The new College of Northern Canada (CNC) has already received endorsements from several prominent Northerners, but prospective students may have some questions about what kind of programs the college offers, how enrollment works and what kind of degrees and certificates await graduates.
The college’s website features praise from former GNWT cabinet minister Tom Beaulieu, who’s identified as a faculty member, and lists former Dene national chief Norman Yakeleya, Deline Got’ine Chief Danny Gaudet, and former Lutsel K’e Dene First Nation chief Steven Nitah as members of its academic council. However, anyone who dials the number listed on the home page will reach Yellowknife’s EPR accounting firm.
That’s because the college’s Yellowknife campus has yet to open, according to president Dr. Chehrazade Aboukinane, a Moroccan-born engineer and environmentalist who says she now splits her time between Vancouver and Yellowknife.
“We’re preparing for the grand opening of our campus,” she said on a Zoom call with Ontario-born college vice-president Louis Blais, who also moves between Vancouver and Yellowknife. “We’re just waiting for some key people and we launched our first programs online.”
“We’ve been busy working behind the scenes on getting our amazing programs launched, and then it’s just a matter of — I would say, hopefully — a few weeks,” she added, without specifying where in the city the campus will be located.
CNC shares ownership with EPR, according to its website. The college has been in development for about three years, said Aboukinane, who became the institution’s president within the last year. The early years were spent “working closely” with council members “to establish programs that they felt were the most needed in the territory” and gathering “several experts” who could help “come up with solutions.”
After years of planning, the college launched with online classes “around the beginning of May,” Aboukinane added, and now has approximately 20 learners, according to Blais.
“We’re always expanding,” he said.
‘Flexible rules’
The college’s website boasts that it has “no mandatory qualification requirements” and “flexible rules and regulations related to the students’ educational backgrounds.”
That’s part of what makes it a “non-traditional academic institution and hub for continuing education,” according to Aboukinane, who also noted that the college is “not offering or targeting any diplomas or degrees at the moment.”
“As an educational provider, [CNC] serves more as a catalyst in knowledge transfer and dissemination, targeting primarily Northern learners or those who desire to provide services to our Northern communities from various educational levels and backgrounds,” she said.
The college currently “doesn’t have any learners from the North,” the president acknowledged, and while she admitted it’s “hard to tell at the beginning” where most of the college’s students will come from, she expressed openness to students from all over the world.
“We’re not only North focused, we’re not only Canada focused, we are world focused,” she said. “We are creating young skilled workers, as well as strengthening the skills of older workers, to be able to take their skills anywhere they need to. Whether it’s for the local communities up here in the North or down south as we like to say, or anywhere in the world, they’re going to be prepared to impart Indigenous values, environmentalist values, et cetera.”
“Indigenous values” are and will continue to be of crucial importance to the college, according to Blais. Not only will the school aim to attract Indigenous students, but it also plans to launch an Indigenous leadership program in “the next few weeks.”
The college is also “one of the first” institutions to use a “co-teaching model,” Aboukinane added.
She described co-teaching as “a unique coaching model that requires an Indigenous educator to be in the room with our students on a regular basis.”
Centres of study
CNC can be broken down into several centres of academic study: The Centre of Indigenous Affairs and Self-Governance, the Centre of Indigenous Research and Scholarly Advancement, the Centre of Environment and Sustainability, the Centre of Executive Education and Leadership Development, the Centre of Pathways to Professional Designations, the Centre of Microcredentials, the Centre of Career Training, and the newly added Centre of Logistics Learning. Because the centres do not offer diplomas or certificates, accreditation from the GNWT’s Department of Education, Culture and Employment is not required. However, the Centre of Logistics Learning is recognized by the Canadian Institute of Traffic and Transportation as an organization that grants CITT-Certified Logistics Professional designations.
“A good way to look at it is, it’s under the framework of education, research and conferences,” Blais said of the centres, none of which yet have physical locations where lessons will be taught. “There’s various methods of knowledge dissemination and collaboration that we use, that we involve world renowned researchers [in], all with the goal of supporting communities and existing institutional organizations all across Northern Canada, the rest of the country, and really the rest of the world.”
Blais did not specify which internationally-renowned researchers the college has been collaborating with, but the college’s website lists five PhD holders among its 16-member faculty. Of those faculty members, few or none but Beaulieu seem to live in the North currently.
One of the college’s big “highlights” so far, according to Blais, was being “a major organizer of Africa’s first ever SWAT (Soil and Water Assessment Tool) conference,” an event held in Ifrane, Morocco from March 4-8 this year.
“SWAT is the world’s most comprehensive and widely used water modeling software, so the conference was a global exchange of knowledge on watershed management and water conservation,” he said. “It really was a gathering of the world’s top water researchers.”
“The full intention going into and contributing to that big, global conference is to, at some point, bring those scholars to the North to solve our water quality issues,” added Aboukinane. “Thinking of the North, we have the highest number of water bodies. I personally, as an environmental engineer and a big environmentalist, was amazed how much research can bring to the North, and it’s not just Yellowknife, but also Nunavut and the Yukon. Essentially, our goal is to really connect these great minds from everywhere, including outside or sometimes inside [the North]— some hidden talents that we don’t know — to bridge the gap between theory and practice.”
While CNC has yet to open its physical campus in Yellowknife, both Aboukinane and Blais are optimistic about the institution’s future in the city and the North.
“I would like [our] centres to be expanded to reach out to researchers and educators from all over the world to help us come up with some solutions to our real problems,” Aboukinane said, adding that, in Morocco, “many people were impressed with our initiative,” and wanted to “reach out and help support, and know what we’re all about.”
Beaulieu, Yakeleya, Gaudet and Nitah could not be reached for comment about their involvement with the CNC.