Madeleine Redfern, Mayor of Iqaluit, welcomed to TFS.
Students at TFS across all grades and branches are encouraged to build their cultural intelligence (often referred to as CQ), defined as the ability to connect with people from other cultures and to collaborate effectively with them.
Senior School students. as befits their age, collaborate on many awareness activities that deepen their understanding of and connection to the world around them, on local, national and global levels.
Knowing that there is no better place to start building cultural intelligence than at home, Grade 6 students recently welcomed Madeleine Redfern, Mayor of Iqaluit, to a TFS assembly. Mayor Redfern spoke about the history of the Inuit. She emphasized the importance of family and thoughtfully shared how residential schools had impacted her community, as well as how separated children and parents are still searching for one another to this day.
She also shared information about the traditional Inuit way of life in Canada, Alaska, Siberia and Greenland, and the importance of living with nature and respecting it. Mayor Redfern concluded by reminding us that there are different ways of knowing, and that different cultures, especially Indigenous ones, have centuries-old relationships with the land and animals in their specific geographical areas, which allowed them to developed accurate systems of knowledge gathering and scientific observation.
