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School suicide: What principals should do when students and staff disappear
February 7, 2019 8:41 AM Comments Off on School suicide: What principals should do when students and staff disappear
A new fact sheet by the national EdCan Network of educators and TeenMentalHealth.org entitled What can school leaders do in the aftermath of student and staff suicide? aims to heighten awareness among K-12 principals and school communities on what they should and should not do following the suicide of a student or staff member.

Authored by Dr. Stan Kutcher, professor in the Department of Psychiatry at Dalhousie University and recently-appointed member of the Senate of Canada, this timely resource reveals how some conventional suicide postvention programs can cause more harm than good for the family, friends and classmates of a student or teacher who dies from suicide.

As Dr. Kutcher asserts, things to avoid include memorializing, using phrases such as “committed suicide,” and purchasing suicide prevention programs.

“With recent and recurring reports of youth suicide nationally, globally and in Indigenous communities – especially those in the Arctic North – we’d like to provide concrete support to principals, teachers and parents who are grappling with tragic losses that impact entire school communities,” says Max Cooke, EdCan Network Interim CEO.

In addition to the downloadable copy of the fact sheet, available at www.edcan.ca/suicide-postvention, also included are several practical resources to support school leaders in taking up evidence-based strategies.

This fact sheet was made possible with the generous financial support of the Desjardins Foundation and the Canadian Schools Boards’ Association.
What can school leaders do in the aftermath of student and staff suicide?
January 30, 2019 8:00 AM Comments Off on What can school leaders do in the aftermath of student and staff suicide?
Suicide postvention refers to activities that support the grieving process and may help prevent suicide contagion among family, friends and classmates of a student or teacher who dies from suicide. While this is a challenging topic for any educator as waves of strong emotions take grip on a school community, acting primarily on emotions is not likely to bring optimal outcomes.

Although evidence on the effectiveness of suicide postvention strategies is still limited, here are some suggestions for what school leaders should and should not do following the suicide of a student or staff member:

THINGS TO DO
- Remain calm and ensure that usual school activities continue.
- Notify all pertinent persons and provide them with simple, clear and factual information.
- Follow the school’s policy and crisis implementation plan.
- Reach out to the deceased’s family to offer condolences.
- Create an opportunity for students and teachers to send condolences to the family (e.g. through a remembrances book) and give permission to attend funeral services.
- Identify key persons from within the school and a site (e.g. a classroom or school health clinic) to be made available before school starts until a reasonable time after school ends for students who wish to talk. Staff the space with educators and student service providers whom the students already know.
- Contact local mental health services providers to let them know and seek their input.
- For students, touch base with the deceased’s closest friends and invite them to chat with a guidance counselor or teacher. For staff, invite them to chat with a trusted colleague or administrator if they wish to do so.
- Identify students or teachers who are still struggling emotionally (including increased absences/sick days) six weeks or longer after the event and suggest referral to mental health services.
- Request that students and teachers use social media responsibly.
THINGS TO AVOID
- Using phrases such as “committed suicide.” Instead, use “died by suicide.”
- Creating or applying school-wide suicide or depression screening programs.
- Providing graphic details as to what happened.
- Memorializing the event (e.g. student assemblies, memorial sites, speakers, etc.)
- Bringing in external “grief counselors” or applying Critical Incident Stress Debriefing.
- Purchasing suicide prevention programs since there is no good evidence that such programs prevent suicide.
To be effective, suicide postvention must be adapted to the unique needs, situations and realities of the affected school and community. While a conservative estimate counts six people connected to the deceased who will be most personally impacted, suicide affects a web of individuals including parents, siblings, friends and acquaintances, classmates, healthcare providers and others.

Although numerous suicide postvention programs are available, school leaders have a responsibility to select evidence-based strategies that are likely to be effective – and avoid those that lack solid evidence and may do more harm than good – in preventing suicide and supporting those who are grieving.

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION RESOURCES
REFERENCES

Kutcher, S. (2018). Suicide Postvention in Schools: Addressing an emotional issue using best available information and critical thought. CAP Journal.

Szumilas, M. & Kutcher, S. (2011). Post-suicide Intervention Programs: A Systematic Review. Can J Public Health, 102 (1), 18-29.

WITH THE GENEROUS FINANCIAL SUPPORT OF:
Three little-known risks of adolescent cannabis use
January 29, 2019 1:12 PM Comments Off on Three little-known risks of adolescent cannabis use
In this era of legalization for Canadian adults, a newly released fact sheet by the national EdCan Network of educators entitled Cannabis: What are the risks for students? aims to heighten awareness among K-12 educators, parents and students on three major risks associated with adolescent cannabis use – lower school performance, psychosis, and cannabis use disorder (CUD). Recent scientific studies pinpoint specific areas of the developing adolescent brain that are vulnerable to cannabis.

Authored by Dr. Christina Grant, McMaster University’s Associate Chair for Education with the Department of Pediatrics, this timely resource provides clarity in view of the limited research that currently exists on the consequences of youth cannabis use over long-term periods.

As Dr. Grant asserts in this fact sheet, “As our understanding of the development of the human brain has increased, so too has the potency of THC – the main psychoactive component in cannabis – which has increased by up to 400% over the past fifty years.” This increase in potency could potentially impact brain development, which continues until students’ mid-twenties.

“Educators want to know if and to what extent legalization will impact teaching practice,” says Max Cooke, EdCan Network Interim CEO. “While it’s too early to say how cannabislegalization for adults in Canada will impact youth consumption, what we do know is that adolescents who use cannabis daily or weekly are at risk of lower school performance.”

In addition to the downloadable copy of the fact sheet, available at www.edcan.ca/cannabis, also included are several practical resources to support parents and teachers in beginning important conversations with students on these serious risks.

This fact sheet was made possible with the generous financial support of the Desjardins Foundation and the Canadian Schools Boards Association.
How Can I Use Self-Reg to Help the Child I’m Concerned About?
January 18, 2019 10:40 AM Comments Off on How Can I Use Self-Reg to Help the Child I’m Concerned About?
This six hour workshop, open to educators, parents and specialists, will help participants consider how they could begin to map out some strategies using the tools of Shanker Self-Reg to help a child in their care. It will discuss what participants can do to address their own self-regulation in ways that will enhance their ability to work effectively with the child. Open to everyone! Whether you are a parent, educator, or specialist, whether you are new to Self-Reg or already familiar with it, we’d love to see you there!
Cannabis: What are the risks for students?
December 18, 2018 12:31 PM Comments Off on Cannabis: What are the risks for students?
There are several unique risks that have emerged over the past few years associated with cannabis use among adolescents. As our understanding of the development of the human brain has increased, so too has the potency of THC – the main psychoactive component in cannabis – which has increased by up to 400% over the past fifty years. Science has explored how this increase in potency could potentially impact brain development among our student-aged population, which continues until their mid-twenties. Although rates of cannabis use among youth ages 15-24 in Canada continue to decrease, approximately 25% reported having used cannabis with the average age of initiation being 14 years-old. We cannot yet conclude how cannabis legalization for adults in Canada will impact youth consumption, but data from Washington and Colorado have not shown a significant increase in cannabis use among those under the U.S. legal age of 21.

Here are three major risks associated with adolescent cannabis use:

1. LOWER SCHOOL PERFORMANCE

Studies have shown that an individual’s working memory is impacted by cannabis use, with the effects potentially lasting for several days. This could impact a student’s academic performance and cause them to fall behind. As well, unlike alcohol, there is evidence that the effects of cannabis can persist over years of regular and continued use. These include the potential for a lowering of inhibition and reasoning skills, and a reduction in memory performance. Research has also shown that regular cannabis use could result in lower levels of educational attainment, including lowering high school graduation rates.

2. PSYCHOSIS

Cannabis use can result in psychotic episodes, where some youth lose touch with reality. These effects can last anywhere from a few hours to a few days, but do eventually resolve. However, in instances where heavy or frequent use is combined with beginning cannabis use at a younger age, there can be as much as a twofold increased risk of developing a chronic psychotic disorder, especially where there is a family history of schizophrenia.

3. CANNABIS USE DISORDER (CUD)

One-in-six youth who experiment with cannabis will go on to develop Cannabis Use Disorder (CUD). This can result in a reduction in grades, increased conflict at home, and changes within the student’s social circle of friends – with these changes often occurring over the course of a single year’s time. According to research, approximately 3% of older male high school students have CUD.

While cannabis has a long history of human use, recent scientific findings have discovered more about the developing adolescent brain and specific areas that are vulnerable to cannabis. For adolescents who use cannabis daily or weekly, studies have pinpointed functional brain deficits that require them to compensate by working harder than those who are not regular users. Fostering an open-door policy and being non-judgemental can help begin important conversations with students on these serious risks.

Additional Information Resources

Resources to talk to teens
General information resources on adolescent cannabis use in Canada
References

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WITH THE GENEROUS FINANCIAL SUPPORT OF:
National gathering reframes barriers to reconciliation in schools
December 17, 2018 10:20 AM Comments Off on National gathering reframes barriers to reconciliation in schools
Since the release of the Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 2015, school systems across Canada have been grappling with how best to embed Indigenous perspectives into all grade levels and aspects of schooling, including lessons on the history and legacy of residential schools. This has included diverse approaches to curricular reform and staff professional development plans, which have revealed that schools are progressing at varying paces along their journey towards reconciliation as they work to implement the Commission’s education-related calls to action.

While many educators find themselves at the how-to stage and fearful of committing cultural appropriation in their teaching, numerous more are still asking, “Why should I do this?”, “Why is this my concern?” and “Even if I’m now obligated by curriculum, where would I begin since I know little to nothing about Indigenous histories and cultures?”

On October 12^th, in an effort to address this tension, the national EdCan Network organized a professional learning event for over 200 teachers at the University of Lethbridge called “Truth and Reconciliation in Every School: What we know, what we don’t know, and what we need to do to move forward respectfully” – an acknowledgment that the road to reconciliation is not only an ongoing process that everyone is called to take up, but also a challenging personal investment that will unfold differently for each educator. The event catered directly to teachers and teacher candidates – regardless of where they might be along their journeys – and convened authors who had written for the recently-published Education Canada magazine special focus on Truth and Reconciliation in the Schools, which maps the progress Canadian public schools are making on this front.

“It’s not so much about the individual teacher,” explained Dr. Leroy Little Bear, the University of Lethbridge’s Special Assistant to the President. “Rather, it’s about the institutional aspect that teachers are a part of, which has played a large part in history in educating those superintendents, those Indian Agents and those ministers who brought about policies that led to residential schools.”

