It should be noted that while most of these are university matters, at least one—the issue of certification—relates primarily to the province’s Board of Teacher Education and Certification. More on this later. In both these areas (operations and university programs), NORTEP-NORPAC has adopted interesting and extremely creative solutions to the organizational challenges it has faced over the past 40 years. The nature of these solutions, as well as the forces that provoked such stratagems, constitute an important dimension of impact for the purposes of this study. We will address each area separately in the discussion that follows.
4.1 Operations and governance The issue of mandate, as well as questions about the legal and organizational authority under which the program would operate, presented a challenge to NORTEP founders right from the beginning. The novel solutions that were ultimately adopted have had an enduring impact on the world of post-secondary education in the province of Saskatchewan. The need for a teacher education program was most keenly felt by the superintendent staff of the newly created “Northern School Board” (which later became the “Northern Lights School Division No. 113). Concerns were also keenly felt by some of the staff who worked with the Academic Education Branch of the Department of Northern Saskatchewan (DNS). Community leaders throughout the North also voiced their awareness of the need for community representation on the schools’ staff, in part to address the obvious language and culture gap that existed between the school and the community. On the academic side, authority for teacher education in the province is vested in the universities. Although efforts to meet the needs of Aboriginal students were in evidence at the University of Saskatchewan—both the Indian Teacher Education Program and the Indian and Northern Education Program had been established—these program initiatives were located on-campus. Northern educational needs required an off-campus program located in the North. Under these circumstances, the Northern School Board was prepared to act unilaterally and decisively. In 1976 the Board applied for and received funding from the province of Saskatchewan and the federal government (under the provisions of the Northlands Agreement), to develop a northern teacher education program. From an impact perspective, it is worth noting here that this vital initiative, to create a post-secondary teacher education program in the North, was undertaken by a school division, which derived its educational authority from the Education Act that governs the K – 12 educational system. This novelty was underlined by the fact that the funding for the program (that would become NORTEP) was provided to the school board not by the arm of government responsible for post-secondary education (the “Colleges Branch” of DNS), but by the branch responsible for K – 12 education (the “Academic Education Branch”).13 DNS was the common acronym used to refer to the “Department of Northern Saskatchewan,” a single-agency department responsible for the area known as the Northern Administrative District (NAD)—a boundary that includes Green Lake, Weyakwin and Cumberland House and the area North to the NWT.
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