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• Young People Speaking Back From the Margins

  November 24, 2010 10:07 PM Comments Off on Young People Speaking Back From the Margins

  The line I want to take in this article is that how we position young people has a profound bearing on how we deal with them, both in terms of policy and practically. In doing this, I want to draw upon some of the issues that have emerged from my own research with young people in Australia over the past two decades or so. The young people I have worked with are predominantly from backgrounds where they, their families, and their communities have been put at a disadvantage through the effects of social, economic, and political forces and by the flow-on effects of globalization that have effectively devastated their communities and lives. Their diminished educational opportunities and subsequent life chances have been dramatic, even to the point of being catastrophic. Having said that, these young people are not hapless victims, nor are they passive recipients of deficit categories like “at riskness”, placed upon them by the media, politicians, agencies, and some academics. Rather they are active agents exercising choices and making decisions about their lives in situations that amount to speaking back.

  I want to explore what is happening when young people from contexts of disadvantage adopt a position of making choices against the institution of schooling that appear to be against their own long term economic interests and that may have the effect of further exacerbating their apparent marginalization. I want to reflect upon how they go about making lives for themselves while speaking back to notions of mainstream schooling and – in many cases – finding their way into alternative and more amenable forms of learning. Another way of putting this is to ask the question: what are the conditions around schooling that young people speak back against, and what are the alternative conditions they argue need to be brought into existence for them to re-connect to and become re-engaged with learning?

  These young people from the most complex of backgrounds are involved in making all kinds of decisions around their own identity formation.

  What is going on in young educational lives?

  One thing that gets conveniently overlooked when schools are prevailed upon and assailed by so-called “reforms” from outside, driven by external agendas, is that the young people whose lives are most closely and directly affected, and who are the most intimate witnesses of schooling, are the group (along with their teachers) that is the most actively denied an official voice. There is rather an irony in all of this because in almost all other aspects of their lives these young people from the most complex of backgrounds are involved in making all kinds of decisions around their own identity formation. They are significant figures in holding families together economically through part-time work and in dealing with the complexities that come with family dysfunction and wider social fragmentation and disintegration.

  A number of themes come through repeatedly and most consistently around what repels these particular young people from school and turns them into exiles from the social institution of schooling:

  • School treats them as immature – as if they were infants or small children.
  • It fails to respectfully acknowledge their lives – their class backgrounds, the communities they come from, their life experiences, or their aspirations for the future.
  • It homogenizes them in the way in which one-size-fits-all policies are applied to them – especially around fractious issues like discipline, dress codes, illegal substance use, punctuality, and the like.
  • It has an inability to be flexible around the complexities of their lives – especially around issues that have to do with their lives beyond and outside of school.
  • It provides these young people with no real meaningful opportunity to own their learning – what they learn, where they learn, or how they learn. In this regard, schooling rides over their lives.
  • It has no real sense of justice – in a context where young people often have a highly developed, if somewhat exaggerated, sense of what is fair.
  • It fails to grasp the fact that young people have emotional lives – it is as if they are being asked to park these at the school gate or the classroom door.
  • It is boring and irrelevant. If schools have a redeeming feature at all, it is as places in which young people are able to socialize with their friends.
  • It bears no relationship to the lives these young people want to live beyond school.
  • Schools are, mostly, stifled by uninspiring teaching, made so by relentless testing and other mindless forms of accountability.
  • Teachers, with a few exceptions, are switched off and burnt-out.
  • Many of these unsavoury aspects are held in place by parents who have been sold the idea by political regimes and the media that schools are places of unregulated choice, consumption, and extraction – league tables, calibration, image, and impression management – all in the interests of continuous comparisons.
  • A toxic and narrow version of vocationalism operates in schools, relegating these kinds of students to low-level tracks that convert them into factory fodder for insecure menial work.

  The upside is that, when asked, young people are very insightful and eloquent in describing the recuperative conditions that have to be created for them to re-engage with learning.

  None of this is to pillory teachers or castigate schools for the predicament they find themselves in with these young people; the picture is much larger and more complex than apportioning blame in such a simplistic way. As Richard Gibboney has argued recently, these are all artefacts of the way in which “an undemocratic capitalism has brought public education to its knees”.[1] The upside to it is that, when asked, young people are very insightful and eloquent in describing the recuperative conditions that have to be created for them to re-engage with learning – and these conditions are demonstrably different from the ones that repelled them in the first place.

  How can we bring young people in from the margins?

  Another perplexing irony in all of this is that these young people – who are ignored, silenced, and marginalized, whose lives are ridden over, and who either self-exile themselves from schools or are propelled out of them – are the same young people who have some extremely perceptive views on the very different conditions that can and need to be created for them to learn. Again, there are some consistent themes in what they say:

  • When the learning culture of the school is not one of fear, intimidation, punishment, and retribution, young people who often find schools to be hostile and alienating places find they can learn.
  • When schools welcome these young people for who they are, where they come from, and the strengths and assets they bring with them rather than labelling them according to their past histories, then learning occurs.
  • When the adults who are charged with assisting them are prepared to reveal something about themselves and their own lives as human beings, then a relational basis that is crucial to learning is created.
  • When their teachers convey a sense of genuinely liking these young people for who they are, regardless of perceived imperfections attaching to individuals, family, or social class background, then learning becomes possible.
  • When the institutions they are required to learn in are able to flex around their lives – which is to say, acknowledge in practical ways the complexities of their lives – then an essential foundation for learning is brought into existence.
  • When learning experiences are built around issues that are of interest to these young people, then learning is re-ignited around their passion and desire to learn. They need to see this connection to their lives and the fact that they have genuine space in which to negotiate their learning.
  • There need to be non-authoritative ways of resolving interpersonal differences that do not paint young people into corners. This involves providing dialogical approaches to the resolution of differences.
  • Above all, there needs to be a genuine atmosphere of trust that these young people are indeed capable of learning, and that the role of adults is to provide the necessary support.

  What, then, are the impediments to this occurring?

  Everything I have said so far sounds eminently reasonable and hardly contestable – and herein lies the major problem. There are several obstacles that present as barriers and result in significant slippage between a reasonable set of propositions and the reality of ensuring that they become deeply embedded in educational practice.

  They go something like this:

  • Schools and teachers need to have ways of interrupting their habituated practices to critically reflect upon and question themselves about how they are travelling in respect of the issues noted so far. Put another way, they need ways of doing a collective audit on how they are doing from the vantage point of young people.
  • They need to do these collective self-assessments in a climate of non-retribution and a context in which there is a genuine preparedness to challenge the status quo and to change.
  • They need to be prepared to foreground the issues of advancing young people’s lives as non-negotiable core issues. This requires considerable courage and leadership, especially in a climate and an ethos that celebrates decisiveness, managing people and outcomes, image and impression management, and fixing things through approaches that name, shame, and expose recalcitrants.

  Courage can be in very short supply when those in ascendant positions have to be prepared to jettison their accustomed role.

  Courage can be in very short supply when those in ascendant positions have to be prepared to jettison their accustomed role, which requires them to demonstrate that they have “solutions”, that they have “can-do” policies, and that they are “results-driven” – many of which may be demonstrably wrong-headed approaches. It requires incredible courage to hold to the line that those in subaltern positions might just have important knowledge worth listening to. Approaching complex, multi-faceted questions in the more democratic and inclusive way being suggested here requires more time, can be considered to be more tedious, can appear more untidy, and may not always appear to be moving in a desirable linear direction. Anything less than the kind of political and policy re-alignment being suggested in this paper can only result in young people continuing to be sold short – and that is not a viable long-term option.

  The ideas that form part of this paper come from an Australian Research Council funded project entitled Re-engaging disadvantaged young people with learning.

  I express my appreciation to the ARC for its funding support and to the young people concerned for their honesty and generosity in sharing their stories.

  EN BREF – Les possibilités réduites en éducation et, ensuite, dans la vie, de nombreux jeunes marginalisés sont dramatiques, au point d’être catastrophiques. Mais ces jeunes ne sont ni des victimes impuissantes, ni des porteurs passifs des étiquettes – comme « à risque » -véhiculées par des catégories de déficits et que leur apposent les médias, les politiciens, les organismes et certains chercheurs. Plutôt, ils sont des agents qui exercent des choix et qui prennent des décisions au sujet de leur vie, dans des circonstances qui équivalent à répliquer. Quand nous les écoutons, ils nous disent très clairement ce qui en fait des exilés des institutions sociales d’éducation. Ils expriment aussi des points de vue très perspicaces au sujet des conditions très différentes qui peuvent et qui doivent être créées pour leur permettre d’apprendre. Seul un réalignement sur le plan des politiques permettant aux voix des jeunes marginalisés d’être entendus et d’avoir des suites peut engendrer les changements nécessaires pour faire des écoles des lieux où ils peuvent s’engager de nouveau dans l’apprentissage.

  ---

  [1] Richard Gibboney (2010) Why an undemocratic capitalism has brought public education to its knees. In J. DeVitis & L. Irwin-DeVitis (eds) Adolescent Education: A Reader. New York: Peter Lang Publishing, pp. 223-237.

• Including the Excluded: De-Marginalizing Immigrant/Refugee and Racialized Students

  9:52 PM Comments Off on Including the Excluded: De-Marginalizing Immigrant/Refugee and Racialized Students

  Identities, Identification, and Marginalization

  Why do Identities Matter?

  Identity is about connection with others. It is about a sense of rootedness to particular places, cultures, histories, contexts, and politics. It is also about comparisons based on perceived similarities and differences, and the concomitant demarcation through identity construction and negotiation of social boundaries that serve to either include or exclude individuals and groups from access to social resources and statuses.

  For young people, the development of their identities as unique individuals is an integral part of their identity formation across the developmental trajectory. This process occurs within societal contexts that seek to include, marginalize, or exclude both individuals and the social groups to which they are seen to belong. Various cultural, racial, religious, linguistic, national, age, sex/gender, socio-economic (class), territorial, and other identification criteria are used in these personal and social identification processes, all of which reflect various types of commonality or difference deemed socially salient at the time. The corresponding identity “markers” serve at once to affirm oneself and the relevant collectivity, while simultaneously demarcating “I – you” and “we – they” boundaries. The resulting personal and social identities may be myriad and complex; they may intersect or overlap; they are in constant flux, as they are constructed, negotiated, and sometimes even contested. They may also intersect with disadvantaged minority statuses in ways that either intensify oppressions and marginality or empower individuals to work for social change and transformation.[1]

  Youth’s personal and social identities are critically important in the learning process. They affect not only how our young people see themselves, but also how they are perceived by both educators and school peers, how they engage with schooling, and how they themselves produce knowledge about everyday experiences. This begs the questions: What role do we play as educators and education researchers in these identification processes? How does the way that we see – or don’t see – the personal identities and lived social realities of our students affect them, particularly in their learning and educational outcomes? What might be our own complicities in processes of social inclusion or exclusion of our students, particularly of our culturally diverse and/or racialized youth? How does this impact them? How might we best understand students’ responses accordingly? Most importantly, what can we do to break existing patterns of social dislocation and marginalization to ensure the educational success ­– and associated life outcomes – of all of our students?

  Marginalization is a process, not a label – a process of social de-valuation that serves to justify disproportional access to scarce societal resources.  As social actors, we do this to others.

  What is Marginalization? Who Does It? To Whom?

  The word “margin” comes to us from the Latin word margo, meaning “edge”, and with time has come to also convey a sense of “little effect or importance”.[2] “To marginalize” is an active verb; it is something that is done by someone to someone else. In the case of “marginalized” students, it is educators, teachers, along with other adults and peers, who – through their identifications, their “seeing” and “not-seeing”, their social inclusion or exclusion – relegate certain individuals and social groups toward the edge of the societal boundary, away from the core of import. Marginalization is thus a process, not a label – a process of social de-valuation that serves to justify disproportional access to scarce societal resources. As social actors, we do this to others. Because of our own agency, we can also change this.  

  “we’re relegated to this label and there’s no way to move out of it…”**

  What characterizes the experiences of a child who is so excluded? How exactly does marginalization occur? Who are the marginalized youth so affected? Are some more likely than others to experience social devaluation, invisibility, silencing, unresponsiveness, and inaction?

  A marginalized child is a child

  • whose social location is not understood and whose identities are contested or denied;
  • whose life circumstances are not known and not considered;
  • whose voice is not heard or has been silenced;
  • whose needs have been left unfulfilled;
  • whose promise is not recognized and whose protest is ignored.