How can you respectfully incorporate Indigenous perspectives into your classroom? Advice from Dr. Leroy Little Bear and Dr. Michelle Hogue

During the event’s main panel discussion, speakers affirmed the need for educators to assess their intentions and work towards navigating from a place of heart, in lieu of “walking on eggshells” and remaining stagnant out of fear of asking a silly question that could offend someone.

Grounded in the view that not doing anything is likewise wrong, speakers accentuated how no one will ever feel 100 percent ready to take up this challenge – that teachers need to be brave enough to say “I don’t know,” which is critical when working with Indigenous peoples and marginalized communities, according to panellist Dr. Pamela Rose Toulouse.

Beyond those three words follows a willingness to reach out to valuable human resources – school district Indigenous consultants, Elders, Knowledge Keepers and those with authentic expertise – so that teachers can advance their own knowledge, build trust-based relationships, and work collaboratively with Indigenous peoples to teach all students about treaties, residential schools and long-standing issues facing Indigenous communities.

“Our biggest obstacle to reconciliation is ourselves,” emphasized Dr. Pamela Rose Toulouse, Associate Professor at Laurentian University and author of Truth and Reconciliation in Canadian Schools. “On the one hand, educators have their fears, misunderstandings and pride, while on the flipside it could be a question of indifference.”

Dr. Pamela Rose Toulouse

“But I don’t have Indigenous students in my school” is but one of the common excuses Dr. Toulouse has encountered from educators. Her suggestion is to liken reconciliation as a collective endeavour as are other large-scale challenges such as food security, climate change and equity, which touch anyone who has children, grandchildren, nephews and nieces, family and friends who comprise today’s generation and those to come. Confronting indifference and excuses also entails illuminating the contemporary contributions of Indigenous peoples – giving credit where credit is due for Indigenous inventions and inspirations for the “sport of hockey, medicines, potato chips and Dr. Pepper,” as Dr. Toulouse listed. Whereas curriculum will speak about residential schools and treaties, educators are charged with filling-in gaps by leading conversations about positive Indigenous role models and contributions that have been made by Indigenous peoples.

Julaine Guitton

Panellist Julaine Guitton is a novel example of a non-Indigenous teacher who has prioritized the resiliency of Indigenous peoples within her classroom over topics of cultural genocide and residential schools. This approach, entrenched in the viewpoint that Indigenous peoples are not victims first, has proven effective among her fifth and sixth-grade students as project lead for Stavely Elementary School’s “Project of Heart.” The project entails general research about residential schools in Canada, followed by more narrowed research into a particular residential school, meeting with a residential school survivor and a culminating artistic act of reconciliation. In a rural township where many students live on farms and ranches, understanding Indigenous peoples’ connection to land and place was cornerstone to these discussions which, as Elder-in-Residence Francis First Charger illustrated, allows students to understand different people, different worldviews and interrelations.

Francis First Charger

“I remember where I was when the final report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was finally released, and I felt especially compelled as a teacher being in a position where I knew that I could help other people,” Guitton recalled. “I didn’t know how I would accomplish that, so I decided to just wear an orange t-shirt to school one day and begin a discussion with my students about what that meant.”

Ira Provost

Ira Provost, Manager of the Piikani Nation Consultation, was Ms. Guitton’s community resource person throughout the project. With a career as an Indigenous liaison and cross-cultural educator, Provost found himself astounded by the depth and breadth of learning that had taken place, which transpired through speeches that the students had presented to school board trustees, the superintendent, Stavely’s school principal, FNMI support personnel and Elders from the Indigenous community during a class-organized community event.

All Indigenous peoples want, as Provost highlighted, is meaningful engagement, which forms the derivative of an ongoing commitment to starting early and moving beyond one-off endeavours.

“Reconciliation is about a thousand cups of coffee,” stated panel moderator Dr. Michelle Hogue, Associate Professor and Coordinator of the University of Lethbridge’s First Nations Transition Program, in her recap of the conversation. “It’s about sitting, listening, being present and building relationships.”

more ideas and resources on how to lead reconciliation initiatives with your students
This event was made possible by the support of our generous partner and sponsors
Plus Ça Change…
November 29, 2018 12:46 PM Comments Off on Plus Ça Change…
Does our current digital citizenship education really prepare students for effective citizenship? Digital communications technology offers powerful tools for civic engagement, but too often civic educators focus on “teaching good online behaviour” instead of teaching the skills and knowledge needed to safeguard and strengthen democratic institutions. And these skills are more critical than ever.

This changes everything. In scholarly journals, professional magazines, and popular media, there seems to be widespread agreement that digital media has radically transformed the way youth engage with one another and with the broader society, both socially and civically. Educators and researchers in civic education have understandably sought to adapt. There is little doubt that certain kinds of adaptations are necessary, and potentially transformative if they can harness the capacity for youth and young adults to be connected, to reach large audiences, and to organize others using the right combination of online and brick-and-mortar tools. But I am also concerned that an all-consuming focus on these powerful new tools for civic engagement may distract attention from serious shortcomings that have been widespread for decades. Are there basic principles of citizenship education that are important to maintain, even as we embrace and adapt to the digital era? Or do the bits and bytes of online social, political, and economic life obviate the need to focus on a more timeless set of fundamentals – habits of the heart and mind – that make democratic societies robust and enduring?

A personal story

These questions were on my mind recently, when I stood in the Frankfurt Hauptbahnhof (train station) waiting for my train to Prague. Both of my parents were born in Germany, my father in Karlsruhe in 1927, and my mother in Frankfurt in 1928. My father was displaced by WWII (he moved to Lisbon with his parents and then to Louisville, Kentucky); my mother was less fortunate. Like my father, she left Germany before being sent to a work camp or concentration camp. Unlike my father, she left her hometown without her parents on a kindertransport to Heiden, Switzerland.

As I waited for my train, I realized that 80 years before my mother had stood in this same train station and waved goodbye to her mother and grandmother, who ran next to the train as it left the station. She remembers smiling so that her mother would not be sad. She also remembers giving her favourite doll to the girl seated opposite her, who was disconsolate. They were two of 100 children on the train headed to relative safety in Switzerland. It was the last time my mother would see her family. She was ten years old.

Although my parents – both German Jewish refugees – spoke little about their experiences during the war, I suspect that the profound injustices that informed their childhoods have had an indelible impact on my views about education and citizenship in democratic societies. What went wrong in German society that led to such unthinkable events as those that define the Holocaust? How could such a highly educated, mature democracy descend into such unimaginable cruelty and darkness? Historians have suggested a great number of causes, including Germany’s punishing defeat in World War I, the suffering German economy after the worldwide Great Depression, and the populist appeal of a leader who promised to fix it all.

As an educator, however, I can’t help but wonder what German schools might have done differently. What can we learn from what schools did or didn’t do in Weimar Germany (which was a democracy too)? What, if anything, should schools today teach children about civic participation, courage, and dissent? How can schools help young people acquire the essential knowledge, dispositions, and skills for effective democratic citizenship to flourish?

If we care about robustly democratic societies, we will have to be explicit about the kinds of knowledge, skills and dispositions required of democratic citizens.

Where are we vulnerable?

Tools for engagement have changed, but our social, political and economic vulnerabilities have not. Educators imagine focusing on a kind of teaching and learning that puts democratic community life front and centre at the same time that it uses changes in digital technology to their advantage. These are both worthwhile goals, but they are not one and the same. If we care about robustly democratic societies, we will have to be explicit about the kinds of knowledge, skills, and dispositions required of democratic citizens.

Digital technologies, as the other articles in this special section demonstrate, have tremendous potential to help build a kind of participatory politics that strengthens democratic societies.¹Teachers, researchers, and policymakers alike attest to the benefits of these powerful technologies and what they allow students to do, including:
- use the Internet to access information that would otherwise be unreachable or require enormous effort to attain
- develop narratives, both alone and with others, about events and actions
- share opinions and perspectives with a potentially large audience
- provide and receive feedback from others, irrespective of their physical location, age, or social position
- exchange information and ideas directly with other youth without institutional gatekeepers.
These are powerful tools. These same features of digital civic engagement and exchange, however, can be put to use in the service of facile educational goals. As I detail in my recent book, What Kind of Citizen? Educating our children for the common good, when schools across Canada and the U.S. set out to teach democratic citizenship, a vast majority of them end up teaching good behaviour instead: follow the rules; listen to teachers and other authority figures; be respectful and responsible; and manifest a sense of patriotism and loyalty. These can all be admirable traits. But none of them are uniquely essential to democratic citizens. And none of them would have been the kinds of traits needed by German citizens in 1933 in order to alter the course of history. “Good character” is insufficient for safeguarding and strengthening democratic institutions and traditions.

What about today?

I do not mean to imply that another holocaust is imminent or that there is some kind of equivalency between anti-democratic leaders today and Adolf Hitler. I use this example both because it has personal resonance given my family history and also because extreme examples have a way of making visible concerning developments and trends. Currently, in the U.S. notably but also in many other countries, a toxic mix of rising economic inequality and ideological polarization is increasing, leading to waning trust in democratic governance.

Eighty-five years after Germany’s democracy was replaced by a totalitarian Nazi regime, popular support for democratic governance is the lowest it has been in decades. In a widely circulated 2017 report, the Pew Research Center raised considerable alarm among those who had assumed that western democracies enjoy relative stability within an entrenched culture of democratic governance. Although the report was titled “Globally, Broad Support for Representative and Direct Democracy,” commentators, civic educators, and political scientists highlighted a number of findings that challenged the rosier title. In the U.S., for example, 22 percent of respondents thought that a political system in which a strong leader could make decisions without interference from Congress or the courts would be a good way of governing. Close to one in three respondents who identified as Republican and almost half of U.S. millennials thought the same (globally, that figure was 26 percent).²

In another study, Harvard lecturer Yascha Mounk and Australian political scientist Roberto Stefan Foa examined longitudinal data from the World Values Survey and found considerable cause for concern. Between 1995 and 2014, the number of citizens who reported a preference for a government leader who was “strong” and who did not need to bother with elections has increased in almost every developed and developing democracy and, again, the growth has been greatest among youth and young adults.³Neither Canada nor the U.S. are exceptions. Democracy, it seems, is not self-winding.

