First year Early Childhood Studies student at Guelph-Humber Sayonne Kourouma moves her fist around every time she states a letter to spell out her name, as if communicating in sign language.
She isn’t in fact signing, but she said she likes to do that to help her follow along in conversations. She said she has a learning disability, and appreciated when teachers saw her uniqueness and accommodated them in school.
Dressed in frilly white knee socks, pink hair clips, and carrying a frilly pink and white umbrella with a bright orange hoodie tied around her shoulders, she discusses the value of people’s differences in helping us learn.
“A lot of Indigenous beliefs are very beneficial for education,” Kourouma said, “We are trying to put it into contemporary education because we realize the importance of it.”
She’s wearing the orange hoodie today to support the “Every Child Matters” campaign led by Humber College’s early childhood education (ECE) program, to raise awareness on Canada's former residential school system and the need to appreciate every child’s uniqueness, like herself.
She didn’t end up volunteering for the event, but stood in support of another student in the ECE program. ECE Lab Technologist Pina Leo is in charge of the volunteers and said she had over 20 students sign up, carrying out three hour shifts.
Leo said the first and second year students cut out 2000 paper orange t-shirts, 4000 orange ribbons and 2000 stickers of orange t-shirts to give away to people around campus. She said it took two weeks to get all the material together and plan the event.
“We’re almost finished and it’s only 1 o’clock. We’re supposed to end at 3:30,” she said.
She said IGNITE came by in the morning when they held their Walk for Reconciliation event at 10 a.m. and showed solidarity for the ECE program’s efforts to raise awareness. Leo also said students learn a lot about Indigenous values within the program.
“We have a lot of story books. They do smudging. We have an outdoor education class,” Leo said.
She said she wants to double the number of materials they produce for next year since so much of it ran out early in the day.
First year ECE student Shardée Bailey was one of the volunteers. She said she’s starting to learn about residential schools in her classes. She wants to teach because she wants to support children the way she was supported.
Bailey said she still keeps in touch with a former teacher who supported her in high school as she navigated a learning disability. Her teacher left when she was in grade ten, but came back to hand Bailey her diploma when she graduated.
She said those examples are the type of teacher she wants to become when she graduates.
“I want to show up for my kids. So when they graduate, I hope they remember me when I come to visit them,” she said.