  In theory, social exclusion or inclusion via recognition or denial of shared commonalities may affect any child. In practice, they disproportionately affect youth sub-populations whose “otherness” is most apparent. These social “others” include our newcomer immigrant/refugee, ethno-culturally diverse, and racialized students.     

  Contested Identities

  Why is it important to look at identity, identification, and marginalization among newcomer, immigrant/refugee, and/or racialized students? The answer is threefold. First, our educational system and structures need to be responsive to changes in the composition of Canadian society. Second, diverse youth sub-populations may face unique challenges that affect their educational trajectories and thus have distinct needs. Third, identification processes – particularly for contested identities – affect learning, and thereby the educational performance and associated life outcomes of our youth.

  Increasing Societal Diversity and Complexity

  Canadian society is becoming increasingly complex along cultural, linguistic, and racial lines. One in five of all Canadian children under the age of 15 is a new immigrant or a refugee. An increasingly significant youth sub-population in Canada, immigrant and refugee youth are culturally diverse, with backgrounds reflecting any of 247 diverse ethno-cultural origins[3] as well as various world regions in Asia, the Caribbean, South and Central America, the Middle East, and Africa.

  Almost three quarters (73 percent) of immigrants who arrived between 2001 and 2006 are members of diverse visible minority populations. These new migrants join longer established racialized populations that include our African and Asian Canadian communities as well as our aboriginal First Nations peoples. It is estimated that by 2016 Canada’s visible minority population will account for one fifth of the total population – and one quarter of all of Canada’s children. These figures are already much higher in larger urban centres; it is estimated that close to half of all elementary and secondary school students living in Toronto are from racialized minority populations. The majority are first- and second-generation immigrants and refugees from Asia, the Caribbean, South and Central America, and Africa.[4]

  Unique Challenges Faced by Each Youth Population

  Both immigrant/refugee and racialized youth face unique challenges when compared to their school peers, challenges that extend well beyond those associated with the mastery of the curriculum content and requirements. Newcomer immigrant and refugee youth grapple not only with learning a new language but also with numerous resettlement stresses. The latter include difficult migration experiences and trajectories, linguistic barriers, acculturation difficulties, adaptation challenges, and experiences of social isolation. A key resettlement challenge often faced by newcomer families is the difficult labour market integration of the parents, including parental unemployment, underemployment, and/or double shift work, stressors that readily translate into financial distress, parental absences, and the concomitant need for young newcomer youth to assume adult roles and responsibilities at home. At school, non-recognition of prior schooling, interruptions or changes in schooling, differential educational levels, lack of familiarity with the Canadian school system and practices, mismatches between home-school cultural values, and unwelcoming school environments often present additional challenges for these students.[5]

  “I never thought I’m gonna skip, quit school and stuff, but the way [the Principal] was to me, he was never like that to other people you know”*

  Many immigrant and refugee students, moreover, do not speak the language of instruction as their mother tongue and/or speak a heritage language at home. In Toronto alone, close to half of secondary students are non-native English speakers; a full two-thirds of these are recent newcomers who speak English as a second language.[6] In all, between 20 and 50 percent of the school population in Canada’s large urban centres are non-English speakers. Linguistic mastery of an official language by newcomer students is essential to student learning, social integration, academic performance, and successful transition into the Canadian labour force. The risk of early school leaving prior to high school completion for English-as-a-Second-Language students is two to three times higher than it is for other youth.[7]

  “The main problem was my language.”*

  Our racialized visible minority youth, both newcomer and Canadian-born, grapple with negative societal messages and stereotypes, negative school climates that alienate minority students, negative student-administrator relationships, unfair/arbitrary/ineffective discipline systems, inequitable school structures and systems, as well as a school curriculum that does not reflect their lived realities and experiences. These visible-minority students are furthermore over-represented in families from the lower socio-economic bracket – 63 percent versus 38 percent for “non-visible” populations[8] – and need also to cope with the attendant risks and challenges associated with access to fewer resources, poverty, and social-stigmatization.

  “Teachers…they seen the skin colour, they want to pick on you. I think the main issue those people pick on me is because of my skin.”*

  Marginalized Identities and Learning

  How do identities affect learning? Are there links between various marginalized identities and educational outcomes?

  Identity is an important site of knowing. It is, in effect, a lens through which one reads and responds to one’s world. Young learners understand everyday issues in their homes and communities in terms of who they are, who they are seen to be, where they feel they belong and are allowed to belong. They make sense of and assign meaning to these lived experiences in ways that are very much connected to their particular histories and realized within societal contexts and social spaces. It is precisely for this reason that minority learners often lament the absence of diversity in teacher representation within their schools, indicating there is something beyond educators’ knowledge, skills, and capacities that is important to the teacher-student dyad. The background of an educator is as relevant as that of the learner in making sense of knowledge and teaching and learning.[9] We all speak from particular social locations, experiences, and histories; this is true of our students, and it is true of us as educators as well. Not to recognize this fact is to “push into the margins” the lived realities and life prospects of those who are “not like us”.  

  “[The students of the school are] mostly Black right now…the teachers mostly White.”*

  The existing research literature clearly points to differential educational outcomes both across different immigrant and refugee populations and between foreign-born and Canadian-born children and youth. Research exploring issues in minority youth education reveals that students themselves point to connections between identity, representation, schooling, and knowledge production, and that the need to feel connected to school and to identify with the curricular, instructional, and pedagogical practices that they find there is critical to their educational success.[10] A school system that fails to recognize and tap into youth’s myriad identities and most salient identifications as valuable sources of knowledge is one that shortchanges learners.

  “They assessed me wrong, because they put me in … Grade Ten, right, and I was supposed to be in Grade Twelve.”*

  ” I didn’t really feel like I belonged.”*

  Complicities and Responses

  As educators and education researchers, we need to ask ourselves about our own complicities in the selective de-centering, dislocating, and fragmenting of youth identities. What do we do to marginalize our own students, through our “self-other” identifications, representations, and selective dislocation? How can we best understand student responses accordingly? What is it that we don’t do – or haven’t yet thought to do – to create and sustain an educational system that is more truly inclusive of all of our children?

  Understanding Student Responses: Resistance, Resilience, and Re-Valuation

  Our failures to tap into the rich histories and community reservoirs of knowledge resident in our learners often leads to a desire and push, particularly among minority students, to reclaim their own cultural, racial, and/or religious identities and associated “ways of knowing”. Such strategic claims for plurality and difference in marginalized spaces within schooling and education constitute political forms of youth resistance to pressures for conformity, sameness, and mainstreaming. To better understand youth resistance to their marginality and concomitant agency to produce change, it is therefore necessary to situate their responses in the “cultural politics of schooling”.

  They resist and respond as and where they can…this resistance often takes various forms of protest and affirmation of lived experiences, cultures, histories, and social realities … a re-valuation of precisely those identities being contested.

  It is important to understand how youth understand, articulate, and respond to their marginality and why they do so. Students who have been effectively marginalized can often readily identify those moments that negate their self, personhood, and collective identities. They are also very much aware that processes of inclusion and exclusion are organized through particular identities, and that these processes not only affect them as individuals but extend beyond to the population categories or social groups with which they are identified and/or themselves identify. Many minority students are moreover very much in tune with the “politics of representation”, as well as attempts to individualize processes of exclusion in ways that effectively hamper their articulation of a shared, collective experience about schooling that is itself often muted, negated, dismissed, or de-legitimized. We cannot understand marginality outside the context of minority youth students’ resistance and resilience that seeks to reclaim newcomer, visible minority, or aboriginal identities as political and subversive. They resist and respond as and where they can. In the context of every day marginalization and marginality, this resistance often takes various forms of protest and affirmation of lived experiences, cultures, histories, and social realities … a re-valuation of precisely those identities being contested.

  “The teachers …don’t treat me the same as Portuguese people. I wouldn’t say racist because there are Black people there too. They just don’t like new people … a new kind of race coming in.”*

  Educator Responses: Including the Excluded

  If we are to equip all learners with the requisite tools to function in contemporary society, the issue of marginality and youth resistance in education must be fully addressed. As educators, we must bring a critical understanding to youth marginality and resistance … and then act upon it. To do this we need to better understand, consider, and respond to the social location and life circumstances of our diverse students. We need to acknowledge both their social and personal identities, listen attentively to their voices, seek to address unique needs associated with social location, and understand the sources of their resistance or protest. Most of all we need to unfailingly recognize the inherent potential in each learner and ever strive to see this potential fully realized.  

  “The role teachers have cannot be underestimated. Just having some kind of approval… that kind of affirmation goes a long way.”**

  For our newcomer immigrant and refugee students, this means understanding that mastery of the language of instruction is critical. Migration and resettlement stresses can also present daily challenges, particularly for recent newcomers. The need for both parents to work long hours, often at multiple jobs, can readily translate into less parental presence and supervision, as well as increased responsibility for care of younger siblings and household tasks; parental underemployment can in turn lead to the need for youth employment to help support the family. Teachers, principals, vice-principals, counselors, and school staff who understand these unique challenges can more effectively support their students in their educational trajectories. Initiatives that make a real difference include: assessment and recognition of previous academic accomplishments; strong, secure, sustained English-as-a-Second-Language programming; administrator, teacher, staff awareness training; facilitation of integration within the school; support linkages to relevant social and/or resettlement services; outreach to parents and communities; and implementation of cultural competence within the classroom. For older students, school flexibility in terms of balancing family/work/home/school responsibilities is often key to ensuring successful educational outcomes.

  “You do better when you have more support from home. My parents try but they’re new to this country also, and it’s hard for them and they have problems of their own.”*

  For our racialized visible minority students, an educational curriculum that is relevant to lived experiences and reflective of diversity is key. School programming needs to be sophisticated enough to allow students to engage the complexities of their daily existence. Rather than devalue or diminish the social histories, identities, experiences, and cultural or collective knowledge that our students bring with them to school, we need instead to incorporate them directly into the learning process itself.[11] Inclusive programming that reflects social histories, identities, and experiences with which they can relate allows each learner to feel not only welcome, but a true sense of deep belonging. Other factors that make a real difference include: anti-discrimination awareness, training, and strategies; a positive, inclusive school ethos; a climate of mutual respect between teachers and students; supportive principals, vice-principals, teachers, counselors, and school staff; building upon youth’s own hopes and aspirations.[12]

  “I was just mostly lonely.*

  Identifications based on race, culture, language, religion, class, and gender and their representations in schooling point to particular embodiments of being, social existence, and thus knowledge production. By recognizing that learners’ identities are important not only to understanding the complexities of our world today but also to the actual learning process itself, we can help to ensure better educational outcomes for all our youth. What will you do?

  This article is based on papers originally presented at the “Marginalized Youth and Contemporary Educational Contexts” hosted by the Community Health Systems Resource Group, The Hospital for Sick Children, 2009.

  *For source of student comment, see reference cited in endnote 12.

  **For source of student comment, see reference cited in endnote 9.

  EN BREF – L’identité personnelle et sociale des jeunes se répercute sur leur façon de se voir, sur la manière dont ils sont perçus par les éducateurs et leurs pairs à l’école, sur leur engagement scolaire et sur la façon dont ils produisent des savoirs par suite d’expériences de tous les jours. L’exclusion sociale fondée sur des identités partagées affecte de manière disproportionnée les jeunes dont l’altérité est la plus évidente. Si nous voulons fournir à tous les jeunes les outils nécessaires pour fonctionner dans notre société contemporaine, nous devons acquérir une compréhension critique de la marginalité et de la résistance des jeunes… puis y donner suite. Pour ce faire, nous devons reconnaître leurs identités sociales et personnelles, écouter attentivement leurs voix, chercher à répondre aux besoins particuliers découlant de leur lieu social et comprendre les sources de leur résistance ou de leurs protestations. Et surtout, nous devons reconnaître sans faute le potentiel inhérent de chaque apprenant et constamment nous efforcer d’atteindre pleinement ce potentiel.

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  [1] J. A. Rummens, “Identity and Diversity: Overlaps, Intersections and Processes,” Canadian Ethnic Studies 35 (no. 3, Special Issue: Intersections of Diversity): 2003:10-25.

  [2] On-line Etymology Dictionary. www.etymonline.com

  [3] National population statistics are from the 2006 Canadian census.