Concrete examples now abound of leaders stoking the flames of populist nationalism – the rallying of “the people” against both “foreigners” and a constructed “elite” in the service of right-wing nationalism. Worldwide, politicians can now openly express disdain for hallmarks of democratic society, including the free press, civil liberties, and the courts, while fostering resentment against foreigners and ethnic “others.” These kinds of anti-democratic rhetoric and policies can drive individuals and groups to withdraw from the broader civil society altogether, preferring sub-group identity – what James Banks aptly calls “failed citizenship.”⁴Recent rhetoric during election campaigns in Canada reveals similarly concerning trends.

A rise in xenophobia and nationalism has resulted in incidents of hate speech, antagonism, and assaults on both newly arrived immigrants and native-born visible minorities in a growing number of western democracies. In the U.S., the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) has documented a precipitous rise in hatred, fear, and alienation among students; and teachers have similarly reported a dramatic increase in hate speech^.5 Social media echo chambers further entrench anti-democratic tendencies and pollute genuine social and political discourse.⁶ Yoichi Funabashi, chairman of the Rebuild Japan Initiative (dedicated to strengthening democratic ideals in Japan) summarizes the risks succinctly: “If society becomes characterized by intolerant divisions, in which people immediately select their allies and dismiss others as foes based on such criteria as race, ethnicity, religion or lifestyle, then democracy’s foundational principles, rooted in careful deliberation and compromise, will be rendered inoperable.”⁷

What kind of civic education do we need?

Online and offline, we need citizens who can think and act in ethically thoughtful ways. A well-functioning democratic society benefits from classroom practices that teach students to recognize ambiguity and conflict in factual content, to see human conditions and aspirations as complex and contested, and to embrace debate and deliberation as a cornerstone of democratic societies. Here are three strategies that can help shape educational practices in an era of both increasingly powerful digital tools and decreasing support for social democracy:

1. Teach students to ask questions

One hallmark of a totalitarian society is the notion of one single “truth” handed down from a leader or small group of leaders to everyone else. Questioning that truth is not only discouraged, but also often illegal. By contrast, schools in democratic societies must teach students how to ask challenging questions – the kind of uncomfortable queries that challenge tradition. Although most of us would agree that traditions are important, without questioning there can be no progress. Dissent – feared and suppressed in nondemocratic societies – is the engine of progress in free ones. Education reformers, school leaders, and parents should do everything possible to ensure that teachers and students have opportunities to ask these kinds of questions.

2. Expose students to multiple perspectives

Much as Darwin’s theory of natural selection depends on genetic variation, any theory of teaching in a democratic society depends on encouraging a multiplicity of ideas, perspectives, and approaches to exploring solutions to issues of widespread concern. Students need practice in entertaining multiple viewpoints on issues that affect their lives. These issues might be controversial. But improving society requires embracing that kind of controversy so citizens can engage in democratic dialogue and work together toward understanding and enacting sensible policies.

Why would we expect adults, even members of Parliament, to be able to intelligently and compassionately discuss different viewpoints if schoolchildren never or rarely get that opportunity? In schools that further democratic aims, teachers engage young people in deep historical, political, social, economic, and even scientific analysis. They also challenge children to imagine how their lived experiences are not universal and how issues that may seem trivial to them could matter deeply to others. They have students use online tools to examine multiple perspectives not only to know that their (or their parents’) views may not be shared by everyone, but also to engender a kind of critical empathy for those with competing needs. This is the kind of teaching in a digital era that encourages future citizens to leverage their civic skills for the greater social good, rather than their own particular interests, thus working to challenge social inequities.

How should we do this? For example, teachers might present newspaper articles from around the world (easily accessed through the Internet) that examine the same event. Which facts and narratives are consistent? Which are different? Why? Textbooks from several different countries could provide another trove of lessons on multiple viewpoints and the role of argument and evidence in democratic deliberation. Many of these textbooks are now accessible online, allowing the kinds of comparisons that would have been difficult before the advent of communications technology. If textbooks are not available online, teachers can use the power of social media to connect with classes in other countries who are reading different textbooks. Even within English-language textbooks there are many opportunities. Schools in Canada, the U.K., and the U.S., for instance, present strikingly different perspectives on the War of 1812.

Why not ask students to use online and offline sources to research who wrote their textbook? Why were those people chosen? What kind of author was not invited to participate? The idea that a person or group actually wrote a textbook reminds us that the words are not sacrosanct but represent the views of a particular time, place, and group of authors. These approaches help demonstrate to students that “facts” are less stable than is often thought.

Students should also examine controversial contemporary issues. Students are frequently exposed to past historical controversies – such as slavery, Nazism, or laws denying voting rights to women. But those same students are too often shielded from today’s competing ideas (for example, the #MeToo movement, women’s reproductive rights, misinformation campaigns that employ social media as a dangerous and powerful tool, controversies over what should be taught in the school curriculum and how). Engagement with contemporary controversies using a range of perspectives and multiple sources of information – something online tools are uniquely well-suited to promote – is exactly what democratic participation requires.

3. Focus on the local

It is not possible to teach democratic forms of thinking without providing an environment to think about. Schools should encourage students to consider their specific surroundings and circumstances. Here too, social media and other digital tools can be an asset.

One way to provide experiences with democratic participation in civic and political life is to engage students in community-based projects that encourage the development of personal responsibility, participation, and critical analysis. Action civics is a particularly powerful and thoughtful way to foster civic participation that transcends community service to also include a focus on government, policy, and dissent.⁸ We saw this with the students of Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland Florida, who, in response to the February 2018 mass shooting in their school, leveraged the power of social media and other digital tools to become key figures in a national dialogue on gun culture in the U.S., while also mobilizing both locally and nationally to agitate for gun control legislation, organize demonstrations, support electoral candidates, and register voters. Their ability to connect a very personal experience with the ways in which government, policy, and social and economic forces shape their lives has allowed them to participate on a national scale, and no doubt prepared them for a life of effective civic engagement. When students have the opportunity to engage with civics education through direct action in their own local context, the impacts of their work are integrated with their lived experience and can teach fundamental lessons about the power of citizen engagement both on and off-line.

Of course, choosing to be explicitly political in the classroom can cause friction for teachers – with students, parents, and administrators – even when teachers avoid expressing their own political views. Encouraging discussion, controversy, and action in the classroom can be daunting. Students may express views that make classmates uncomfortable; they may engage in political acts that concern their parents; or they may choose to challenge their own school’s policies. Democracy can be messy. Rather than let fear of sanction and censorship dictate pedagogical choices, however, teachers should be supported and protected, encouraged to use debates and controversy as “teachable moments” in civic discourse.

Another obstacle to focusing locally is the obsession with provincial (and national and international) standardized testing. The resulting emphasis on memorization and regurgitation of generalized knowledge prevents deeper critical analysis and runs counter to almost everything we know from education research about how to make teaching and learning meaningful and about how to foster engagement and participation in civic life.⁹

Education in a digital era

The communication technologies of the digital era have enormous potential to bring people together in collective pursuits. Those pursuits, however, must be consistent with democratic values. History demonstrates that just because schools teach children about citizenship and character does not necessarily mean they do it well, or even toward admirable aims. In fact, schools have sometimes engaged in some of the worst forms of citizenship indoctrination. Counted among the many examples of organized “citizenship” education are the hateful lessons learned by members of the Hitler Youth brigades such as racism, antisemitism, the glorification of Nordic and other “Aryan” citizens, and blind obedience to authority; or the Young Pioneers of the USSR who were taught to report any religious activity in their own homes to authorities so their parents could be prosecuted. Had these same youth had access to YouTube, Snapchat, Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest, would they have been more or less likely to teach one another about democratic ideals and the dangers of authoritarian rule?

Similarly, when we use digital technologies in schools, do we use them to teach children to unquestioningly preserve our social, political, and economic norms and behaviours, or do we use them to imagine and pursue new and better ones? Do we teach them only the importance of following the rules or also to question when the rules are not worth following? Do we teach students to mobilize in support of policies that promote only their own self-interest, or to think more broadly about their ethical obligations to others? I wonder what might have been different in 1941, the year my mother received her last letter from her parents, had children been taught not only compliance but also doubt and the obligation to imagine a better society for all. I think about what civic educators can do now – whether focused on new technologies or on the kinds of critical thinking skills necessary to sustain democratic norms and behaviours – to convey to students the power of community, as well as the pitfalls of blind allegiance to it.

Long before computers or the Internet, John Dewey described schools as miniature communities and noted that the school is not only a preparation for something that comes later, but also a community with values and norms embedded in daily experiences.¹⁰ In many ways the question of how to teach citizenship in a digital era is a much broader question about the purpose of schooling writ large. Transforming the way we teaching citizenship is not only the purview of the civics and social studies classroom, but a journey into all classrooms, all subjects, the hallways, and the relationships of the entire school experience. Citizenship education – indeed education of all sorts – is, ultimately, a proxy for the kind of society we seek to create.

Photos: Bundesarchiv_Bild_183-S69279,_London,_Ankunft_jüdische_Flüchtlinge and iStock

First published in Education Canada, December 2018

1 Also see the work of Erica Hodgin, Joseph Kahne, Ellen Middaugh, Ben Bowyer and others at the Civic Engagement Research Group in Riverside, California. www.civicsurvey.org

2 Pew Research Center (PEW), Globally, Broad Support for Representative and Direct Democracy (Washington, D.C.: PEW, 2017).

3 R. Stefan Foa and Y. Mounk, “The Danger of Deconsolidation: The democratic disconnect,” Journal of Democracy 27, no. 3 (2016): 5-17.

4 J. A. Banks, “Failed Citizenship and Transformative Civic Education,” Educational Researcher 46, no. 7 (2017): 366–377.

5 United Nations (UN), Racism, Xenophobia Increasing Globally (New York, UN, 2016), www.un.org/press/en/2016/gashc4182.doc.htm; M. Costello, The Trump Effect: The impact of the presidential campaign on our nation’s schools (Montgomery, AL: The Southern Poverty Law Center, 2016); W. Au, “When Multicultural Education Is not Enough,” Multicultural Perspectives 19, no. 3 (2017): 147–150; J. Rogers, M. Franke, J.E. Yun, et.al, Teaching and Learning in the Age of Trump: Increasing stress and hostility in America’s high schools (Los Angeles, CA: UCLA’s Institute for Democracy, Education, and Access, 2017).

6 For research about media echo chambers, see, for example: J. Kahne & B. Bowyer, “Educating for Democracy in a Partisan Age: Confronting the challenges of motivated reasoning and misinformation,” American Educational Research Journal 54, no. 1 (2017): 3–34.

