Northern Saskatchewan Indigenous Teacher Education Program

Delivered on Far Reserve, Lac La Ronge Indian Band, the Northern Saskatchewan Indigenous Teacher Education Program (NSITEP) prepares you to support learning in northern and Indigenous communities in Saskatchewan. You can complete the program as a four-year Bachelor of Education or as a two-year after degree if you already hold a bachelor’s degree.

As a fully accredited program, NSITEP prepares you to meet the requirements for teacher certification in Saskatchewan. You will develop the knowledge and practical experience needed to teach Pre-Kindergarten through Grade 12.

The program is delivered through partnerships with the Gabriel Dumont Institute, the Lac La Ronge Indian Band, and the University of Regina. These partnerships make it possible to complete a teaching degree close to home while staying connected to your family, culture, and community.

What is Indigenous Teacher Education?

Indigenous teacher education prepares you to teach in ways that recognize and respect Indigenous knowledge, cultures, and languages. It combines teacher preparation with an understanding of the social, historical, and cultural contexts that shape education in Indigenous communities.

In this program, you’ll gain hands-on experience with innovative and adaptable teaching methods. This includes equitable assessment and evaluation, teaching and learning in a digital world, supporting multiple types of literacy, and responding to a variety of learning, behavioural, and health challenges in schools. The program also emphasizes land-based education and focuses on Indigenous ways of being and knowing, providing a rich and culturally relevant learning experience for students.

You’ll progress through the program as part of a cohort, learning alongside the same peers throughout your studies. This approach strengthens collaboration, shared learning, and relationships that carry into your professional practice.

Some courses you may take as part of this program include:

ECS 101 – Knowledge, Schooling and Society

The course provides an introduction to the foundations of teaching, including politics of education, ethical relationality, teacher identity and professionalism, conceptions of learners and learning, and teaching for justice, equality and equity. 

ECS 102 – Education for Justice: Self and Other

With a vision for social change and moving towards truth and reconciliation, students will examine issues related to eco-justice, multilingualism, racism, sexism, heteronormativity, and ableism in ways that challenge how they have come to view the world and better equip them, as future educators, to help children and youth engage with the precarity and complexity of our shared lives.

INDG 100 – Intro. to Indigenous Studies

This course introduces the subject of Indigenous studies with a survey of Indigenous peoples in Canada from their origins, through European influence, and to the present. 

INDG 208 – Cree Culture and History

This course surveys the culture and history of Cree societies, with special emphasis on Cree societies resident in Saskatchewan.

ECS 203 – Curriculum and Pedagogy I

This course is intended to establish both a theoretical base for students to work from and the beginnings of understanding how theory and practice in teaching are linked. As such, this course introduces students to ‘big ideas’ in curriculum theory, walking through these ideas both philosophically and in historical context. While taking up these ideas, students will also have opportunity to see how these theories might be embodied in classroom practices.

ELNG 200 – Multilingualism and the Classroom

This course prepares future teachers to develop critical multilingual language awareness. It helps students to develop an understanding of language development across social contexts as well as how classroom instruction can constitute and maintain social categories. Students will become familiar with literacy instruction that works to foster equity and justice in the classroom and beyond. There is a 8 hour maximum field observation component. 

EOE 224 – Intro. to Outdoor Education

A foundational course utilizing an interdisciplinary approach to the study of the nature and scope of outdoor education, its potential in the education process; techniques of conducting outdoor learning experiences.