  [4] M. Cheng and M. Yau, The 1997 Every Secondary Student Survey: Detailed Findings #230 (Toronto: Toronto District School Board, 1999).

  [5] J. A. Rummens, K. Tilleczek, K. Boydell, and B. Ferguson, “Understanding and Addressing Early School Leaving Among Immigrant and Refugee Youth,” in Why Do Students Drop Out of High School? Narrative Studies and Social Critiques, ed. Kate Tilleczek (Edwin Mellen Press, 2008), 75-101.

  [6] Cheng and Yau.  

  [7] People for Education, Quick Facts – Support for ESL Students (Toronto, 2006). Accessed in 2008 from www.peopleforeducation.com

  [8] Cheng and Yau.

  [9] G. J. S. Dei with Alana Butler, Gulzar Charania, Anthony Kola-Olusanya, Bathseba Opini, Roslyn Thomas, and Anne Wagner, Learning to Succeed: The Challenges and Possibilities of Educational Development for All (New York: Teneo Press, 2010).

  [10] G. J. S. Dei, L. Holmes, J. Mazzuca, E. McIsaac and R. Campbell, Push Out or Drop Out? The Dynamics of Black Students’ Disengagement from School. Final report submitted to the Ontario Ministry of Education and Training, Toronto, 1995; G. J. S. Dei, J. Mazzuca, E. McIsaac, and J. Zine, Reconstructing ‘Dropout’ (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997).

  [11] G. J. S. Dei, M. James, Sonia James-Wilson, L. Karumanchery, and J. Zine, Removing the Margins: The Challenges and Possibilities of Inclusive Schooling (Toronto: Canadian Scholars’ Press, 2000); G. J. S. Dei, S. James-Wilson, and J. Zine, Inclusive Schooling: A Teacher’s Companion to Removing the Margins (Toronto: Canadian Scholars’ Press, 2002).

  [12] B. Ferguson, K. Tilleczek, K. Boydell, Joanna Anneke. Rummens, Dara Roth Edney, and Daniel Coté, Early School Leavers: Understanding the Lived Reality of Student Disengagement from Secondary School (Ontario Ministry of Education, May 30, 2005). www.educ.gov.on.ca/eng/parents/schoolleavers.pdf

• Questions, Conversations, and Education Canada

  9:30 PM Comments Off on Questions, Conversations, and Education Canada

  I love this magazine. I come to each new issue with excitement about finding gems inside. Often I read it cover-to-cover in one sitting, a luxury few can enjoy these days. I wish I could read the French articles with greater understanding.

  This column is my last contribution to Education Canada as its Executive Editor. Preparation for retirement is prime time for reflection, and so I’ve been thinking about why the magazine means so much to me. First there are the people. Paula Dunning, the Editor, who with skill and grace recruits writers and edits their work with a deft but determined hand that makes texts meaningful to professional rather than academic readers; and Corinne Cécilia who does the same in French. Art Director, J. Lynn Campbell designs graphic treatments that best present the articles, and Gilles Latour and his staff manage the business side from circulation to the ups and downs of an erratic advertising market.

  But it’s the writers who make the magazine. They keep me engaged through thoughtful reflections on their practice, on ideas and perspectives that challenge my own, and on the contributions of their research to the understanding of teaching and learning. Professional magazines like Education Canada play a key role in providing educators with relevant and timely access to both research knowledge and questions arising from the classroom experience of teachers and students.

  My first encounters with education research were as an elected trustee of a school board whose administration believed that policy should take account of research findings, but also knew that research cannot substitute for consensus building across ideological divides and ­– perhaps most important – that research may tell us what is, but rarely tells us what could be. Most of us accept research conclusions that align with our own experience or beliefs and challenge those that don’t. In the end, it’s the questions that research provokes and the conversations that ensue that are most valuable to policymakers and practitioners.

  Sometimes, in the rush for results, educators don’t wait for those questions and conversations to show a clear direction. That may be one reason that education is such a frequent victim of fads. Consider “brain-based” learning (as opposed to what, “liver-based” learning?). Understanding how the brain learns is exciting science, but it’s a science in its infancy. I’m hard pressed to think of another field that would accept claims as expansive as those found in many of the “brain-based” resources offered to teachers.

  The conversations prompted by authors in Education Canada are not limited to academic research. Personal questions based on experience need to be debated too, and may ultimately lead to research we can build policies around. With four children born in three seasons of the year, the notion of “school readiness” – or worse, “readiness to learn” – was problematic for me. In childcare, the kids moved to the toddler room when they became toddlers, not because it was September. Is a child who enters junior kindergarten at age 3 years and 8 months less “ready for school” than one who begins at age 4 years and 8 months? Does the possibility of up to a year’s difference in age in Grade 3 influence how we understand results of Grade 3 standardized assessments? Would achievement profiles be different if we only assessed, say, children who are eight years old at the time of test-taking? Whether or not these questions interest policymakers, they certainly matter to the boy born in December who experiences school as the place where he’s never quite good enough at the stuff that schools care about.

  We need to validate student voices and experiences, too. As a very naïve but altruistic new teacher in the UK, I joined a rehabilitation program for young offenders (we called them juvenile delinquents in those days). They were, they told me, “doin orticulcha” at the training school, and I was to teach plant physiology. Their classroom behaviour was dreadful, often verging on the psychotic. After three sessions, I admitted my pain and asked them how we might at least co-exist comfortably for the remainder of the term. The ring-leader piped up, “Giv’s a recess, and we’ll tell ya.” They came back with a deal. “You teach us what we want to learn and we’ll behave like students.” How simple, how obvious. Not surprisingly, they wanted sex education. “The real stuff. Not birds and bees.” Their ignorance was profound and their desire to learn intense. They did know how to be students, and I learned a lot about teaching.

  Here’s a place where research, experience, and student voice come together. We know how important motivation is to learning. We know that intrinsic motivation is more powerful for learning than the extrinsic motivation that comes from good marks or gold stars. So why are we so reluctant to let young people learn what they need and want to know or what interests them deeply?

  Some years ago Mary Pratt, the painter, ended a back-page column in this magazine with a plea for educators to make a commitment – something like the Hippocratic oath – to at least “do no harm” to the hearts and minds entrusted to public education. I’d like to go beyond that, and I will continue to count on the writers in Education Canada to challenge their readers to think deeply, weigh evidence carefully, and give thoughtful attention to the voices of those whose lives and futures depend on us “getting it right”.

• Indigenous Education and Epistemic Violence

  8:24 PM Comments Off on Indigenous Education and Epistemic Violence

  Canada’s continuing failures to adequately address the training and educational needs of its First Nation, Métis, and Inuit learners are so profound as to be beyond all serious dispute, and so unconscionable as to constitute a national disgrace. Isolated pockets of academic excellence notwithstanding, a disproportionate number of Indigenous students in every province routinely underperform academically, drop out of school at inexcusably tender ages, fail to graduate from high school in heart-stopping numbers, and are woefully under-represented in institutions of “higher” learning. Put in the language of the final report of the Canadian Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples,[1] educational institutions at every level regularly “replicate the negative features; including scant attention to Aboriginal world views and Indigenous knowledge; that have led [Indigenous] students to drop out of school in the first place.”

  Although reactions to such bad-news reports may vary (some are angry, others indifferent or filled with aimless resolve to do better), no one is in the least surprised. Rather, your standard-issue, deeply inured, non-Indigenous onlooker is so well-habituated to the defamatory idea that all First Nation, Métis, and Inuit persons are interchangeable members of a common, always impoverished, and perpetually disease-ridden underclass that further information about across-the-board academic failures serves only to round out their already bleak picture of the Indigenous world. If pressed to account for such well documented academic shortcomings, other and better-intended onlookers more generously point accusing fingers at poverty, or isolation, or the continuing aftermath of historically earlier colonialist practices – ideas that are, no doubt, at least partially correct. Anyone living in abject poverty, cut off from otherwise available opportunities for cultural enrichment, or a victim of systemic prejudice can be equally understood to be a poor candidate for academic success. Perhaps this is all there is to it. Perhaps, if given a fair economic shake, and more warmly clutched to the bosom of mainstream-Canadian culture, existing educational inequities would conveniently disappear. More money and more efficient assimilative practices are not, however, the only available answers on offer.

  Alternatively, the educational crisis that so deeply affects many of Canada’s Indigenous communities is, arguably, better understood, not as a symptom of one group’s ineffective struggles to play “catch-up” with their “betters”, but, rather, as an ongoing David-and-Goliath style cultural war – a war in which anyone caught out failing to reflexively subscribe to what Battiste has called the “classic Eurocentric order of life”[2] is automatically demeaned and discounted; a “take no prisoners” war in which adherents to any and all contrasting (and perhaps incommensurable) “epistemologies”, or “ways of knowing”, are simply written off as having failed to grasp the taken-for-true essentials of “Westernized” standards of truth and rightness. In such a wartorn climate, Indigenous students are, then, alternatively understood, not as slackers, but as the innocent victims of an avoidable collision between contrasting ideologies and their associated pedagogical practices – cannon fodder of a cultural clash in which the unrequited educational aspirations of Indigenous learners are too often shrugged off as a sanctioned form of collateral damage reluctantly paid in order to bolster the presumptive supremacy of Westernized, essentialized, post-enlightenment, Judeo-Christian notions of what is right and true. On this alternative account, responsibility for our collective failure to close the many educational gaps that separate Indigenous and non-Indigenous learners is, then, re-read as a natural byproduct of all of those hegemonic ways in which culturally-mainstream pedagogic practices have traditionally ridden roughshod over those epistemic differences that set Indigenous knowers apart from their non-Indigenous counterparts.

  How, in this culture versus that, is it to be decided what constitutes bona fide knowledge? Is truth context-specific or is “real” knowledge universal, equally true in all places and for all times?

  Among the challenges that such a “paradigm-wars” approach naturally throws down is an obligation (on everyone’s part) to first get clear about how the arbiters of both Indigenous and non-Indigenous cultures have approached a handful of key questions about knowledge acquisition. How, for example, in this culture versus that, is it to be decided what constitutes bona fide knowledge? Is truth context-specific, for example, or is “real” knowledge universal, equally true in all places and for all times? How are we to best proceed when knowledge stakeholders disagree? How might novices optimally acquire some journeyman-like appreciation of what is standardly held to be right and true? Such classic epistemic alternatives not only pose questions for professional philosophers, but have equally puzzled knowledge stakeholders in every time and culture. More pointedly, and for present purposes, they are also questions that demand answers of anyone presuming to set the pedagogical course for others.

  Epistemic Violence

  Given the root-and-branch ways in which Indigenous epistemologies have been overturned, it is worth reflecting on the common fate of aspiring learners in just about every previously colonized group one might care to mention. In considering such matters, I tend to imagine myself authoring an apocryphal “self-help” book, entitled something like Epistemic Violence: A User’s Guide – a “how-to” book written for the benefit of anyone aspiring to become an especially good colonizer. Chapter One of this fictional “Operations Manual” is given over to detailing how one might successfully pacify a newly encountered indigenous population by bringing to bear available bits of technological wizardry (gunpowder, antibiotics, etc.), all carefully calculated to persuade the “Indigenes” that what they have traditionally taken to be right and true is actually the mistaken by-product of their own earlier, and now evidently dated, proclivity for “magical” or “mystical” or “child-like” thinking. Successfully duped in this fashion, even members of otherwise well-functioning cultural groups can reputedly be persuaded that assimilation is their only practicable course. There is, of course, nothing fanciful about such Machiavellian maneuvers. Rather it is a piece of the history of very many Indigenous peoples, including many of Canada’s Indigenous peoples.

  Of late, however, as the hegemony of classic Western-European epistemologies have been increasingly undermined from within, various Indigenous groups in Canada, and around the world, have similarly come to have their own second thoughts. What was it, exactly, they ask, that – in some all but forgotten pre-contact moment – once defined Indigenous ways of knowing, and why were these homegrown accounts so readily cast aside? Has something of such once-robust ways of knowing persisted into the present, and, if so, how have they served to define what is true about more contemporary Indigenous epistemologies? What costs have been paid by Indigenous cultures of having been bereft (in whole or part) of their own traditional beliefs about belief, and what might potentially be done to rehabilitate those Indigenous knowledge system now eroded by generations of assimilationist practices? Obviously, any attempt to address these and other similarly crucial questions necessarily requires that we somehow get as clear as possible about the particulars of whatever distinctive epistemology, or system of knowledge, might currently be operating within a given Indigenous community, and whether there is any prospect of generalizing such insights across what, in Canada alone, amounts to more than 600 unique indigenous communities. And, more important still, if – as is being proposed here – some important part of our collective failure to adequately meet the educational needs of Indigenous learners does, in fact, turn on our first having failed to adequately take into account those differences that do divide the culturally sanctioned ways of knowing practiced by Indigenous and non-Indigenous populations, what, you might well ask, ought we to do next?