7 Y. Funabashi, “Trump’s Populist Nationalism,” The Japan Times (2017, January 17). www.japantimes.co.jp/opinion/2017/01/17/commentary/japan-commentary/trumps-populist-nationalism

8 See, for example: B. Blevins, K. LeCompte, and S. Wells, “Innovations in Civic Education: Developing civic agency through action civics,” Theory & Research in Social Education 44, no. 3 (2016): 344-384; M. Levinson, No Citizen Left Behind (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014).

9 D. Koretz, The Testing Charade: Pretending to make schools better (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2017); J. Westheimer, “No Child Left Thinking,” Colleagues 12, no. 1 (2015). http://scholarworks.gvsu.edu/colleagues/vol12/iss1/14

10 J. Dewey, Moral Principles in Education (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1909/1975).
Well-being and Success
12:14 PM Comments Off on Well-being and Success
Why should student well-being be part of the education agenda? Reporting on a four-year-study conducted in Ontario, the authors argue, “Get the well-being agenda right, and it will support and be supported by effective learning, so that all our students can be successful and well.”

Canada is a global leader in educational change. It has widely-acclaimed results on student achievement and equity on international assessments.¹ Only Finland exceeds Canada in terms of equal opportunity combined with positive outcomes for low-income students. Canada also has stronger democratic self-governance and greater multicultural inclusion than many other high performing systems.

But Canada’s record on student well-being is less impressive. UNICEF places Canada 26th out of 35 nations on a table measuring well-being across four indicators of life satisfaction, health, education, and income.² On OECD indicators of life satisfaction, Canada’s students are “not significantly different from the OECD average.”³ Like a number of countries in East Asia, its record on student achievement is not matched by its performance in student well-being.

In response, Ontario made well-being one of its four policy priorities in 2014. As anxiety and depression among the young skyrocketed, its educators began giving greater attention to their students’ emotional, physical, and spiritual development. Our new research from interviews with educators in ten Ontario school boards over the past four years shows that educators started teaching students a range of ways to improve their well-being.⁴ Students are now learning meditation, practicing yoga, and serving on school-based mental health committees. Teachers are providing programs of emotional self-regulation that help students calm down when they are angry or anxious, and they are showing students how to use apps to report to counselors when they are worried about their own or others’ well-being. Educators have also been changing the curriculum to be more inclusive of the identities of all young Canadians (though this is now a point of contention with the province’s new government).

But is well-being just a self-indulgent distraction from the basics of real learning? Conversely, is it being used to compensate for the ill-being that is created by standardized testing and out-of-date approaches to teaching and learning? Do achievement and well-being occupy separate silos that have no connection with each other? Or is there a relationship between well-being and success – and if so, what do Ontario’s educators believe that it is?

Get the well-being agenda wrong and opponents will easily portray it as emotional self-indulgence or trendy identity politics that are distractions from academic basics. Get the well-being agenda right, and it will support and be supported by effective learning, so that all our students can be successful and well. In their 2017 report on student achievement and well-being, the OECD argued that “most educators and parents would agree that a successful student not only performs well academically but is also happy at school. Indeed, schools are not only places where students acquire academic skills; they are also social environments where children can develop the social and emotional competencies they need to thrive.”⁵ This is the educational policy challenge for Canadians now.

From 2014 to 2018, our research team from Boston College worked collaboratively with a representative sample of 10 of Ontario’s 72 school boards to understand what work they were doing on the ground to implement the province’s four pillars of educational reform at the time. These were: achieving broadly defined excellence; securing equity for all students that also involved how included they felt in their learning and their schools; promoting well-being; and establishing public confidence. Part of this research involved interviewing 222 educators about this implementation and asking them questions concerning their beliefs and reported practices about well-being and achievement.

Our interviews with Ontario’s educators revealed that they find three different kinds of relationships between well-being and achievement.
1. Well-being is a crucial prerequisite for achievement.
2. Achievement is essential for well-being; failure leads to ill-being.
3. Well-being has its own value: it complements academic achievement.
Let’s look at each of these in turn.

1. Improved well-being increases achievement

There are multiple sources of ill-being in many of Ontario’s communities. An assistant principal of one rural school stated, “We have a lot of kids that are high-anxiety, with a lot of developmental trauma. A lot of kids are in [foster] care.”

“We look at our role as addressing the whole student,” a fellow principal said. One of the teachers in this board asked, “How did they sleep? Are they hungry? Are they feeling OK? Are they happy? You are starting bare bones and you work your way up until you they are ready to learn.”

Many educators agreed that before real learning could begin, a minimum threshold of well-being had to be attained. They did everything they could to address issues like poverty or social exclusion to prepare their students for academic achievement. A board in a working-class city with a 24.2 percent youth poverty rate (compared to a provincial rate of 17.3 percent) was grateful for the commitment of trades unions and philanthropy. “It’s a part of the culture here,” one said. “There’s huge care around mental health, huge care around the partnerships, huge care around poverty,” a colleague observed. “There’s this belief in helping others.”

Educators in another board reported that ill-being can affect the affluent as well as the poor. “Some of their anxiety is related to parental pressure,” a teacher commented. One way that schools supported students in this community was by providing a calming space that helped them to settle down and “just go and relax” when they were stressed or upset.

A superintendent summed up the relationship between well-being and achievement when he said, “Take care of people; take care of everything.” But caring for students at risk of ill-being is not sufficient to ensure well-being. Learning requires discipline and zest, the ability to focus, the capacity to empathize with different points of view, the social skills to interact with others, and the stamina to persevere through difficulties and bounce back from disappointment. These dispositions call for positive well-being to support the dynamic learning that leads to widespread success.

2. Academic achievement is crucial for well-being

In a second point of view, well-being is supported by academic success, while failure perpetrates ill-being. Some administrators expressed this idea when they said that they wanted to raise students’ mathematics results “to boost their confidence” and to “make them feel good about being learners.” Here well-being was regarded as an outcome of deliberate efforts by students and their teachers to secure earned achievement.

Clarity of purpose and direction around improving achievement was also important for both students and their teachers. One school board director stated, “I think it’s stressful to waste time and not know where you’re going. In the absence of direction, people do what they want. It isn’t always the most purposeful thing.”

Almost half the boards in our study described projects that put a priority on developing “growth mindsets” among students and their teachers.⁶ Compared to fixed mindsets where people believe things cannot change, in growth mindsets, people believe that difficulties, including ones that involve their own learning and development, can be overcome.

A growth mindset orientation was used in one board to promote mathematics achievement in the belief that it would, in turn, contribute to students’ self-regulation and resiliency. A special education consultant in this board spoke about “building in mindset activities in every single session” of her coaching with teachers. A teacher in another board gave students the URLs of video clips on growth mindsets to encourage them to work harder to develop a greater sense of accomplishment. By promoting the belief that everyone can achieve, educators treated well-being as a result of hard-won effort, including the effort to achieve academic success.

Having a sense of achievement isn’t or shouldn’t be all about getting good test scores, though. Having meaning and purpose is integral to people’s sense of well-being. Well-being involves far more than happiness, and accomplishments go far beyond test success.

A sense of purpose and accomplishment in this broader sense was behind many learning innovations across the ten boards. These included comparing water quality on First Nations Reserves with that in neighbouring communities, and learning about and raising funds to adopt and accommodate Syrian refugee families, for instance. In cases like these, students deepened their own learning and sense of accomplishment by addressing the well-being of others.

3. Well-being has its own value: It complements academic achievement

Getting back to basics shouldn’t mean moving away from well-being. Many East Asian parents and their governments in Hong Kong, Singapore and South Korea, for example, now realize that excessive emphasis on tested academic achievement has led to anxiety, depression and even suicide among young people. They are easing up on testing requirements now and putting greater emphasis on quality of life.

Almost every board we studied addressed students’ ability to self-regulate when they became angry, anxious or depressed. One widely used program was called Zones of Regulation.⁷Here, students learn to identify their emotions with reference to four categories or colours: red, where children are angry or overly exuberant; yellow where they are anxious, nervous or silly; blue where they are sad or depressed; and green when they are calm, alert, and ready to learn.

Educators everywhere were enthusiastic about this program. According to one principal, they were “seeing some gains” because of this approach. Suspension numbers had dropped. “Kids are able to take responsibility for behaviour a little more easily than they used to,” the principal said. “They’re able to articulate what went wrong.” It took less time to calm students down before they could rejoin a class. It was better to give students the time and space they needed to get in the right frame of mind to focus on learning, teachers believed, than to punish them when their minds were racing or their bodies were restless.

Another strategy to support well-being was resiliency. “You build resiliency. You’re not born with it,” one principal said. One elementary school took the idea of “building” resiliency literally. They developed “toolkits” for students and “built a resiliency wall. Every student had a brick and they could [write] on, ‘Who supports me when I’m feeling down?’” Students sometimes searched through these toolkits when they needed help in dealing with a worrying or frustrating issue – from a blockage in their learning to coping with the death of a fellow student.

In Ontario, students have become increasingly engaged in the well-being agenda themselves. For example, one board created student-led well-being groups called Sources of Strength. The group consisted of student “leaders from every part of the school. You get kids who aren’t the jocks, and they are not the artsy kids. You want it to be representative of everybody.” The students received training from mentors at the school. They organized events such as a Walk for Depression awareness day, so that students and community members wouldn’t ignore any student who was struggling. A student mental health committee in another board consisted of students who were acquainted with problems such as experiencing a friend committing suicide, or being treated for a speech impediment. Elsewhere, in a student-designed poster on “50 Ways to Take a Break,” students were encouraged to “sit in nature,” “read a book,” or “pet a furry creature,” for example. In these ways, boards encouraged students to reach out to others with kindness, and make sure that no one was left to suffer alone.

Putting it all together

In testing times, let’s be wary of the cheap shots that are easily made against well-being or achievement. On the one hand, we don’t want a school system that is obsessed with well-being to the point where young people live in a superficial and self-indulgent world of undemanding happiness. That path leads to a nation of narcissistic adults who feel that success and earned expertise are unimportant, and that all that matters is the needs and opinions of themselves and of others who happen to agree with them.

True well-being doesn’t come without sacrifice and struggle, perseverance, and empathy for others.

