessons, we’ve gone from no language knowledge to nearly story-telling abilities in Ojibwe,” he explained. “Once you start getting them to being able to pick up the patterns through some proper lessons and materials, then they start really taking the language doing their own thing. Those motivated learners, they really want to make the language their own.”

Students wishing to register for the online Ojibwe courses can do so by going through their school guidance departments.

https://anishinabeknews.ca/2024/12/24/v ... e-teacher/