  If it were the case that the particulars of such unique Indigenous knowledge systems were already well understood; and if, in some imagined spirit of intercultural sharing and mutual respect, there were a sufficient appetite for real educational change; then everyone’s marching orders would be reasonably straightforward. As Marlene Brant-Castellano made clear in the 1996 report of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples: “For Aboriginal people the challenge [would be] to go beyond the deconstruction of oppressive ideologies and practices, [and] to give [renewed] expression to aboriginal philosophies, world-views, and social relations. For non-Aboriginal people the challenge [would be] to open up space for Aboriginal initiatives in schools and colleges, work sites and organizations so that Indigenous ways of knowing can flourish.”[3]

  Unsurprisingly, this is not the world in which we currently live. Even where openness to change and mutual respect do exist, it still remains the case, according to Battiste, that “when educators encounter cultural differences, they have very little theory, scholarship, research, or tested practice to engage Aboriginal education in a way that is not [strictly] assimilative.”[4] The consequence has been that existing educational practices have too often functioned as an exercise in “thought control” imposed upon Indigenous learners, rather than as instruments of true intellectual exchange.

  The aim of this brief essay is to contribute to this ongoing critique by alerting readers to some of that Battiste calls the missing “theory, scholarship and research” required to bring real change about. 

  A Closing Agenda

  Any hope for real progress in coming to some better understanding the distinctive “ways of knowing” characteristic of Canada’s First Nation, Métis, and Inuit populations necessarily requires first getting clear about what it is, exactly, that talk of “epistemology”, and, more particularly, “folk” or Indigenous epistemologies, is meant to be talked about – all before attempting to work out what it is that contemporary Indigenous and non-indigenous philosophers, ethnologists, and social scientists imagine to be distinct about Indigenous, as opposed to non-Indigenous epistemologies.

  As a way of unfolding this agenda, what remains of the present account proceeds in three quick steps. The first of these simply ventures to make plain what is intended by talk of epistemology, Indigenous or not. Step Two briefly hints at some part of what is currently being said about what might constitute the unique particulars of Indigenous, as opposed to non-Indigenous, epistemologies. Finally, and by way of conclusion, there will be room left only for a brief remarks about the ways in which a more careful study of Indigenous epistemologies might serve to redress some of the educational inequities currently suffered by First Nation, Métis, and Inuit learners.

  Persons reared in different cultures are regularly said to frame and defend their understanding of truth and rightness in often radically different ways – ways that promote misunderstandings, tensions, and conflict between colliding cultures. 

  Step I: Epistemologies in General and Indigenous Epistemologies in Particular.

  Although talk about warring epistemologies (i.e., standpoints, paradigms, frames of reference, rhetorical postures, world-views, knowledge systems, etc.) is everywhere thick on the ground, one could easily be excused for wondering what all these heady terms actually mean. Like other similarly hard-to-pin-down notions, “epistemology” in general, and “folk” or “indigenous epistemologies” in particular, risk qualifying as further instances of those loose, baggy, portmanteau sorts of concepts that can be used to describe just about anything one might wish. Reduced to its barest of bones, however, the word “epistemology” – plain and simple – ordinarily functions as a covering term that references “a branch of… [scholarship]…concerned with the origins, nature, methods of determination, and limits of human knowledge.”[5] “Folk” or “Indigenous epistemologies”, by contrast, amount to more or less the same thing, with the important proviso that they tend to be collectively authored (not by professional philosophers, but by whole cultural communities), and by the fact that they represent implicit or tacit forms of knowledge and practice that commonly ghost beneath the surface of conscious or declarative thought.

  Whatever else might be said about them, Indigenous epistemologies are widely understood to vary – often dramatically – from one culture or historical moment to the next. As a consequence, persons reared in different cultures are regularly said to frame and defend their understanding of truth and rightness in often radically different, even incommensurable ways – ways that promote misunderstandings, tensions, and conflict between colliding cultures.

  As thus understood, it turns out that the several foundational epistemologies that have dominated the more analytic branches of 20th century Anglo-American philosophy have played to extremely poor reviews among many Indigenous scholars. Such criticisms are owed primarily to the complex relations that are assumed to obtain between power and knowledge – relations that give talk of Indigenous epistemologies an almost inescapable political character. Nevertheless, and because it “barters [well] within the currency of mainstream academia” ^[6], many contemporary Indigenous scholars have, nevertheless, chosen not to abandon the otherwise suspect study of epistemology, but have instead worked to “ decolonize” and re-“colour” such efforts by taking up the task of “rediscovering and reaffirming” ^[7] Indigenous ways of knowing. Reclaimed in these ways, the study of Indigenous epistemologies is, according to Meyer, widely regarded, not only as a “sword against anthropological arrogance and [a] shield against philosophical universalisms,” but also as a new key plank in the shared platform of Indigenous studies.[8]

  Step II: Demarcation Criteria   

  Owed in important part to what has recently become an international renaissance in cross-cultural scholarship, a multicultural cadre of Indigenous philosophers, ethnologists, and social historians have recently mounted ambitious efforts to document and give pride of place to their own non-Western systems of knowledge. Notwithstanding a shared commitment to the context-dependent or situated character of such ideas, certain common claims repeatedly pop up within this literature, perhaps because many of these groups have suffered a common plight.

  Key among the common “demarcation criteria” thought to distinguish Western from non-Western ways of knowing are the recurring claims that Indigenous epistemologies tend to be holistic rather than analytic;[9] are context-sensitive and responsive to lived experiences and the social reality of Indigenous authenticity and voice;[10] view knowledge as ecologically situated and unique to specific settings;[11] employ physical geography as a foundation stone of Indigenous knowledge building;[12] make room for the sacred, as opposed to only the mundane;[13] consider certain animals and plants as stewards to certain doors of knowledge;[14] regard, not just individuals, but whole communities as “epistemological agents”; and, consequently, view true knowledge as the result of a process that can only be validated by cultural groups.

  Despite this much in the way of agreement among those Indigenous scholars responsible for this concert of opinion, many stalwarts within the “Academy” judge such claims as overly anecdotal and as relying too exclusively on expert testimony, introspection, and informal observations as sources of insight. While such criticisms are not entirely out of place, they have not, for the most part, been followed by any evident sense of obligation to undertake the necessary programs of empirical research required to produce a better rounded picture of what is and is not definitional of Indigenous epistemologies. Where all of this leaves us is that, notwithstanding a welter of ethnographic claims and strong testimonial about the uniqueness of various Indigenous ways of knowing, there currently exist almost no empirically-based accounts of what may be distinctive about the Indigenous or “folk” epistemologies of Indigenous peoples in Canada or elsewhere.[15]

  Step III: Epistemic Violence Goes to School   

  Among the places where the tensions raised by competing epistemological claims are first and most sorely felt are precisely those explicitly given over to the cultivation of new knowledge – our schools. That is, if – as is widely argued to be the case – Indigenous learners routinely subscribe to culturally sanctioned ways of knowing that are at variance with those of the economically dominant culture, and if the systems of mainstream pedagogy to which they are exposed are principally set within some foreign epistemological frame, then trouble is automatically afoot, and school failures and lost opportunities are sure to follow. Available space allows for only one working example that suggests the rightness of such views – an example owed to the First Nations researcher Stephany Fryberg.

  Fryberg’s work-in-progress turns upon what the developmental psychologist Carolyn Dweck has termed “incremental” as opposed to “entity” accounts of learning.[16] Those who subscribe to “entity-based” learning models assume (in keeping with classical Western-European traditions) that competencies are fixed, that academic successes are proof of such latent abilities, and that failures call assumptions about a learner’s basic competencies into deep question. By contrast, those that maintain an “incremental” view (Canada’s Indigenous communities, for example) assign success to effort, and treat failure as a signal that still more effort is required. Working with young elementary school students, what Fryberg has shown is that, in contrast to their culturally mainstream counterparts, Indigenous youth begin their academic life with a commitment to an incremental view of learning, but quickly find themselves out of step with the pedagogic models favoured by their teachers. The heavy price extracted as a result of these children’s forced assimilation is conversion to an entity-based view of themselves as fundamentally incompetent. Fryberg’s work, I suggest, offers something of a template for future studies. It draws upon ethnographic insights emerging from contemporary Indigenous scholarship, it trades upon empirical measurement procedures borrowed from some of the best of recent social science research, and it points to possible ways in which educational institutions might work to better accommodate demonstrated differences in Indigenous and non-Indigenous epistemologies.

  EN BREF – Notre échec à combler les écarts d’éducation séparant les apprenants autochtones et non autochtones du Canada peut s’expliquer comme étant un sous-produit d’une pédagogie générique, qui n’a pas fait de cas des différences épistémiques – c’est-à-dire de différences dans les façons de connaître – qui distinguent les connaissants autochtones de leurs pairs non autochtones. On dit que les personnes élevées dans différentes cultures formulent et défendent leur perception de la vérité de différentes façons – des façons qui engendrent des malentendus, des tensions et des conflits entre les cultures qui se heurtent. Et ces tensions se manifestent particulièrement dans nos écoles. Si, comme on le soutient souvent, les apprenants autochtones souscrivent habituellement à des manières de savoir qui s’écartent de celles de la culture économiquement dominante, et si les systèmes de pédagogie générique auxquels ils sont exposés sont principalement fondés sur le cadre épistémique de cette culture, il s’ensuivra nécessairement des échecs des écoles et des occasions perdues.

  ---

  [1] Report of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, vol. 5, Renewal: A Twenty-Year Commitment (Ottawa: Canada Communications Group, 1996).

  [2] Marie Battiste, Indigenous Knowledge and Pedagogy in First Nations Education -A Literature Review with Recommendations (Report prepared for the National Working Group on Education, Indian and Northern Affairs Canada, Ottawa, 2002).

  [3] Royal Commission on Aboriginal People.

  [4] Battise.

  [5] P. Fitzsimons and G. Smith, “Philosophy and Indigenous Cultural Transformation,” Educational Philosophy & Theory 32, no. 1(2000) 25-41, 25.

  [6] A. M. Meyer, “Our Own Liberation: Reflections on Hawaiian Epistemology,” The Contemporary Pacific 13, no.1 (2001): 124-148, 146.

  [7] L. I. Rigney, “Internalization of an Indigenous Anticolonial Culture Critique of Research Methodologies: A Guide to Indigenist Research Methodology and Its Principles,” Wicazo Sa Review (1999): 109-121, 113.

  [8] Meyer, 123

  [9] W. J. Ermine, “Aboriginal Epistemology,” in First Nations Education in Canada: The circle unfolds, eds. M. Battiste and J. Barman (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1995), 101-112; Japangka E. W. West, Speaking Towards an Aboriginal Philosophy (Indigenous Philosophy Conference, Linga Longa, Australia, 1998).

  [10] D. W. Gegeo, “Indigenous Knowledge and Empowerment: Rural Development Examined from Within,” The Contemporary Pacific 10, no. 2 (1998): 289-316.

  [11] Ibid.

  [12] D. Foley, “Indigenous Epistemology and Indigenous Standpoint Theory,” Social Alternatives 22, no. 1 (2003): 44-52.

  [13] Ermine.

  [14] M. J. Chandler, C. Lalonde, B. Sokol, and D. Hallett, “Personal Persistence, Identity Development, and Suicide: A Study of Native and Non-native North American Adolescents,,” Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, serial no. 273, 68, no. 2, 2003.

  [15] (for rare exceptions to this generalization see Ibid., and M. J. Chandler, D. Hallett, and B. W, Sokol, “Competing Claims about Competing Knowledge Claims,” in Personal Epistemologies, eds. B. K. Hofer & P. R. Pintrich (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2002), 145-168.

  [16] C. Dweck, Mindset (New York: Randomhouse Inc., 2006).