Equally, achievement shouldn’t be reduced to grades and test scores where students are expected to apply themselves with grim determination even in the face of poor teaching, irrelevant tests, or a curriculum that is so boring that students cannot see what value it has for them. Achievement should be about accomplishing things of purpose and value for oneself and for others. It should bring a sense of lasting fulfillment, not just test-score completion or evanescent fun.

Well-being is needed to support achievement, especially where children come from backgrounds that present them with great challenges. Achievement and accomplishment are also sources of well-being. It’s hard for young people to maintain dignity and self-respect if they feel like they’re failing all the time.

But well-being and achievement shouldn’t exist in two different worlds, with different specialists populating them – mathematics and literacy people on one side; counselors and mental health specialists on the other. Canada could do better at mathematics. But it is also not doing well at being well. We don’t want Canada’s schools to produce a nation of happy, stupid people. But we don’t want Canada to be a land of smart, sick people either.

Well-being is a long-overlooked policy agenda for schools that is now working its way into education around the world. Our work in Ontario points to many different ways in which educators have eagerly seized the opportunities to develop their students’ well-being. But when budget cuts loom, initiatives in yoga or meditation, or support roles in counseling and similar areas, can seem like the easiest options for making economies, compared to literacy or math. To sustain its importance and focus, the emphasis on well-being therefore has to find its proper relationship to the learning mission of schools. Whether we work in times of plenty or in an era of austerity, we shouldn’t have to choose between success on the one hand or well-being on the other. Instead, let’s turn out young adults who are successful and fulfilled at the same time.

Photo: iStock

First published in Education Canada, December 2018

1 C. Campbell, K. Zeichner, A. Lieberman, and P. Osmond-Johnson, Empowered Educators in Canada: How high-performing systems shape teaching quality (Marblehead, MA: John Wiley & Sons, 2017).

2 UNICEF, Fairness for Children: A league table of inequality in well-being in rich countries (Florence, Italy: 2016).

3 OECD, PISA 2015 Results: Students’ well-being (Paris, France: 2017), 39.

4 A. Hargreaves, D. Shirley, S. Wangia, C. Bacon, and M. D’Angelo, Leading from the Middle: Spreading learning, well-being, and identity across Ontario (Toronto: Council of Ontario Directors of Education, 2018).

5 OECD, PISA 2015 results, 232.

6 C. Dweck, Mindset: The new psychology of success (New York: Ballantine, 2007).

7 L. M. Kuypers, The Zones of Regulation: A curriculum designed to foster self-regulation and emotional control. (San Jose, CA: Think Social Publishing, Incorporated, 2011).
Digital Civics
12:05 PM Comments Off on Digital Civics
The potential of digital media to bring about a more equitable democracy won’t be fully realized unless we ensure that all young people have access to high quality digital civic learning opportunities. Teachers can, and should, play a pivotal role in supporting all youth to develop the sense of agency, motivation, and skills to use digital media to participate in democratic life.

In October 2017, Quebec’s National Assembly passed Bill 62, “which bans Muslim women who wear a niqab or burqa from obtaining government services — including [using] public transportation — without showing their faces.”¹ In short order, various legal challenges were posed by the Canadian Civil Liberties Union and the National Council of Canadian Muslims. At the same time, Québecois residents who opposed the measure turned to other strategies to demonstrate their solidarity with those affected by the ban – marching in the streets and riding the Metro²wearing niqabs and face coverings. Another facet of the protest and solidarity movement involved posting selfies³ on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook with faces fully or partially covered, either with traditional head scarves or with other coverings including motorcycle helmets, sunglasses and winter scarves, and surgical masks. These kinds of online expression show how traditional forms of civic action (like rallies) may be enriched by social media. They also show the potential power that digital tools and platforms have to circulate photos and other content with a civic or political message to a wide audience. Importantly, the potential here doesn’t end with expressing one’s voice; tweets with catchy photos, hashtags or memes can potentially change the conversation. Educators need to pay attention to this landscape as they consider what and how to teach for civic agency in today’s world.

Youth civic participation in the digital age

Online tools and social media platforms have become a central part of civic and political life. A recent study found that eight in ten social media users reported that they feel social media platforms “help users get involved with issues that matter to them” and “helped bring new voices into the political discussion.”⁴ The digital age has opened up new ways to learn about issues, engage in dialogue, circulate ideas to a wide audience, and mobilize others to get involved. Yet, there are also unique challenges: assessing the credibility of online information, recognizing echo chambers and filter bubbles, learning to handle contentious online exchanges, determining potential risks of online content, reaching unexpected audiences, and considering the digital afterlife of one’s tweets, status updates, or snaps.

This digital landscape creates distinct pathways for youth to participate. Young people use social media as the primary way to communicate about politics.⁵ Despite perceptions that digital media distract youth from civic and political matters, 48 percent reported social media made them more aware of political issues and over 85 percent disagreed with the idea that social media lessened their awareness and commitments. In fact, one study found that 90 percent of youth who engaged in online civic and political activities report that they also vote or participate in institutional activities like letter writing and volunteering for a campaign.⁶

Digital media expand opportunities for a set of practices we call participatory politics. These practices differ from institutional politics in that they are peer-based and interactive; they tap into youths’ social networks; and they often draw on popular culture. In digital spaces, youth can participate without deference to adult-led institutions and bureaucratic structures that dictate the what, when, and how of civic and political action. For example, youth are blogging, engaging in online discussions, and creating and circulating clever memes and pointed hashtags. They are also using online petition sites like Change.org in order to influence the conversation and, in some cases, legislation around issues such as immigration, racist policing practices, gun control and climate change.

The changing nature of civic learning

Just as democratic participation is changing in the digital age, so should our approaches to civic education. New knowledge, skills, and dispositions are needed to navigate this changing landscape. And just because young people know how to text or tweet, doesn’t mean they know how to use these tools for civic and political purposes. Data from a 2015 survey suggests that only 10 percent of youth engage at least weekly in such online political activities – meaning that 90 percent are not engaged or only occasionally engaged online.⁷

Therefore, bringing digital civics into classrooms and schools is essential. While this is already happening in some places, research points to an equity gap: youth who are White, from upper-income families, and high achieving academically receive far more of these learning opportunities than others.⁸ In addition, exposure to digital learning opportunities appears to be both inequitable and low overall. In a 2013 survey, 33 percent of U.S. high-school-age youth did not report having a single class session focused on how to tell if online information was trustworthy, and only 16 percent reported more than a few sessions.⁹Therefore, it is critical to integrate digital civic learning opportunities for all youth across grade levels and content areas.

The core practices of digital civics

As educators consider teaching digital civics, we suggest the following framework that parses online civic engagement into four core practices. We also think it is essential to acknowledge the double-edged nature of digital life – the positive opportunities and genuine challenges connected to each practice.

Investigation

At a time when information flows freely and rapidly from a diverse array of online sources – some credible, some not – it is vital to support youth to be thoughtful and savvy investigators.

Dialogue

Social media provide ample opportunities for youth to share their perspectives on public issues, learn about the views of others, and perhaps even engage in debate. Yet, the risk that conversations will turn toxic may deter youth. Providing youth with strategies and tools for engaging in online dialogue can help them feel prepared.

Voice

Online contexts offer nearly boundless opportunities to express and amplify one’s ideas and perspectives on important issues. As with dialogue, these positive potentials bring risks – including surveillance and backlash. Helping youth make thoughtful decisions about where, when, how, and to what ends to express their voices in networked spaces is essential.

Action

The role of social media in supporting civic action is contested. Some describe e-petitions and mobilization via Twitter as “slacktivism” while others see great promise (if not clear evidence) of positive impact. In our networked age, we must help youth understand the potentials and limitations of tweets, likes, and hashtag activism in social change efforts, as well as the enduring role of face-to-face civic practices.

A classroom example of teaching digital civics

In order to attend to these opportunities and challenges, Nina Portugal and other educators in Oakland Unified School District (OUSD) in Oakland, California integrate civic and digital civic learning experiences into their core curriculum. In one project, Nina engaged her Grade 9 students in learning about various tactics of social change, both face-to-face and online. Students worked in small groups to identify an issue affecting their community and theninvestigate the history, root causes, and effects of that issue. Students then wrote a proposal outlining what they learned, what audience they wanted to reach, and what tactics they would utilize to respond to the issue. Next, students put their plan into action over the course of a week, posting media online using a common hashtag to document their actions. For example, one group of students focused on the negative effects of gentrification on communities of colour in Oakland. They mobilized people to write letters to the mayor and tweeted information about the effects of gentrification at the mayor every day during the action week.

After the week of action, students reflected on the effectiveness of their tactics, what they learned, and what they would do differently in the future. This reflection, along with their proposal and documentation of their action steps, were all posted to their class blog. This enabled students to voice their perspectives and raise awareness about their issues. It also gave other students the chance to read and comment on their classmates’ projects, opening up a dialogue amongst the various groups.

While the project undoubtedly provided students with exciting opportunities to learn about issues they care about, express their perspectives on a public platform, and take action, there is a lot to consider to facilitate such a project. For example, teachers have to navigate a number of concerns – such as juggling all the topics students choose, ensuring students’ work is ready for online publication and circulation, helping students reach an authentic audience, and monitoring the depth and academic tone of students’ comments. However, as Nina describes in a recent blog post, it is all worth it when students have opportunities to express their civic and political views in authentic contexts and to reach an expansive audience.¹⁰

Five ways to bring digital civics into the classroom

The Digital Civics Toolkit (DCT) is a new resource that offers educators tools they can implement in the classroom to support their students as they engage with practices linked to participatory politics (see Figure 1). Created by members of the MacArthur Research Network on Youth and Participatory Politics, the DCT contains modules and activities that explore opportunities and tensions associated with participatory politics. It offers five ways to integrate digital civic learning into your classroom.

Teaching digital civics: A necessity today

Youth today are growing up in a world in which digital media is not just about socializing with friends. Public issues and social change agendas can be – and are – raised, explored, discussed, and responded to on the Internet. While there are inevitable challenges and tensions, there are also positive opportunities, especially for youth. Further, the networked nature of civic and political life isn’t likely to go away. The potential of digital media to bring about a more equitable democracy won’t be fully realized unless we ensure that all young people have access to high quality digital civic learning opportunities.

Teachers can, and should, play a pivotal role in supporting all youth to develop the sense of agency, motivation, and skills to use digital media to participate in democratic life. And all educators have a role to play regardless of discipline, grade level, and learning context. By teaching digital civics, educators can enable more youth to recognize and, hopefully, seize new opportunities for civic and political engagement that are empowering, equitable, and impactful.

