Overview
The RESPECT program is designed to teach cultural safety and anti-racism for all employees at SFU with a focus on the implications of such skills for engaging with Indigenous faculty, staff and students and engaging in reconciliation as an institution more generally.
The RESPECT program is a response to the Aboriginal Reconciliation Council's (ARC) Recommendation in Walk This Path With Us, Call 7: Develop intervention programs teaching culturally safety and anti-racism for all employees at SFU.
The RESPECT Working Circle developed this program with the following aims in our minds and hearts:
- Create an understanding of how to build respectful and sustainable relationships with the host nations of SFU to ensure their knowledges, languages, cultures, and protocols are honoured by SFU employees.
- Build capacity of SFU employees understanding of Indigenous Peoples' past, present, and future.
- Ensure all SFU employees take up their individual responsibility to reconciliation through the collective work of decolonization and Indigenization.
- Foster and sustain a culture of life long (un)learning and respect for SFU employees.
- ‘Enhance’ ongoing professional development in the areas of cultural safety, decolonization, and Indigenization for SFU employees at all three campuses.
The RESPECT program is a hybrid learning model that combines some self-study and personal reflection online, with online discussion and periodic in person meetings. The program is designed in four integrated learning bundles. Each learning bundle entails some self-study and online work that will inform a culminating in person meeting.
Spring 2025 Offering
About the Learning Experience
This content-rich program is robust and co-designed with involvement from local land-based nations and SFU community members. The learning opportunity in this program is developed using a holistic, growth mindset, and academic realm and involves a deep connection between the individual, the community, and the environment. This learning is not just about consuming or acquiring knowledge but really taking the time to integrate what is learned. This growth mindset takes a substantial amount of time and therefore, learners should only commit to the program if their intention is to allow the opportunity to develop and commit. Ongoing participation in the program content is expected, not mandatory. Supervisor support is required so as to ensure the commitment is supported from all levels.
Dates
This program runs from January 13th* to Thursday, April 3rd. Participants should expect to spend a minimum of a half day a week on this course for the duration of the program. This includes synchronous and asynchronous learning; discussions and assignments, and five mandatory meetings (two in-person and three virtual). This timeline acknowledges the opportunity to give intentional time into the workday for learning with other RESPECT participants along with completing independent study and reflection journals and assignments.
In addition to self-paced online learning through Canvas, the following are the dates for the mandatory meetings:
- Thursday, January 23rd from 1 to 3pm – in person in Burnaby
- Thursday, February 13th from 1 to 2pm – virtual
- Thursday, February 27th from 1 to 2pm – virtual
- Thursday, March 13th from 1 to 2pm – virtual
- Thursday, April 3rd from 1 to 3pm – in person in Burnaby
*Note that the program launches with access to the Canvas course on January13th and the first in-person meet-up following on January 23rd.
Click here to register for the Spring 2025 offering.
Eligibility
The training is available to all SFU employees with supervisor approval (APSA, CUPE, APEX, Poly Party, TAs, RAs, Post Docs).
For questions please contact Caitlin.stiles@sfu.ca