• Composing Lives: Listening and Responding to Marginalized Youth

  7:53 PM Comments Off on Composing Lives: Listening and Responding to Marginalized Youth

  I lived up to the troublemaker
  I was treated differentlyI wanted to change
  I proved my teachers wrong and was able to break the stigma
  for the first time I enjoyed handing in my work

  -Samuel, National Youth in Care Network, 2008[1]

  Sometimes the stories we hear write our responses, they bring forth a knowing that our lives are intertwined and that lives are always complex. These responses grow out of a deep listening, a recognition of uncertainty, and a celebration of surprise, which demand that we stay close to the stories we hear. Shifting perspectives in childhood research have moved us away from the objectified status of the child to a view of children and young people as competent social actors who take an active role in sharing their experiences and pose challenges for rethinking the power relationships implicit in many research paradigms.[2] We have listened to youth’s stories in our respective research projects – youth who have left school early, youth who have experienced the onset of early psychosis, and youth who are homeless.

  In listening to youths talk about their lives, we reflect upon our own lives as we respond and are carried backwards to our own stories. Samuel’s story reminds Vera of her own life; it brings forth memories of dropping out of high school. It is the confidence in his voice as he speaks, as he finds his way back into school; it speaks of the possibility of finding voice in a system that too often is disempowering; it is this certainty that leads Vera to inquire more deeply. Who are the people standing beside Samuel as he lives, tells, and retells his story? Where are the openings in our educational system that allowed him to return to school? What are the turning points in his life? These questions bring us back to our own life stories, urging us to inquire more deeply, taking us to a potentially dangerous place – a place sketchy with forgetfulness, but perhaps much richer in terms of possibilities and inquiry. In listening to stories, we become implicated in a complex ethical relationship, one we can’t so easily evade, one in which we as listeners are also positioned as thinkers.

  The youth we listened to do not necessarily describe themselves as victims, but as imaginative, creative, and resourceful human beings with social, cultural, and political agency.

  School engagement – and particularly disengagement – challenges our perceptions of schooling and our understanding of education by raising questions about meaningful engagement. Decades of research have highlighted that social class, ethnicity, gender, special needs, and sexualities have predicted school disengagement; however, the ways in which youth describe this process is relatively unknown. Rehabilitative educational programs are frequently posited as the solution to reduce these assumed deficits – programs that inherently ignore or minimize the social and economic realities of the daily lives of young people.

  We hear marginalized youth described as “deviant, criminals, substance users, culturally impoverished, overtly different, bored and powerless”, [3]but it is important to listen to their own stories. The youth we listened to do not necessarily describe themselves as victims, but as imaginative, creative, and resourceful human beings with social, cultural, and political agency.[4] Serena and Shannen Koostachin’s voices echo from the screen as they lead a national movement to get a school built in their community, the community of Attawapiskat First Nation:

  I would like to talk to you what it is like to be a child who grows up never seeing a real school. I want to tell you about the children who give up hope and start dropping out in Grade 4 or 5. But I want to also tell you about the determination in our community to build a better world. School should be a time for hopes and dreams of the future. Every kid deserves this.[5] 

  Serena and Shannen spearhead a campaign called Education is a Human Right. Their story reminds us that many life choices are made against a backdrop of imposed social conditions, such as being aboriginal. Both Serena and Shannon leave their makeshift school on the reserve to attend a non-native high school, and in doing so they are forced to move away from their immediate family and community; social, cultural, and institutional narratives are shaping their storied landscape. Understanding the youths’ stories as embedded in social contexts leads us to ask questions about the social and political funding structures of schools, yet it also leads us to ask questions similar to McLaughlin’s: Whose knowledge counts as school curriculum? How is this knowledge organized? What are the underlying values, assumptions, and beliefs that structure school curriculum? What kind of cultural systems does this knowledge work from and legitimate? Whose interests are served by the organization and legitimizing of school curriculum?[6]

  Smyth and Hattam argue that the dominant regimes of school leadership within current school reform approaches are failing because of their inability to listen to the voices of students and teachers. They argue that a different “sociological imagination” is required – one that attends to the lifeworlds of young people, is more reflexive of its own agenda, and is sensitive to the broader political context within which “dropping out” is experienced.[7]

  By listening to marginalized youths, we ground our knowledge in their lives, accounting for the intersection of representation and identity as well as the multi-faceted mingling of the social, cultural, and psychological elements in their lives. Thus, the stories they tell us are interlocutors of our storying of their lives; they ask us to engage, to inquire. While we listen to the stories we often imagine, and we remind ourselves to open doors of possibility and, as Greene would say, to break with the ordinary, to look at things as if they could be otherwise.[8] These responses arise from our own situated lives. People hear differently, listen differently – the youth we talk with are not just telling us a good story; they often come to tell because they believe that their stories can awaken us to see more and, to call again upon Greene, to release the imagination, to release the power of empathy, to become more present to those around, perhaps to care. In these moments we can only make sense if we talk out of our own memories with a feeling of commitment and hope.

  Young people in these studies are resisting an identity constructed for them by the institution of schooling.

  Frank notes that “storytelling is an occasion when people co-author responses to Tolstoy’s great question of what shall we do and how shall we live; not permanent answers applicable for the rest of their lives, but the crucial if provisional answers that guide what to do next and how to live now.”[9] How do we create stories of school that open benign or inspiring or stimulating possibility? Can we really separate the imaginary from the political or the ethical? Or do we have to weave them together? If we want to think about this, then we have to make openings for many voices, voices that have not been heard.

  In our work on early school leaving, we heard the voices of Aboriginal, Francophone, newcomer, second generation immigrant and refugee, third plus generation, visible minority, lesbian-gay-bisexual-transgendered, and rural youth. For example, our consultation with Aboriginal young people provided direction for the content and ordering of the interview protocol itself. These youth indicated the importance of asking about the influence of the residential school system and about their experiences with the Children’s Aid Society. They approved of our plan to have youth participants complete the socio-demographic fact sheet after the interview and of having the interviewer review the questions with them. Finally, they indicated a preference for the ordering of questions and prompts in the interview instruments, demonstrating the need to make adaptations for urban aboriginal youth versus rural aboriginal youth.   

  In further consultations, early school leavers responded positively to probes on issues beyond personal blame for leaving school; they were comfortable with beginning to speak about their everyday lives and working up from there to other levels of influence in home, school, and community; and they also appreciated the use of the term “early school leaver” as opposed to “dropout”. Further, many of them did not identify as early school leavers, but as just not in school for now.[10] Smyth notes a number of studies that portray young people as active agents with power rather than passive victims in challenging relational contexts.[11] Young people in these studies are resisting an identity constructed for them by the institution of schooling.

  With respect to school disengagement, we have many questions: why do we keep applying standards, achievement tests, curricula? Who makes them up? What do we accomplish by this? How can we install a belief that we can be the best that we could possibly be amidst this? What does it mean to be cheated in life? How do we make human rights and social justice a reality? How can we go on living as if we were untouched by their stories? How can we abdicate our responsibility? We are not talking about transforming the world; this is about honouring what we believe in: that education matters, that schools can be educative, safe, and caring places. It is a recognition that the stories are not only text, but reflections of lives that continue to be lived and that their lives are intertwined with our own.

  This relational responsibility, which we carry as narrative inquirers and arts-based researchers, provides us with an approach to understanding experience in our own lives as well. By investigating our storied lives and experiences, we arrive at a narrative vantage point from which we can create a collaborative, reciprocal, and relational process to understand lived and learned experiences of others. Our hope is that we can emphasize inquiry rather than finding final answers or solutions, to reflect upon the diversity of experiences and the continuous unfolding of lives lived. We are engaged in collaborative research, research that is at it is core relational.

  In the words of Powers et al, “Although most would agree that one of the overarching goals of education is to promote self-sufficiency and competency among youth, many or most of our own efforts to assist youth have been fairly directive, aimed at providing youth with informational and experiential building blocks upon which they might somehow spontaneously launch their lives after leaving school.”[12] These building blocks reflect the dominant social, cultural, and institutional narratives of white, middle class cultures. As Kevlar states “there’s always the people who have the perfect lives, the perfect parents […]school is built for them.”[13] Our narratives reflect moments in our lives and at times open possibilities to our imaginations, allowing us to create hope and social vision. The significance of the narratives told is therefore not always in the recalling of the experience but in the process of the telling, which gives rise to a kind of embodied theory. This embodiment attends to the relationship between language and the experiencing body and has the capacity to bring the lived experience of individuals to the forefront.

  Paying attention to the unfolding of our own lives is an important aspect of trying to understand the experience of others.

  We know that many of the youth (as do many of us) impose a linearity and coherence to the unfolding of events, places, and stories that were never part of the lived experiences. In many ways they might have constructed these experiences to emphasize their understanding and the personal significance of their experience. Paying attention to the unfolding of our own lives is an important aspect of trying to understand the experience of others; it is a relational knowing; a recognition that an embodied response is drawn forth within each relationship and within our memories and imaginations. The stories of marginalization on the school landscape thus become embedded in relationships and in places of community.

  In studying and understanding experience narratively, we recognize the centrality of relationships, as participants relate and live through stories that speak of their experiences. Throughout this process, we need to remain attentive to ethical tensions, obligations, and responsibilities in our relationships with those who tell, and to address questions of how larger social, institutional, and political narratives inform our understanding and shape youths’ stories. Paying attention to these larger narratives enables us to further understand the complexity of the living and telling of stories, to understand the role of both context and relationships.

  This is the intersection between the theoretical and our autobiographical coming to know. There is no easy place within any one theory or within any one discipline to see, write, and think about the world; it becomes even more complex, yet necessary, for theory and personal experience to interact and inform one other. As Boer notes, we see that in the process of theorizing that includes self-reflection, one indeed leaves the ontological home to return to the same location, but not quite as the same person.[14] The story of a life is both less than the actual life – because it is selective, partial, contextually constructed and because the life is not yet over – and more than the life – because its contours and meanings allegorically extend to others. To us, listening to the youth stories is a reminder of becoming: students and teachers becoming, and the possibility of educational becoming. We concur with Thiessen’s assertion that “students have both authorship of and authority in their lives at school.”[15] In the words of one young student:

  More and more people these days, like myself included, we wanna become something. We don’t just want to become lawyers and astronauts, and firefighters and all of that. We wanna make a change for the world.

  As researchers and citizens, we see it as our responsibility to inquire, alongside and in collaboration with youth. In the telling and retelling of stories, we continuously recognize that lives matter, that each listening brings forth a response, a retelling, and a possibility to shift common plotlines and lives.

  EN BREF – Écouter les récits des jeunes nous amène à réfléchir à nos propres expériences vécues, ce qui nous ouvre la possibilité de mieux comprendre la vie qu’ils nous racontent. La signification des récits racontés ne réside pas toujours dans la narration elle-même, mais dans le processus consistant à exposer et à trouver des résonances dans nos vies et dans les réactions aux récits racontés. À titre d’auditeurs, porter attention au déploiement d’une vie devant nous, d’une vie en devenir, nous amène à engager de façon relationnelle avec d’autres et souligne un engagement envers une connaissance relationnelle et contextuelle. S’occuper d’une vie qui se déploie et des résonances dans notre propre vie nous permet d’aller au-delà des catégories, des stéréotypes et des jugements auxquels font face les jeunes marginalisés et de voir ces jeunes comme des êtres imaginatifs, créatifs et ingénieux ayant un ressort social, culturel et politique.

  ---

  [1] Samuel’s digital story was played at the Marginalized Youth conference in Toronto in the spring of 2009. As part of the conference Vera introduced the youth in person or their stories/videos to the audience. The words of the youth were strong reminders of the importance of our work and form the background of our paper. Samuel’s words were arranged as a found poem by Vera, his digital story can be viewed at www.youtube.com/watch?v=8dTzP56qVjA

  [2] M. John, Children’s Rights and Power: Charging up for a New Century (London, England: Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2003).

  [3] D. Palmer, “Talking About the Problems of Young Nyungars,” in Australian Youth Subculture. On the Margins and in the Mainstream, ed. R. White (Hobart, Tasmania: Australian Clearinghouse for Youth Studies), 110.

  [4] D. J. Clandinin, P. Steeves, Y. Li, J. R. Mickelson, G. Buck, M. Pearce, V. Caine, S. Lessard, C. Desrochers, M. Stewart, and M. Huber, Composing Lives: A Narrative Account into the Experiences of Youth who Left School Early (Unpublished manuscript, 2010). Retrieved from: https://www.ualberta.ca/.