Suggested Resources
- Digital Civics Toolkit
- Teaching Channel’s Deep Dive: Educating for Democracy in the Digital Age
Original Illustration: istock

First published in Education Canada, December 2018

1 https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2017/10/19/women-scarf-selfies-bill-62_a_23249363/?ncid=tweetlnkcahpmg00000002

2 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/bill-62-metro-protest-1.4366483

3 https://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/face-covered-selfies-social-media-protests-over-quebec-s-bill-62-1.3641563

4 M. Duggan and A. Smith, The Political Environment on Social Media (Pew Research Center, 2016). www.pewinternet.org/2016/10/25/the-political-environment-on-social-media

5 P. Mihailidis, Media Literacy and the Emerging Citizen: Youth, engagement and participation in digital culture (New York, NY: Peter Lang Publishing, 2014).

6 C. Cohen, J. Kahne, B. Bowyer et al., Participatory Politics: New media and youth political action (YPPSP Research Report, 2012). http://ypp.dmlcentral.net/publications/107

7 J. Kahne and B. Bowyer, Can Media Literacy Education Impact Digital Engagement in Politics? Manuscript submitted for publication (2018).

8 J. Kahne and E. Middaugh, Democracy for Some: The civic opportunity gap in high school (CIRCLE Working Paper 59, 2008). www.civicyouth.org/PopUps/WorkingPapers/WP59Kahne.pdf

9 J. Kahne, E. Hodgin, and E. Eidman-Aadahl, “Redesigning Civic Education for the Digital Age: Participatory politics and the pursuit of democratic engagement,” Theory and Research in Social Education, no. 1 (2016): 1-35.

10 N. Portugal, “Confronting the Monster Under the Bed: Integrating blogging into the classroom,” Teaching Channel (May 14, 2018). www.teachingchannel.org/blog/2018/05/14/integrating-blogging
21st Century Citizens
November 28, 2018 4:04 PM Comments Off on 21st Century Citizens
Remember when the Internet was so full of promise? There was so much information – on everything! – available at our fingertips. So much more connection possible – with long-lost friends, with people from around the globe who shared our challenges, interests or concerns. Important news, causes, and initiatives could reach so many more people. The world took a giant step closer to becoming a true global village.

That promise is still there, but the dark side of this instant connectivity has become starkly apparent. If we have more information than ever before, we also have more disinformation. If we can recruit more people to save the whales, we can also recruit them to join the neo-Nazis. We can connect with people, and we can also inundate them with brutal hate mail. Extreme polarization seems as likely an outcome as a common understanding.

In this context, democratic countries have never had a greater need for informed, active citizens who can see beyond narrow self-interest and grandiose claims and set their sights on positive change. We need savvy users who can engage online, yet protect their privacy and well-being. We need critical citizens who are able to assess both the value and flaws in our institutions and policies. In this issue, we explore how educators can engage students in civic issues within the shifting landscape of the digital age.

And yes, this is a charge that our schools must take on, alongside so many other requirements. Joel Westheimer points to disturbing signs that globally, democracies are weakening, and warns that civic education is more than teaching good behaviour online or off: “ ‘Good character’ is insufficient for safeguarding and strengthening democratic institutions and traditions.” Erica Hodgin and her colleagues write, “Teachers can, and should, play a pivotal role in supporting all youth to develop the sense of agency, motivation, and skills to use digital media to participate in democratic life.” For one inspiring example of how it can be done, check out Casey Burkholder’s account of how students use cellphilming to engage with and communicate issues that are meaningful to them.

I hope you will find lots to think and talk about in this issue, and in our web-exclusive articles. There’s been a lot of attention paid to the education students need to participate in the workforce of the future. Surely it’s at least as important to prepare students to be effective citizens in a world filled with critical challenges.

Photo: Dave Donald

First published in Education Canada, December 2018
Self-Reg Summer Symposium 2019
November 9, 2018 12:06 PM Comments Off on Self-Reg Summer Symposium 2019
Join Dr. Stuart Shanker and the TMC crew, July 8th – 11th 2019, for our 5th annual Self-Reg Summer Symposium. Our theme this year is Self-Reg and Democracy: The Future lies in the Hands of Self-Reg Parents, Schools, and Communities.
SRSS 2019 will focus on how Self-Reg can help sustain democracy and civil engagement, one community, one classroom, one family, one child at a time. How can Self-Reg help us raise today’s kids in ways that promote the prosocial behaviour and civic engagement that society needs?
2019 Digital Learning Symposium
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The BC Partners in Online Learning, in partnership with the Canadian eLearning Network (CANeLearn), invite you to the 16th annual Digital Learning Symposium April 7 – 9, 2019 — Fostering Inquiry: Personal Learning in Digital Environments. The focus of the 3-day Symposium is on leading flexible learning models, environments and instructional approaches. The event attracts over 400 educators from BC and across Canada: technology coordinators, curriculum developers, and leaders from K-12 and post-secondary. Network, learn, be challenged and enlightened at this premier CANeLearn event.
Beyond Trial and Error
September 26, 2018 9:48 AM Comments Off on Beyond Trial and Error
Evidence suggests that new teachers are not confident taking on formative and differentiated approaches to assessment. What supports could help them refine their assessment skills?

TAKE A MOMENT to picture your classroom. Imagine you are planning an upcoming unit for your students. Would you start by designing a summative evaluation, then backward plan your lessons? Or would you first create your formative assessments and let the information you gather from these tasks guide your subsequent lessons, learning activities, and final assignments? Would you perhaps review the curriculum expectations with your students and ask them to design personal learning plans or co-plan an inquiry for the unit? Or maybe none of these approaches would work for you and your students.

While there is considerable latitude in how you implement assessment policies within your own classroom to support teaching and learning, research shows that how you approach your assessment decisions has tremendous impact on the learning culture in your classroom. A teachers’ approach to classroom assessment not only influences what students learn but also how they learn.¹

Our aim in this article is to reflect on the experiences that shape teachers’ approaches to classroom assessment, in particular those early in a teacher’s career. teachers become more aware of the classroom assessment practices, but to outline how teacher education and in-service mentorship can support early career teachers in effectively interpreting and implementing assessment policies that meaningfully support student learning.

Approaches to assessment

Previous measures of teachers’ classroom assessment literacy have tended to diminish the influence of classroom context, instead focusing on teachers’ assessment knowledge (e.g. norm vs. criterion assessments) and/or specific skills (e.g. test construction). Through this approach, assessment literacy was understood as a set of learnable skills that teachers were required to know and use. By overlooking the importance of the classroom context, teachers could be scored, compared, and ranked through a multiple-choice test on their classroom assessment knowledge and practices. However, such a de-contextualized measure of teachers’ knowledge and skills does not accurately capture teachers’ preparedness for classroom assessment practices.

In contrast, recognition of the significance of the classroom context deters the scoring and ranking of teachers’ knowledge and skills, as an assessment practice appropriate in one context may not be in another. For instance, the construction of multiple-choice questions may be appropriate for a teacher in one grade or subject, but may not be used by another teacher, yet both could have sound assessment practices for their context. Furthermore, a teacher with multiple classes of the same course may value producing reliable assessments that can be used across sections, while a teacher with a range of dissimilar courses may value producing assessments that reflect the specific learning progress of each class.

Teachers’ classroom assessment practices are also shaped by their own teaching and learning experiences.

Initial classroom experiences

For a new teacher, few things are as daunting as the first days of school. Pre-planned routines can devolve into trial-and-error, and a well-crafted philosophy of education can gravitate towards just trying to get through the day. While these feelings generally dissipate over time, they may profoundly impact early career teachers’ approaches to assessment.²

Compared to teacher candidates, early career teachers with less than five years’ classroom experience are more than three times as likely to focus on adhering to reporting mandates set out by assessment policies. Unlike teacher candidates and later career teachers, who both tend to support differentiated approaches to assessment, early career teachers are more than three times as likely to endorse an equal assessment protocol for all students (in which all students receive the same assessment tasks) and almost four times as likely to value producing consistent assessment tasks (utilizing similar assessments across courses and/or years).

Early career teachers’ orientation toward a more standardized and summative assessment approach may be fuelled by their need to simply survive the first few years of teaching, and is likely further intensified by the current accountability climate of Canadian schools. Importantly, as teachers pass the five-year mark and develop more extensive classroom experience, their approaches to assessment begin to gravitate towards more formative and differentiated approaches. Given that this shift towards standardized and summative approaches appears only within early career teachers, it is important to consider the supports that could be provided to help teachers early in their career enact a more balanced approach to assessment.

Teacher education programs

Teacher education programs play a central role in the development of teachers’ approaches to assessment. These programs are typically the first instance in which teachers are explicitly exposed to theories of teaching, learning, and assessment and are also when they first venture forth into the classroom as a teacher. While there are a plethora of experiences that shape teachers’ approaches to assessment (such as coursework, instructor pedagogy, and practicum experiences), stand-alone assessment courses are the dominant source of assessment education across Canadian teacher education programs.

Within stand-alone assessment courses, teacher candidates are expected to acquire knowledge and skills related to classroom assessment practices. What is rarely addressed is how to utilize their assessment knowledge and skills to navigate the principles of teaching, learning, and assessment that permeate our educational system (e.g. outcome-based accountability, transparent and equitable practices³). While some of these alignment issues are likely addressed in curriculum courses and during practicum placements, the role of assessment education should be to support teachers’ capacity to align their assessment knowledge and skills to their approach to assessment in order to navigate these underlying principles. If this doesn’t occur, teachers may start their careers without a firm understanding of how their approaches to assessment can be used as a bridge between the knowledge and skills they have developed and underlying principles of teaching, learning, and assessment.

Mentorship of early career teachers

For the past 40 years, formal mentorship via teacher candidates’ practicum experiences has dominated our models of teacher education.⁴ Upon certification and securing a teaching position, depending on school board and province, some teachers have the opportunity for formal early career mentorship, whether from their administrator or more established peer teacher (e.g. the teacher induction program in Ontario), but these opportunities do not necessarily maintain a consistent focus on classroom assessment. However, informal mentorship can provide crucial supports for early career teachers to better equip them to confidently take on a range of assessment strategies.

