Cambridge Bay sisters stick it out to become only grads from their 8-student teacher education cohort

Denise VandenBrink says she and her sister Janielle are excited to be graduating in June.

But they’ll be the only two students to do so from their original cohort of eight who started the Nunavut Teachers Education Program in 2021 at the Cambridge Bay campus. 

Students get a bachelor’s degree in education upon completion of the five-year program, which is a partnership between Nunavut Arctic College (NAC) and Memorial University of Newfoundland (MUN).

But the two sisters are the only ones in their group who’ve stuck it out this far, according to NAC. 

Denise VandenBrink said it was discouraging to see her classmates drop out one by one due to personal circumstances. She said she also struggled in the beginning while she was going through a breakup.

“But I'm glad that I had Janielle, and Janielle had me to kind of lean on each other to keep going,” she said.

VandenBrink said the first two years of the program, delivered by NAC, focused on Inuit culture and Inuinnaqtun, which was healing for her as she discovered more about her roots.

She said growing up, her father drilled the value of education into her and her eight siblings. But she said she didn’t take her schooling that seriously. 

That changed when she moved to Rocky Mountain House, Alta., as a Grade 10 student in 2005, which she said exposed her to an entirely different world. Three years later, her father passed away, but his legacy has stayed to this day.

After having her first child in 2014, VandenBrink applied to be a student support assistant at the local elementary and secondary school, where she discovered the joys of educating the next generation. 

“There was the student that I was helping, and just to see that click in him like, ‘Oh my god, I understood that.’ … It's a really good feeling,” she said. 

VandenBrink's mother, Lena Emingak, said she didn’t really know what profession Denise would enter when she was younger. But Emingak has one wish for her daughters.

“My hope for the future is for them to graduate and be teachers for all my grandchildren,” she said. 

That could very well happen, as VandenBrink looks to teach locally after graduation.