  [5] To view their public speaking engagements and to access additional information in the campaign, see: www.youtube.com/watch?v=w17r5atzNUI and www.youtube.com/watch?v=wp-TkDv6te0

  [6] D. McLaughlin, “Personal Narratives for School Change in Navajo Settings,” in Naming silenced lives. Personal Narratives and Processes of Educational Change, eds. D. McLaughlin & W. G. Tierney (New York: Routledge, 1993).

  [7] J. Smyth and R. Hattam, “Voiced Research as a Sociology for Understanding  “Dropping-out” of School, British Journal of Sociology of Education, 22 (2001): 401-415; J. Smyth and R. Hatta, “Early School Learning ang the Cultural Geography of High Schools,” British Educational Research Journal 28 (2002): 375-377.

  [8] M. Greene, Releasing the Imagination. Essays on Education, the Art, and Social change (San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 1995).

  [9] A. Frank, “Why Study People’s Stories? The Dialogical Ethics of Narrative Analysis,” International Journal of Qualitative Methods 1, no. 1 (2002), Article 6. Retrieved from http://www.ualberta.ca/~ijqm/

  [10] Clandinin et al.

  [11] J. Smyth, When Students Have ‘Relational Power’: The School as a Site for Identity Formation around Engagement and School Retention. Paper presented to the annual meeting of the Australian Association for Research in Education, Adelaide, 27-30 November 2006.

  [12] L. E.  Powers, R. Wilson, J. Matuszewski, A. Phillips, C. Rein, D. Schumacher, and J. Gensert, “Facilitaing Adolescent Self-determination: What Does it Take?” in Self-determination Across the Life Span: Independence and Choice for People with Disabilities, eds. D. J. Sands and M. L. Wehmeyer (Baltimore, MD: P.H. Brookes Publishing Co., 1996), 258.

  [13] Clandinin et al, 229.

  [14] I. E. Boer, Uncertain Territories. Boundaries in Cultural Analysis (Amsterdam, Netherlands: Rodopi, 2006).

  [15] D.  Thiessen, “Researching Student Experiences in Elementary and Secondary School: An Evolving Field of Study,” in International Handbook of Student Experience in Elementary and Secondary School, eds. D. Thiessen and A. Cook-Sather (Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Springerm, 2007), 40.

• Content and Relationships: A False Dichotomy

  7:42 PM Comments Off on Content and Relationships: A False Dichotomy

  A review of The Rose That Grew From Concrete: Teaching and Learning with Disenfranchised Youth by Diane Wishart. The University of Alberta Press, 2009. ISBN: 978-0-88864-516-6

  The Rose That Grew From Concrete is an account of working with and teaching disenfranchised youth in Wild Rose Alternative School (WRS), a private school in Edmonton. Diane Wishart addresses a number of contentious topics – such as special education, labeling students, white privilege, and race and class – and highlights conventional school structures, policies, and practices that further marginalize these students.

  At a time when high school completion, high school success, and student engagement are foremost on the agenda of most provincial governments and school jurisdictions, Wishart’s book serves as another reminder that those we single out as the most deficient, the most oppressed, have the potential to inform us of the changes needed to create an education system for today’s world.

  My former teaching partner and I spent a number of years team teaching in a school similar to WRS. Images, sounds, and stories from a hazy past suddenly floated clearly into focus as I encountered fragments of conversations with WRS students and teachers.

  “The teachers judged me on my marks and treated me by their judgments… and they’d be like, ‘Ok, this kid’s like basically a waste of time.”

  “And so, you know the middle-class people don’t talk to the poor people and the white people don’t talk to the Native people. So if you’re Native and poor, forget it.” 

  Like Wishart, I felt indignation as students came to be defined by their behaviours, wearing labels and codes like “oppositional defiance disorder”, “attention deficit disorder”, “code 42”. These students were far too frequently known only by their deficits. While many critical educators working in schools like WRS search for more liberating practices to aid the exploited, they must at the same time guard against the preoccupation with critiquing and interpreting while evading the responsibility to act.  

  Throughout the book, Wishart makes it clear that the staff of WRS was deeply committed to critical pedagogy, to building relationships with their students, to creating a culture of belonging and respect. They understood the need to engage these youth in questioning, critiquing, and understanding the larger forces giving rise to domination and oppression. Wishart also documents the ways that teachers used literature and the arts to create encounters with those ideas.

  Although creating such a critical pedagogy is the stated aim at the outset of the book, the resulting tension is evident throughout. While coming to understand themselves and the forces of oppression and domination in a larger context, these disenfranchised youth want, at the same time, to belong to that larger society – to get jobs, to belong, to achieve material success.

  Ethical inquiries into disenfranchisement cannot avoid confronting the question of the relationship between the individual and the community. Too frequently, the assumption is made that the needs of the individual are at odds with those of the community. As Wishart moves into this space, she insists that the way through this conflict emerges when we discover our fundamental need to relate to one another.

  It is exactly on this point that I found myself agreeing with – and yet searching for more from – this book. I wanted to see the same need for students to relate to and connect with the topics and ideas they studied. While Wishart documents some attempts at re-visioning and interpreting curriculum for these students, she projects a defeatist resignation. Finding few ways to interpret the official provincial Programs of Study, she laments content coverage, standardized testing, special needs funding, and inadequate teacher education.

  Caught in the false dichotomy between content and relationships, Wishart comes down on the side of relationships, while at the same time providing glimpses into the ways that relationships are formed through engagement with photography, media arts, and drama. Unfortunately, these encounters seldom seem to be part of students’ day-to-day experiences with academic core subjects.  Curriculum theorists and learning experts challenge teachers to reinterpret curriculum, to design learning encounters around an idea that demands and requires the engagement of teachers and students, alike. Disciplines, when treated as living things constantly under renewal and construction, hold the potential to be personally liberating and politically enlightening, for they require both participation and contribution.

  Failing to deconstruct the historical underpinnings of industrial education – that system built on the need for fragmentation, isolation, control, boredom, and even special education – Wishart remains complicit in critiquing and interpreting what is rather than imagining what might be. An alternative school for disenfranchised youth holds the potential for informing the system about what needs to change, how to re-create itself, how to address the malaise and sense of inadequacy that are linked to larger societal tendencies. Throughout the book, Wishart illuminates the problems at the centre of our current schooling endeavour. However, she fails to acknowledge that it is not enough to identify, critique, and interpret what is; rather, the challenge is to change it.

• Illuminating the Blind Spots – Climbing from Student Voice to Student Involvement

  7:17 PM Comments Off on Illuminating the Blind Spots – Climbing from Student Voice to Student Involvement

  “Industrial-age schools have a structural blind spot unlike almost any other contemporary institution. This blind spot arises because the only person who could in fact reflect on how the system as a whole is functioning is the one person who has no voice in the system … the student is the one person who sees all the classes, the stress of home, the multiple conflicting messages from media and the total environment … but they have no power or standing in the system.” Peter Senge[1]

  Alberta Education’s Speak Out is one initiative seeking to remedy this structural “blind spot”. Thousands of young Albertans have shared their desire for positive, respectful relationships with motivated teachers, challenging and meaningful work in the classroom, and opportunities to apply what they’re learning to real life.[2] Students shared similar calls for reform in CEA’s Imagine a school… initiative when “respect us” became the mantra for participants who were asked how school could better meet their needs .[3]

  Clearly, student voice is an invaluable data source in the context of school improvement, but it’s less clear to what extent this voice has been heard. How has it impacted policy and practice? We invite students to share their opinions, but how often do we invite them to become an integral part of classroom practice and co-design their everyday experiences of learning? And yet we know that students are both willing to and highly capable of shaping decisions about the content, process, and outcomes of their learning.^[4]

  Increasingly, young people are demanding to know what the surveys they participate in will be used for. In the summer of 2010, for example, five Social Planning Councils in Ontario conducted youth focus groups to “test-drive” a draft survey designed to measure students’ confidence in learning and in their futures. When asked to identify effective ways of involving them as partners in school and community planning and change, the young people – many of whom are marginalized – said they were tired of being asked about things that don’t matter to them, and given empty promises of change.

  Similarly, students who participated in follow-up focus groups after being surveyed in the What did you do in school today? initiative reminded us that they are often frustrated by being the objects of research without knowing its purpose – they want to know what it’s for, to see the results, and to know what impact it might have. In other words, they’d like to see a shift from student voice to student involvement.

  It is this shift that Adam Fletcher articulates in The Ladder of Student Involvement in School,[5] which identifies eight steps toward increasing recognition of students as agents of change, climbing from exclusion (”adults manipulating students in decision-making”) to voice (“adult led decision-making informed by student voice”), co-design (“Student-led decision-making shared with adults”).

  High school students from North Delta Secondary School in B.C. climbed beyond student voice when they conducted student-led focus groups to learn more about results from the What did you do in school today? survey and their peers’ learning experiences.[6] The resulting presentation – complete with student demographics, student views, and recommendations – helped administrators to realize the issues that students wanted resolved.[7] These students demonstrated the benefits of involving young people in a survey every step of the way – using data as a tool for democratic action that engages students in making a difference.

  With a taste of critical involvement in school decision-making fresh in his mind, one Delta student asserted that 51 percent of his peers being intellectually engaged was “higher than the Canadian norm, [but] still not high enough because that’s only half of the school that’s intellectually engaged so half of the kids are still going to school because they have to – they’re just sitting back and going along for the ride.”

  Educators at Dartmouth’s Sir Robert Borden Junior High School have propelled their students to the pinnacle of the student involvement ladder by involving them as equal partners in school decision-making processes. Students and teachers are building their own professional learning community to co-design learning environments that make students more interested learners.

  Education lags behind other sectors, like social justice and municipal governments, where youth engagement is an integral component in program development and city planning. We know how to collect students’ ideas and opinions; now we need to get better at allowing their voices to guide us and honour the contribution that all students can make to deep meaningful change in education.

  ---

  [1] P. Senge, Schools that Learn, A Fifth Discipline Fieldbook for Educators, Parents, and Everyone Who Cares About Education (New York: Doubleday/Currecy, 2000): 58.

  [2] “Speak Out: The Alberta Student Engagement Initiative Year in Review 2009–2010,” Alberta Education: 38 (www.speakout.alberta.ca/LinkClick.aspx?fileticket=uwkiMK8PcH4%3d&tabid=108)

  [3] K. Gould Lundy, “Imagine a school…,” Education Canada 46, no. 4 (Fall 2006): 49-53 (www.cea-ace.ca/sites/cea-ace.ca/files/EdCan-2006-v46-n4-Lundy.pdf)

  [4] J. Dunleavy and P. Milton, What did you do in school today? Exploring the Concept of Student Engagement and its Implications for Teaching and Learning in Canada (Canadian Education Association, May 2009), 18,19. (https://www.edcan.ca/articles/what-did-you-do-in-school-today-exploring-the-concept-of-student-engagement-and-its-implications-for-teaching-and-learning-in-canada/)

  [5] //www.soundout.org/ladder.html

  [6] The What did you do in school today? survey was a modification of the pre-existing Tell Them From Me survey of The Learning Bar. CEA’s measures of Intellectual Engagement and Instructional Challenge are now available to all schools within the Tell Them From Me survey. (www.thelearningbar.com)

  [7] Puneet Bhatti J. Chauhan, G. Grewal, S. Sachdeva, “Exceeding All Expectations: Student-led Initiatives in a North Delta School,” Education Canada 50, no. 1 (Winter 2010: 28-31.

• Learning from Stories, Stories of Learning

  6:25 PM Comments Off on Learning from Stories, Stories of Learning

  Several years ago, after a lecture I gave on research methods to first year undergraduates, a member of class came up to me. The woman, considerably older than me and from the Carribean, asked if we could have a quick word. I agreed, and asked her if she would like to go to my office. No, she assured me, that wouldn’t be necessary; hers would be a quick inquiry, and we could stay in the classroom where we were. As the other students emptied out of the room, we pulled two chairs aside, and I asked her what I could help her with. She looked me straight in the eye, and then asked me “Where does confidence come from?” Having expected a question of an informational nature – what was the word length for the essay, or how could one access particular resources in the library – I was rather taken aback. What a question. How could I respond to her, in a way that would be both useful to her, and honest?