As teachers move beyond the first five years of teaching, subtle yet important shifts in their approaches to assessment occur. The most apparent is that the prioritization of more standardized summative assessments diminishes in favour of differentiated and formative approaches that support students throughout learning. Furthermore, within their formative assessment practices, experienced teachers are far better able to distinguish and prioritize assessment for and as learning practices, a distinction that appears more ambiguous for teacher candidates and early career teachers. Based on these findings, it appears that experienced teachers are better able to use fluid assessment practices that suit individual students’ needs, rather than being driven by accountability mandates that tend to emphasize summative assessment results.⁵

Given the changing nature of teachers’ approaches to assessment over their career, more established teachers could play an important role in mentoring beginning teachers as they negotiate current accountability mandates and assessment responsibilities in the service of student learning. For example, more experienced teachers could help early career teachers understand the alignment between the knowledge and skills they developed during teacher education and the expectations set out by classroom assessment policies. This mentorship could equip teachers to effectively interpret and implement assessment policies in ways that are meaningful to teachers’ practice and effective in the service of student learning.

IN PREPARING TEACHERS for the realities of current and future classrooms, there is a need to focus on the drivers of teachers’ classroom assessment decisions. To effectively navigate the pressures of classroom assessment and support student learning, early career teachers need ongoing support tailored to their career stage. With this support, we hope that early career teachers’ pronounced shift towards a standardized and summative approach to classroom assessment could be moderated toward more balanced approach that equally values formative and differentiated approaches aimed at using assessment to support and promote student learning.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Dr. Lorraine Godden and Alice Johnston for their feedback throughout the writing process.

Understanding your Approaches to Assessment

It is worthwhile, particularly for teachers new to the profession, to critically reflect on what influences shape their assessment decisions.

The Approaches to Classroom Assessment Inventory is a professional learning tool to help teachers identify and develop their approaches to assessment through scenario-based questions and a personalized assessment profile.

In addition, the following questions offer a good starting place when making an assessment decision:
- What is the purpose of this assessment? Am I trying to measure student learning, guide future lessons, or support students as they navigate their own learning?
- What aspect of the assessment process should I focus on? Do I invest more in the design of assessments, how they are scored, or how I communicate the results to my students and their caregivers?
- How is this assessment fair to all my students? Is it fair because all of my students will complete the same task? Is it fair because I will differentiate this task for all of my students?
- Am I using this assessment because I have used it with previous students and it has proven to be reliable, or have I created a new assessment task that is rooted in the learning experiences of the students I am assessing?
First published in Education Canada, September 2018

1 A. Coombs, C. DeLuca, D. LaPointe-McEwan, and A. Chalas, “Changing Approaches to Classroom Assessment: An empirical study across teacher career stages,” Teaching and Teacher Education 71 (2018): 134-144.

2 Ibid.

3 Ontario Ministry of Education, Growing Success: Assessment, evaluation, and reporting – improving student learning (Toronto, ON: Queen’s Printer for Ontario, 2010); Manitoba Education, Citizenship & Youth, Rethinking Classroom Assessment with Purpose in Mind: Assessment for learning, assessment as learning, and assessment of learning (2006).

4 A. J. Hobson, P. Ashby, A. Malderez, and P. D. Tomlinson, “Mentoring Beginning Teachers: What we know and what we don’t,” Teaching and Teacher Education 25, no. 1 (2009): 207-216.

5 Coombs et al., “Changing Approaches to Classroom Assessment.”
Fundraising and Fairness
9:44 AM Comments Off on Fundraising and Fairness
Educators committed to equity must confront the difficult reality of school fundraising: it provides some kids access to opportunities and resources that other children don’t have.

“To properly fund a classroom to learn the way that I think kids need to learn, there’s no way that money exists.” Although not everyone agrees, this is what a teacher recently said to me during an interview about school fundraising. At her school, parent fundraising pays for laptop computers that support independent research and science workshops that enable kids to learn about concepts through direct experience rather than reading about them in textbooks. While good for her students, this teacher recognizes that not every student is so fortunate. Indeed, some Canadian public schools raise hundreds of thousands of dollars each year, while others raise nothing at all. Educators committed to equity must confront the difficult reality of school fundraising: it provides some kids access to opportunities and resources that other children don’t have. Is this fair in public education systems?

School fundraising refers to the multitude of ways individual schools bring in money from private sources, including parents, not-for-profit organizations, businesses, alumni, foundations, and universities and colleges. Schools and parents often turn to fundraising to top up perceived government funding shortfalls so they can provide students with a wider range of opportunities than school budgets can buy. Some provinces (e.g. Ontario, New Brunswick and the Yukon) have policies that attempt to limit what fundraised dollars can buy. These policies specify that fundraised dollars should not be used to purchase materials necessary to meet curriculum and graduation requirements. Enhancements to required educational programs, however, are permitted.

Of course, something one person might consider a classroom enhancement another might see as essential for learning. Like the teacher quoted above, many parents, teachers, and others believe schools are underfunded and worry that students will be unable to compete for jobs and secure the lives they desire upon graduation. Parents want to help their children be successful, and the pressure to do so has increased in contemporary society. Indeed, doing everything they can for their children is for many parents simply what good parents do.

Fundraising efforts pay off big time for some schools. A handful of schools in Toronto, Ontario, raised over $300 per student last year – more than 30 times what some other schools raised. Fundraised dollars purchase everything from school supplies, books, and musical instruments to technology, playground equipment, drama productions, athletic programs, retrofitted libraries, guest speakers, school trips, and more. Differences in amounts raised by schools may exist because schools or school/parent councils decide not to fundraise, but often they are due to families’ ability – or inability – to pay. It is the drastic differences in amounts raised that concern opponents of school fundraising and call districts’ and schools’ commitments to equity into question. Why should children from poorer families and neighbourhoods get fewer opportunities and more limited resources than children from more affluent families in public school systems?

It’s at this point in discussions about fundraising that someone will usually point out that schools in poorer communities or with large numbers of low-income students receive extra funding from their boards and government, qualify for more grants, or attract more donations than schools in more affluent communities. While this may sometimes be true, these additional funds often do not compensate for amounts raised by schools or school councils for a number of reasons. First, top-up funds from governments can be, and in some boards are, used to address provincial funding shortfalls for mandatory services as well as programs enjoyed by all students. Conversely, many grants awarded to schools by private and not-for-profit organizations dictate or limit how the money can be spent.

Furthermore, schools in poorer communities may need to spend their additional funds on items that other schools can rely on families to provide, including food and health services. Funds raised by schools or school councils, on the other hand, can usually be spent on whatever enhancements to the school’s program that council members and/or the principal deem fit, such as tablets, Chromebooks, or interactive whiteboards. Also, principals can spend more of their school’s discretionary budget on learning materials if there are fundraised dollars to pay for nice-to-haves (or for some parents, must-haves) like band instruments and new playground equipment.

Supporters of school fundraising point out that many of the opportunities and resources acquired with fundraised dollars are enjoyed by all children in the school, not only those whose families contributed money or other resources. This may be true within schools, but differences in opportunities offered to children between schools remain. Supporters also highlight fundraising’s potential to engage families in their children’s schools, but research from the University of Wisconsin¹ shows it can sometimes have the opposite effect. Parents who don’t have the time, skills, or other resources to contribute to fundraising may become disengaged if they feel what they can offer, such as volunteering occasionally on class trips, is not equally valued by the school. There are also questions about which parents, if any, should be involved in decisions about how fundraised dollars are spent and how to ensure fundraised dollars are spent equitably within a school. Furthermore, students and their families who can’t afford to pay for trips, pizza lunches, extra-curricular activities, or student activity fees may feel stigmatized if they have to ask the school to cover these expenses. Some kids won’t bother and will simply miss out.

What is the solution?

So how might educators, principals, elected officials or parents reconcile their commitment to equity in public education with others’ – and perhaps their own – desire for more funds? Some schools and school councils donate a portion of the money they raise to another school or host fundraisers specifically to raise money for another school. Another idea is for boards to redistribute some or all fundraised dollars to schools with the greatest needs for additional funding. This is the approach adopted by the Portland Public School Board: one third of funds raised by parents in schools that raise more than $10,000 annually goes to a central equity fund for redistribution within the board. Trustees in the Toronto District School Board previously considered this option but decided against it, citing their belief that parents would raise less overall if such a plan was adopted. Even if it had introduced such a policy, it would not have addressed discrepancies between boards; a 2016 Toronto Star investigation found that average per-student amounts raised through fundraising by public boards in the Greater Toronto Area varied from a low of $118.10 to a high of $357.80.

Banning school fundraising is the only real solution to the problem of fundraising and fairness, since it is the only option that addresses the pressure on parents to do whatever it takes to ensure their kids’ success. A ban would enable parents and school councils to spend more time on priorities other than fundraising, relieve administrators of pressure to support a practice they may believe to be problematic, and engage parents who cannot afford or do not wish to participate in fundraising. Parents and educators might instead use time and energy they once spent on fundraising to lobby the government to adequately fund all public schools. As long as governments and educational leaders continue to allow (and in some cases even encourage) school staff and parents to raise and spend money in ways that benefit the children in their schools, our commitment to ensuring every child has the opportunity to succeed in Canadian public schools will continue to ring hollow.

Photo: iStock

First published in Education Canada, September 2018

1 Linn Posey-Maddox, “Professionalizing the PTO: Race, class, and shifting norms of parental engagement in a city public school,” American Journal of Education 119, no. 2 (2013): 235–60.
Community-Based Teacher Education
9:41 AM Comments Off on Community-Based Teacher Education
Rural and remote communities struggle to attract and keep teachers. A new program at the Werklund School of Education aims to fill that gap by allowing students from these communities to earn their teaching credentials without leaving home.

The geographical area of Canada is vast and expansive, with much of the population residing along the Canada/U.S. border. And yet, rural Canadians comprise approximately 25 percent of all Canadians, and many live in the far-reaching northern and remote areas of Canada. This is unsurprising and longstanding, yet it presents particular challenges for serving these areas well, particularly related to teaching.

Various financial incentives are commonly provided to attract more certified teachers to rural and remote areas. These may include financial student bursaries so long as they commit to a designated period of time teaching in the rural school district, subsidized accommodation, or travel to and from urban and rural areas. In other cases, urban teacher education programs create satellite campuses to have a more far-reaching applicant pool of individuals interested in pursuing an education degree. Both strategies have been met with limited and mediocre success. In the first instance, financial incentives to draw individuals into the community commonly result in a high turnover of teachers once the contract and financial commitment has been met. Satellite campuses struggle to maintain these programs as a financially viable and sustainable model. Given the financial costs associated with keeping programs open in satellite campuses and further ensuring that there is sufficient faculty expertise to teach in them, individuals in satellite campuses are normally required to attend two years at the urban campus (creating a 2 +2 model).

