On November 13, Noelle Pepin had come into the EDUC 405 class and spoke to the class about a project that she had worked on for her masters program, Beaded Tweets.
Beaded Tweets is a project that had combined Indigenous beading and binary coding. This combined both contemporary things in our everyday lives (tweets/social media) and traditional Indigenous beading done in a more contemporary way.
Pepin had brought in both examples of the bead work and ways that the beading had been done within the classroom. They had brought in either a visual (in a PowerPoint) or a physical item to show the members of my class. They had shown everything from the intricate bracelets that they had done with high school students over a period of days that showed full words to pipe clearer bracelets that they had done with primary students. This has shown us how the activity can be adapted to a variety of grade levels to allow for different skill levels to be able to participate and learn about the Indigenous knowledge that comes with the activity (both the history and process of doing).
For my class, beads had been provided and all of the students had created 1-2 string of beads that spelled out a single word in code. We had been instructed to pick something that had meant something to us. The top picture shows my beads. The pink and purple one spells out “swiftie” (in honour of Taylor Swift) and the blue and white one says “style” (in honour of the song “Style” by Taylor Swift which is rumoured to be about her relationship that she had with Harry Styles back in the day).
My outline for the beading