  We spoke for some time – about her life before she had moved to Britain, her decision to come to university, and her tremendous difficulty in translating her life experiences into an academic framework. Still, she pushed for an answer. In the end, what I offered her was this: for me, at least, self-confidence comes from knowing what you know. There is something very fundamental about validating one’s own life experiences, regarding them as a legitimate source of knowledge, all the while recognizing the inevitable limitations of what we know personally, and even what can be known. When we become familiar with the rock upon which we ourselves stand, a secure footing can afford us a sense of orientation to the world around and beyond us. In the intervening years, I have thought back to this conversation, and believe that it encapsulates for me much of my philosophy of teaching and learning. In the context of formal education, students are often positioned as if they know nothing; it is, however, our task as teachers to resist this construction. Rather, we must communicate to those with whom we are entrusted that what they bring to the table is of value, and show them how what they know can be used as a basis for intellectual exploration.

  In this article, I will discuss the importance of bringing lived experience into the classroom, and why and how this is a cornerstone of the teaching I have done for many years. Teaching is most effective, I believe, when students come to feel that the subject matter is worth caring about, that it has something to do not only with the world around them, but with their own lives. And so it is that I structure my teaching in such a way that there is room for personal storytelling. It is my contention that learning with and through narratives is a very effective tool for bringing people into discussions who might otherwise be excluded. If we believe, as I do, that stories are vital to who we are, and how we are in the world, that they change over time, and that they are both unique and culturally inscripted, then it follows that these stories have a great potential for bridge building, for making vital connections between individuals and the world of ideas. We know that personal stories – narratives – are always told from the perspective of the present and that the past is being continually rewritten in line with understandings anchored in the present and looking out towards the future. As such, they serve as a key for unlocking an oftentimes blocked door to making sense.

  Stories do not come out of nowhere, nor do they simply represent an experience or an event as it actually happened. Rather they are always a representation of that, and as such are a very rich means for accessing inner truths – those ideas, beliefs, and commitments that an individual holds dear. When thinking about the relationship between selves and stories, a number of key questions emerge:

  • Who tells their stories? Who remains silent? Who do they tell their stories to? Who are the main characters in the stories? Who is absent, but was present? Who drives the motion of the story? Who has power and how is it negotiated?
  • What stories do we tell? How do students decide which experiences of theirs they are willing to bring into the classroom and why? Which stories must forever stay outside the gates of the school, or university?
  • Where does the story take place? Where is it recounted? How similar or different are these worlds?
  • When do the stories start, and critically, where do they end? How does this construction help to create the very point of the story?
  • Why is this story being told? What is its strategic function for the speaker?
  • How is the story interpreted? By the speaker? By the listeners?

  As teachers, we must demonstrate to our students that we think we have something to learn from them, as well as some knowledge and skills to impart.

  Paulo Freire has emphasised that real learning can only happen in the classroom when teachers have a sense of the world in which their students live:

  Educators need to know what happens in the world of the [students] with whom they work. They need to know the universe of their dreams, the language with which they skillfully defend themselves from the aggressiveness of their world, what they know independently of the school, and how they know it.[1]

  Becoming genuinely acquainted with the worlds of our students – both real, as they are lived, and imagined, including their dreams and their greatest fears – is a very demanding and dynamic project. As teachers, we must demonstrate to our students that we think we have something to learn from them, as well as some knowledge and skills to impart. Again, quoting Friere, “…teaching cannot be a process of transference of knowledge from the one teaching to the learner. …Learning is a process where knowledge is presented to us, then shaped through understanding, discussion and reflection.”[2] We work up information, including the facts of our existence, into knowledge, much as a potter uses clay as her material which will be made into a piece of ceramics. Ideally, this process of transforming information into knowledge is what we as teachers help to foster in our classrooms.

  Teaching which is built upon the importance of personal experience requires:

  • An acute appreciation and acknowledgement of the importance of positioning: of the student, of the teacher, of the topic. All knowledge is situated – “there is no view from nowhere”[3] – and the acquisition of knowledge is a fundamentally dynamic task. Recognizing that knowledge bases are created and built up from particular positions, the classroom must be a space that uses, rather than resists, this locality. Moreover, questions of teaching “marginalized youth” inevitably invite questions of boundaries: marginal to what/to whom? How are the categories of insider and outsider created and sustained in education? What can we do within our classrooms to make those boundaries more fluid, to shift the eyes of the beholder?
  • Demonstrating that what is to be studied actually matters. It is not sufficient to assume that students will engage with the subject matter simply because not to do so will result in poor performance and ultimately negatively impact upon life opportunities. Rather, curiosity needs to be ignited, and this is true for both teachers and students. A teacher who has grown numb to her subject matter is not one who will ignite a flame of intellectual passion in others. Interest and enthusiasm are not always contagious, but they are often so.
  • Making connections between stories of the self and other stories, and ultimately to other forms of knowledge. While students’ personal experiences are an important starting point for intellectual engagement, it is essential that they come to appreciate that individual stories are never just individual. While we are all of us unique, we can at the same time extract from concrete particulars to wider questions of culture and social structure. As Rice contends, “The story of an individual life – and the coherence of individual identity – depends, for its very intelligibility, on the stories of collective identity that constitute a culture. … cultures and societies organize individual identity.”[4] Individual stories reveal far more than their particular content. They also serve as an indicator of that which the speaker regards as “tellable”, and are created as a response to perceptions of audience. Moreover, and critically, individual stories can serve as the engine to social change. Not only telling one’s stories, but hearing those of others, can be a critical moment in the awakening of a political consciousness, that is, realizing that one’s experiences are shared by others (and, by implication, might be at least partially a result of factors which extend beyond the self.) In this way, the cultivation of narrative knowledge can be a primary means for exploring the relationship between structure and agency.
  • An especially fine-tuned ear for listening beyond one’s own horizon of experience. Individuals tend to tell stories only when they feel they will be listened to. Deep listening is, as Erika Apfelbaum argues, a “risky business” for it requires individuals to entertain the possibility that the world is or can be a very different place from how they imagine it to be.[5] This is why a good teacher is someone who is endowed with a rich imagination, not only with regards to her subject matter, but also in her ability to enter the world of those she wishes to teach. She must be willing to accept the possibility of profound differences between her real lived experiences and those of her students, and to think creatively about how to bridge the chasm between those perspectives. Moreover, as Freire observes, “[B]y listening to and so learning to talk with learners, democratic teachers teach the learners to listen to them as well.”[6] The activities of listening and learning are integrally bound to one another and are demanded both of teachers and students in the transmission of knowledge.

  A vital part of my job, as I see it, is to provide them with tools that will help them not only to understand their own lives as they are living them, but also to imagine other ways of being.

  In virtually every class I teach, I try not only to create an atmosphere in which students feel they can talk about their experiences in relation to the topics we are discussing, but also to build into at least some of the assessments a role for reflections of a personal nature. I will give two examples of this here. The first comes from my class on political psychology, where the first assignment for the class is to write an essay on their own political psychology. The instructions read:

  What are your political beliefs and where do they come from? Have these evolved over the course of your lifetime? What were the most significant influences on your political beliefs? How do these beliefs correspond to the actions in your daily life? What experiences have been most influential in forming your ideas, and why did you make sense of these experiences in the way(s) in which you did? What might have been another way of interpreting those critical experiences? What role did other individuals and/or groups play in the development of your political psychology? Using your own biography as a case study, examine how your experiences compare with a) the assigned readings b) outside readings c) class discussions and d) lectures. You will be assessed on your ability to apply key concepts and debates to your own life.

  The second example comes from a class I teach on aging. Here, half of the course mark is based upon what I call an “intellectual journal”. For each week’s topic, I pose a number of questions that I ask students to respond to. The questions are rooted in the student’s life experiences, but they must relate these questions to other course materials, including readings, films, lectures, and class discussions. Sometimes the journal questions require students to do a short practical exercise. Here is an example of instructions for the entry of the second week of the course, when the topic for discussion is “the meaning of the category of age”:

  Interview three people who are, from your point of view, “young” “middle-aged” and “old”. Find out what “age” means to the person with whom you are speaking. What is their chronological age and what, if anything, does this age mean to them? These conversations do not need to be recorded, but you should take notes during and afterwards. Following this, write in your journal about the meaning of age and aging.  How do your ideas compare with the people you interviewed? What is old? Are you old? What is the meaning of life in old age? In middle age? In youth? Moody (1991) suggests that we think about “life as a whole” and focus on “unity of human life.”[7] What aspects of your life help you to do this? What hinders you? Is this a desirable goal, and is it realizable?

  In both of these examples, my intention is to establish that students are, in themselves, people who come to us with experiences and certain kinds of knowledge, and that those are a valid foundation on which to build other kinds of knowledge. A vital part of my job, as I see it, is to provide them with tools that will help them not only to understand their own lives as they are living them, but also to imagine other ways of being, and ultimately to see and understand new aspects of the world in which we live.

  In preparation for writing this article, I spoke with Agazi Afewerki, whom I orginally met in Toronto in 2009, at the conference on Marginlized Youth and Contemporary Education Contexts. Agazi was one of the young people who was invited to tell the audience his story, how he had come up through the Pathways to Education programme (www.pathwayscanada.ca/home.html) , and had gone on to study first Business, and then Law. (He lives in London, England, where I teach.)

  In our conversation, Agazi stressed time and again that the most important influence on his (highly successful) educational career was those teachers who had showed a real willingness to listen. Regardless of the subject matter, if teachers were able to create in the classroom space for students’ experiences to be validated – even if those experiences might not seem relevant – they fostered in the classroom an open, yet intellectually stimulating environment where real learning was possible. Much of what Agazi said echoed with my own experiences, both as a student and now as a teacher. That it is not always possible to create such an environment is obvious; but too often it is the educational system itself that gets in our way. With the emphasis on pre-established, transparent learning objectives, we become less and less flexible as we enter the classroom, less open to how we approach the topics we wish to teach, and less sensitive to how certain discussions may engage or silence our students.

  In the pre-conference workshop in which presenters were invited to participate, we were asked to answer the question “What do you believe to be true but can’t substantiate?” I would like to conclude this essay with my response to this question, as scribbled on my workshop papers:

  I believe that everyone is born with the potenial to be curious about the world around them and beyond. It is our job as educators to ignite that curiosity and to provide students with the skills to explore it. This creative act of making meaning (which includes but is not limited to investigating our own position in the world, and enhances the possibility of realizing our own potential) is one of the core activities that identify us as being human.

  EN BREF – L’apprentissage à travers et au moyen de récits est un outil très efficace pour intégrer à des discussions des personnes qui pourraient autrement en être exclues. Si nous croyons que les récits sont vitaux à notre être, qu’ils changent avec le temps et qu’ils sont à la fois uniques et culturellement inscrits, il s’ensuit qu’ils comportent un potentiel considérable pour établir des liens vitaux entre les individus et le monde des idées. Un récit ne représente pas tout simplement une expérience telle qu’elle s’est déroulée. Plutôt, c’est toujours une représentation de celle-ci et, ainsi, un moyen très riche d’accéder aux idées, convictions et engagements auxquels tient quelqu’un. Il est très exigeant d’apprendre à vraiment connaître le monde – tant réel qu’imaginaire – de nos élèves. À titre d’enseignants, nous devons montrer que nous sommes ouverts à apprendre de nos élèves, comme nous avons à leur transmettre des connaissances et des compétences.

  ---

  [1] P. Freire, (1998) Teachers as Cultural Workers – Letters to Those Who Dare Teach, translated by Donoldo Macedo, Dale Koike, and Alexandre Oliveira (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1998), 72.

  [2] Ibid., 22, 31.

  [3] T. Nagel, The View from Nowhere (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986).

  [4] J. S. Rice, “’Getting our Histories Straight’”: Culture, Narrative, and Identity in the Self-help Movement” in J. Davis, ed. Stories of Change: Narrative and Social Movements (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2002).

  [5] E. Apfelbaum, “The Dread: An Essay on Communication Across Cultural Boundaries,” International Journal of Critical Psychology, no. 4 (2001): 19-35

  [6] Friere, 65.

  [7] H. Moody, “The Meaning of Life in Old Age” in N. Jecker, ed., Aging and Ethics: Philosophical Problems in Gerontology (New Jersey: Humana Press, 1991).

• Engaging Learning in the 21st Century

  November 15, 2010 4:58 PM Comments Off on Engaging Learning in the 21st Century

  On November 17, 18 and 19 CEA will facilitate 2 workshops at York Region’s Quest Conference: Engaging Learning in the 21st Century. We look forward to sharing what we have learned about student engagement through What did you do in school today? in our presentations on Students as Agents of Change and CEA’s Multidimensional Model of Student Engagement: From Theory to Practice. Denise Rose (Superintendent) and Lisa Blackstock (Director of Staff Development) from the Foothills School Division in Alberta will be co-facilitating the second workshop with Penny Milton.