There are increasing calls for post-secondary teacher education programs to consider how to attract individuals who already live in rural areas and who are committed to the long-term vitality of the community. For instance, the Northern Alberta Development Report (2010) spoke to the need for “home grown teachers”: teachers who come from and will stay in the rural community to which they belong.

Yet, this task is not as easy as first perceived. Generally, it is difficult to attract individuals from the rural community to attend an on-campus program or even satellite campus, given the financial and logistical strain that this may place on students. Students may find the costs of moving to a city, or driving to a satellite campus on a regular basis, too much strain to bear. If students do decide to move to an urban-based teacher education program, the trend is that the vast majority of them never return to their rural community. In this way, the very intent to attract these individuals to university may further undermine the vitality of the rural community.

Given this dilemma, alternative models are being explored and implemented to attract individuals to become rural teachers who will become long-standing professionals in their own communities. This article considers a new program offered in Alberta since 2015 that has seen some optimistic initial results.

Community-Based Bachelor of Education

In July 2015, the Werklund School of Education, University of Calgary welcomed the first cohort of students into a newly designed Community-Based Bachelor of Education program. This program allows students to complete their entire Bachelor of Education degree in a model that blends face-to-face, on-campus instruction in the summer with online courses in the fall and winter. This is combined with field experience placements in their rural communities, working alongside mentor partner teachers and principals in these areas. This allows students to remain in their local rural communities for the vast majority of the duration of their studies.

The Community-Based Bachelor of Education at Werklund allows students the best of both worlds. Each summer, students come to the University of Calgary for two weeks in July to meet their instructors and the other students in their cohort in person. During these two weeks, students not only begin their courses but they have access to academic, career and student supports provided by a dedicated team of faculty and support staff. Most importantly, however, students in these two weeks are offered the opportunity to develop collaborative relationships with those in their cohort and with their instructors, ensuring they feel connected to one another and to the Werklund School of Education.

The intensive two weeks of on-campus instruction creates a bond among students, who work together throughout the day in their courses and experience the residency component as a cohort. The timing of the courses (July) is purposeful, as many students have children. The summer holidays allow for more flexibility to find childcare for those two weeks, and yet the time away from their children is not overwhelming.

When students return home at the end of their two-week summer residency, they begin the online component of their program. The Education courses students take online are designed to be interactive and collaborative, allowing students the same kind of experience they would receive in an on-campus course. The courses are not self-directed and do not follow an online correspondence model; instead, the courses have a balance between asynchronous learning and synchronous online instruction, along with purposeful pedagogical and curricular relevance to teaching in rural areas.

Field experiences in their local communities provide the contextual experiential learning and students are mentored by educators in those communities. The students have real and meaningful rural teaching experiences that are attentive to the local and cultural norms and values of the community. This provides more student teachers with an opportunity to gain experience in rural schools, opportunities that have traditionally been scarce within urban-based teacher education programs. It provides mentorship opportunities for exemplary rural teachers and principals who have a nuanced understanding of the needs and opportunities for rural students, and empowers those rural communities to support their own continued professional learning in their communities.

Who are the students?

Over the last three years, the program has been tracking the nature of the students who are enrolling in the program to see whether the program is attracting students from rural and remote areas of the province. Thus far, the indicators prove promising. The overwhelming majority of students who have enrolled in the program to date are women between the ages of 35 and 50. The places where these students reside have truly hit the most northern and remote regions of the province: near the border between Alberta and Northwest Territories, the boreal forests in northern Alberta, the mountainous regions to the west of the province, the rural valleys in the eastern and southern regions, and Indigenous Treaty 7 and 8 territories. Over 90 percent of these students have worked in schools in some capacity, with the majority working as educational assistants or occupational therapists. This is noteworthy. One Indigenous Elder commented that educational assistants are often the life blood of the school. Teachers and principals come and go, but it is the educational assistants who tend to remain in the same rural schools, providing the institutional memory of the school, and the continuity and stability for the children.

The life stories of students who enrol in this program are telling. It is clear that they have a strong desire to become a certified teacher, but given their personal circumstances, would not have been able to drive to a satellite or urban campus. Almost all have children and most work to support the family. A full-time residency-based teacher education program was simply not an option.

Given the mature demographic of the students, who lead complex lives supporting their children and their families in these rural communities, attentiveness to when the courses were offered was of paramount importance. Unlike most programs that offer on-campus instruction during the day, fall and winter courses are offered in early evening time slots of 4:30 or 6:30 p.m. This allows individuals to work during the day, pick up their children from school, drop them off to their after-school activities should they require, or make supper. The timing of the courses also allows students to ensure that they have adequate Internet connectivity by staying at a school, library, or other institution, should their own house not have consistent Internet service – as is commonly the case in the mountains, valleys, and remote areas of the province.

Students create strong bonds during the summer, and feel a strong sense of communal belonging and commitment to each other.

Feedback from students indicates that initial concerns about potential isolation when doing the program “remotely” has thus far been a non-issue. Students create strong bonds during the summer, and given their overlapping stories, they feel a strong sense of communal belonging and commitment to each other. As many students note, when they take the leap of faith to enrol in the program, they feel the weight of their success on their shoulders. It is not just a personal journey to become a certified teacher; they tell us that they feel their children, families and communities are rooting for them to accomplish this goal. This creates a double-edged sword. In one way, they feel supported by their community to undertake this degree, but they also feel pressure to not let the community down should they struggle in their studies.

Given that this is a common theme among students who are desperate to succeed in becoming certified teachers, it is not uncommon for students to call up their fellow classmates to find out how their sick child is doing, how the harvest went, or how they have been juggling their family and work life with the program. In this way, students who had previously attempted to attend university in the city feel an incredible attachment to other students that they had not felt attending large lectures on campus. In many respects, there is a true sense of family, of getting through the program with the support of their classmates and their local community.

Cautious optimism

The nature of the blended program does present challenges. Despite advances to ensure secure Internet provision, the valleys, mountains and remote areas of the province make it difficult for some students to have a consistent online connection. This impedes the kinds of online activities that might otherwise be incorporated, restricting us to more limited activities that are less taxing. For instance, having all the students with their thumbprint pictures to be “seen” while holding an online class would bounce many students off-line. In this case, instructors are limited to audio, which lessens the ability to watch for body language among the students.

The traditional university structure also creates unintended barriers for students who learn from a distance and online. Students’ tuition often covers access to gyms, dental plans, or other student supports. Yet, commonly, those services are limited to those who are within proximity to the campus. Students may not opt out of the costs associated with these university fees, and yet derive little benefit.

Similarly, bursaries and awards are generally structured for students who have full-time status on one campus. Those students who may take courses from more than one institution, as in the case of this program, may be excluded from these financial supports as they do not meet the criteria that has been set for taking courses from one institution.

These difficulties point to a lag in the institutional structures of the universities in terms of student supports that can be provided online, or by phone, rather than having to walk into a particular office or centre. This not only hinders the students in this blended program, but it calls attention to the need for more flexible supports to increase access for students who lead complex lives beyond the campus.

Despite these challenges, there is a cautious optimism that this model may create more access to students in remote areas to foster qualified certified teachers who are committed to teaching in their local rural schools. Rural school superintendents and Indigenous communities are hopeful that they can encourage individuals who have already demonstrated a passion for supporting their schools and communities, to take the step in becoming certified teachers. At the time of this article, the first graduating class from this Community-Based Bachelor of Education will enter the teaching profession, and most have received teaching contracts in these rural areas.

It is not known whether these teachers will become the long-standing educational professionals in the community. Time will show whether the program makes a significant change to the perennial turnover and shortage of teachers in rural areas. However, we are cautiously optimistic that this may provide a tipping point in redressing this challenge.

Photo: iStock

First published in Education Canada, September 2018
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This experiential K-Post-Secondary changemaker education day will give participants the opportunity learn from youth and the ingenuity of our Canadian youth-focused Ashoka Fellows. By providing an immersive experience in living a changemaker education, Ashoka Canada and Rideau Hall Foundation aim to further our goal of helping all young people see themselves as Canada’s future innovators who create change for the good of all.

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2019 National Reading Recovery and Early Literacy Conference
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Young Child Expo
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We invite you to our 16th Annual Highly Rated Conference on April 30th – May 3rd 2019, join us for 4 days of early childhood conference presentations. Over 80 presentations. Continuing Education Credits Offered. Over 1,000 attendees expected. Topics for Typically Developing Children topics on Special Needs, Autism, Speech and other conditions
Target Audience
Teachers, Special Education Teachers, Principals, Directors, Speech, OT, PT Therapists, Psychologists, & Social Workers.

Archive

Although evidence on the effectiveness of suicide postvention strategies is still limited, here are some suggestions for what school leaders should and should not do following the suicide of a student or staff member:

THINGS TO DO

THINGS TO AVOID

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION RESOURCES

REFERENCES

WITH THE GENEROUS FINANCIAL SUPPORT OF:

Here are three major risks associated with adolescent cannabis use:

1. LOWER SCHOOL PERFORMANCE

2. PSYCHOSIS

3. CANNABIS USE DISORDER (CUD)

Additional Information Resources

Resources to talk to teens

General information resources on adolescent cannabis use in Canada

References

WITH THE GENEROUS FINANCIAL SUPPORT OF:

This event was made possible by the support of our generous partner and sponsors

A personal story

Where are we vulnerable?

What about today?

What kind of civic education do we need?

1. Teach students to ask questions

2. Expose students to multiple perspectives

3. Focus on the local

Education in a digital era

Let’s look at each of these in turn.

1. Improved well-being increases achievement

2. Academic achievement is crucial for well-being

3. Well-being has its own value: It complements academic achievement

Putting it all together

Youth civic participation in the digital age

The changing nature of civic learning

The core practices of digital civics

Investigation

Dialogue

Voice

Action

A classroom example of teaching digital civics

Five ways to bring digital civics into the classroom

Teaching digital civics: A necessity today

Suggested Resources

Approaches to assessment

Initial classroom experiences

Teacher education programs

Mentorship of early career teachers

Understanding your Approaches to Assessment

In addition, the following questions offer a good starting place when making an assessment decision:

What is the solution?

Community-Based Bachelor of Education

Who are the students?

Cautious optimism

Read the article that inspired this conversation.