  This year CEA was also invited to submit an article to the Quest Journal 2010 – our article The Search for Competence in the 21st Century is now available to read through the online journal at https://www.leadingedgelearningcenter.com/. We welcome your comments on the article and our presentations, which will be posted here in the next couple of weeks. 

• Teachers Need Feedback Too

  October 31, 2010 7:54 PM Comments Off on Teachers Need Feedback Too

  Just as teachers assess their students’ learning and provide feedback about it, so too should students assess their teacher and provide feedback.

  This is not a quest for popularity, or even approval, but rather the common sense response to a teacher’s duty to enable learning, not simply present information. Since communication occurs in the listener, one has to seek feedback in order to know what is being communicated and how. Students’ perception is the reality within which a teacher works.

  So how might one ask students to provide feedback? Actually, you don’t even have to ask. Their moment-to- moment and day-to-day response is generally highly informative, except that you have to disentangle it from the heavy overburden of compliance and approval seeking that permeates school life, and the social norms that often mask students’ true feelings, especially in adolescence.

  However, its also useful to make an explicit request for feedback. This signals your desire to be supportive, yields useful information and creates an opportunity to catch serious issues early in the year. I found the following simple questions, answered anonymously, to be be very informative after a month or so.

  • In general, how are you feeling about the course so far? [Likert Scale]
  • Is there anything you think I should … to help you learn better? – Stop [Open Ended], Start [Open Ended], Continue [Open Ended], or Change [Open Ended]
  • How satisfied are you with your own effort and engagement so far? [Likert Scale]
  • Is there anything in particular you think I should know? [Open Ended]

  Having asked for feedback, it is important to report the results to your students along with any comments on the results, particularly any adjustments you intend to make. Generally, I found a range of responses that invited some explanation about why I did what I did, but only relatively minor adjustments to procedures. Occasionally, however, I learned something more substantial, and perhaps even challenging. Sometimes, I got a distressing response from an individual student that I would have liked to follow-up on but since the responses were anonymous my only option was to reinforce for all students my previous invitation to see me individually if they had any questions or concerns.

   Whatever the particular response, this was a very productive exercise that helped to establish open communication with my students and helped me to be a better teacher.

• What’s Stopping Us?

  October 21, 2010 12:58 PM Comments Off on What’s Stopping Us?

  It’s Thursday afternoon in a school in Brampton, Ontario. The dismissal bell has rung, and staff members are anxiously waiting in the school library for the arrival of the principal who has called what has been billed as an extremely important meeting—a command performance!
  
  “I’ve got news for you,” the principal declared as he entered the room and sat down. Our ears naturally perked up. 
  
  “We’ve got to change. The world around us is changing and we have to change with it. We need a paradigm shift in the way we think about the work we do!”
  
  And then he paused.
  
  That’s all I remember about that meeting—except the date: February…1990!
  
  In the weeks that followed, we engaged in lively discussions about new practices, student-centered learning, real-world problem solving and authentic tasks and assessments. Not everyone agreed with the new programs that were being introduced, but the school, the district and the province seemed to be pushing forward.
  
  Yet today, some 20 years later, new generations of teachers continue to beat a path to a largely unchanged and unmoved schoolhouse. Curious, isn’t it? Maybe not!
  
  In my last entry, I presented a list of criteria that could help us develop powerful and engaging learning tasks. Someone on my current staff saw the blog post and approached me this week with a rather poignant remark: “This is a great list, but we’ve been talking about this stuff for so long. Why aren’t we there yet?”
  
  There is something stubbornly resistant about this place we call school. But what, exactly, is at the heart of this resistance. I used to think that the solution to the dilemma lay in getting people motivated and excited about new ideas.
  
  But now I spend a good deal of my time thinking that there are more fundamental factors at play here. My new question:
  
  If we have a sense of what the criteria for quality learning environments are, what are the things that we bump up against when we’re trying to develop these experiences at the classroom and school level?
  
  In my own experience, I see several things that contribute to our current state of inertia when it comes to transformation. In this entry, I have chosen to focus on three of the “dissuaders” that I have encountered over the past three or four years.
  
  First, the accountability movement that also began in our schools about 20 years ago (huh!) has actually narrowed our vision of what schools could be for our learners by forcing educators to focus primarily on things that can be easily measured. A charged-up, uber-excited group of teachers in September can quickly turn into a panicked and rather staid set of individuals as the deadline for the first set of report cards approaches. In the past several years, I have found it increasingly difficult to report on student progress using the rather narrow band of success defined by our current reporting system.
  
  And let’s face it: many teachers are governed by yearly reporting cycles. If there is a mismatch between how we teach and how we are forced to report on what we teach, guess which one is going to win out? When push comes to pull, the tiny assessment boxes on the report card rule every time!
  
  Point One: We need assessment, evaluation as well as reporting tools and cycles that are more reflective of the transformative practice that we want to encourage in our schools. We need to expand our notion of accountability to include much more than what can be tested.
  
  Second, the architectural design of our school facilities goes a long way to controlling what actually happens within them on a consistent basis. Most school design is still based on the idea that learning takes place in small, isolated rooms with a single door. Despite a brief period in the late 60’s and early 70’s when walls started coming down in favour of more open learning spaces, this compartmentalized approach to design has been one of the most recognizable features of schools.
  
  Not only are teachers limited to just a few possibilities when it comes to arrangement of learners and furniture, the potential of opening up classrooms to other resources: physical or human is also limited by size and space. Oddly enough, I’m finding that, instead of getting larger and more spacious, many new schools that I visit have even smaller classroom spaces, smaller library, and smaller common areas for collaborative meeting of staff, students and parents outside the confines of the classroom.
  
  Point Two: The way that we imagine learning space will have a great influence on whether our visions of transformation will occur. We need transformation-minded teachers, learners and others to be part of design teams and committees, not just in the early stages, but throughout the entire planning and building process! (Do they make extra small hard-hats?)
  
  Finally, we are still forced to think of schooling in terms of separate distinct curriculum areas. Many jurisdictions produce separate curriculum documents, written by separate curriculum teams and rolled out of district offices by separate groups of curriculum consultants. The chances of developing powerful and engaging integrated tasks at the classroom level is diminished by the way that this strict discipline-bound approach forces educators to envision their curriculum design.
  
  Oh there are some advantages afforded by our current model of doing school. It  allows for easier scheduling of staff and learners, a more efficient balancing of time throughout the day, as well as the development of neat and tidy sets of data for—you guessed it—report cards.
  
  The world that is meant to be the subject of our school-based investigations is, itself, a pretty complex place. And the life that we live within that world is becoming increasingly connected and integrated. We can no longer expect learners to be prepared to be a confident contributor to that world unless the learning experiences in which they are immersed throughout their schooling are somehow reflective of that complexity. And in order to do this, we need a curriculum that reflects the deeper relationships between and among the learning expectations that we develop and the documents that we write!
  
  Point Three: A stronger focus on connective curriculum and interdisciplinary thinking must accompany any attempts to really transform the work of our classrooms. The most creative and imaginative teachers, despite their best intentions, will still declare the challenges they face in bringing to life a curriculum that is composed in silos.
  
  So, there are my three entry points into the conversation about some of the challenges that we face in bringing our ideas for quality learning environments to life. But you have likely encountered your own points of resistance.
  
  What do you see as the primary point of resistance in your own school experience? What are some of the ways that you have met and even overcome these challenges? Where is the most work needed if we are going to foster the development of quality learning environments for all students?

  
  

  Take a chance—post a response!

• Is a Teacher a Friendly Critic or Critical Friend?

  October 20, 2010 8:31 PM Comments Off on Is a Teacher a Friendly Critic or Critical Friend?

  Supportive relationships between teachers and students create safety and provide encouragement but they are not uncritical.  In fact, constructive feedback – in both directions – is an essential feature of a healthy relationship, but the manner and spirit of that feedback determines whether it enhances or undermines the relationship.

  Students should see their teacher as a critical friend, not a friendly critic. The distinction is important because feedback not only provides information about current learning but also contributes to students’ emerging sense of self-efficacy as a learner, which affects their inclination to engage in future learning.  Therefore, encouragement should be in the foreground and correction comes later.  In learning, fluency precedes accuracy.

  Students decide, generally sub-consciously, about whether and how to engage with an activity based on a sort of cost-benefit analysis and one of the “costs” to be considered is the likelihood of failure. If a student does not feel that s/he has a reasonable likelihood of success then s/he will generally find reasons and ways not to engage, even if the task itself is attractive.

  The following recommendations for building confidence in students are based on self-efficacy theory, which holds that the underlying motivators of human action are perceptions of personal control and competence.  (Motivation in education: theory, research and applications, Chapter 3, by Pintrich & Schunk, 1996) 

  • Help students develop their self-perceptions of competence within a content domain. Provide assistance in areas of difficulty, but focus on constructive, encouraging and specific feedback about what students can do rather than what they cannot do.

  • Help students to maintain relatively accurate but high expectations and self-efficacy beliefs, and to avoid the impression of incompetence. Towards this end, use formative assessment frequently to provide descriptive feedback and supportive suggestions, and make much more limited use of summative evaluation and critique.

  • Because students’ perceptions of competence develop not just from accurate feedback from the teacher, but through actual success on challenging academic tasks, assignments should be relatively challenging but reasonable.

  • Minimize the amount of relative achievement information that is publicly available to students.  Do not use comparative evaluation.

  • Foster the belief that competence or ability is a changeable, controllable aspect of development rather than a question of innate talent or intelligence. Focus on encouragement rather than praise and stress the merits of effort and persistence.

  Supportive relationships with students are based on a commitment to student learning and faith in their ability to learn, but also includes constructive feedback about learning that provides helpful guidance and builds a realistic but confident sense of self-efficacy.

• Wanted: Quality Learning Environments

  October 10, 2010 12:34 AM Comments Off on Wanted: Quality Learning Environments

  Let me begin by acknowledging the elephant that has been lurking in the room for sometime now:

  Schools are not the best place for kids!

  A rather odd statement I know, but look at it this way: If we were to take everything we know about cognitive, emotional and social development, about how people learn and under what conditions and we used that to develop a place where children could be nurtured into a life of happiness and meaningful participation, do you think it would look anything like the schools of today?

  Most people recognize that there is a wide gap between the schools that we need for the 21st century and the schools that we currently have. Although the problem of how best to bridge the gap is a complex one, and even a little scary at times, we have to start somewhere and we have to start soon.

  In the next couple of entries, I would like to do some thinking out loud about a possible starting point that has been recognized by many as the one that holds great promise.

  ---

  If the movie Waiting for Superman presented me with any ideas worth pursuing, it was the one that claims that schools are really about the adults. I’ll massage that point a little and say that, from my experience, our schools are really designed for teaching and not for learning.

  Don’t believe me? Take a closer look at the current education reform discourse that is being used in our schools. So much emphasis is being placed on effective teaching practice: strategies and approaches that teachers can use on their students that will, if performed correctly, result in higher achievement. (My own home bookshelf boasts 32 books on “strategies that work”—all of them written within the last 5 years.) The most popular courses at faculties of education are the ones that deal with effective classroom (read student)  management techniques. Lesson plan templates are strongly geared to the things that teachers are going to do to students in order to get them to learn. Professional development programs in many jurisdictions are limited to those approaches and methods approved by ministries of education and school districts.

  And last year, a ministry-appointed trainer came in and presented teachers at our school with a scripted literacy program to use with our students during the first 20 days of school! It was at that point that I realized that the elephant in the room was actually sitting squarely on the school improvement agenda, and we weren’t going to be moving anywhere very quickly!

  It was then that I began to realize that we need a narrative turn in the story that we tell ourselves about school and I believe that the most important thread in this new story is this:  these buildings to which we force our children to come day after day, year after year are really about them and not us. Our public schools need to become primarily places of learning, not teaching. In schools, the word student and all of the metaphorical implications with which it has become infused, needs to be replaced by something that will force us to pay attention to the needs, challenges and possibilities of the young people that walk into our midst each day. For now, let’s consider the word learner.

  In redefining what we mean by effective, successful schools our starting point should be a serious examination of the heart of the school experience: the type of “work” in which learners are engaged on a daily basis.

  Imagine if all educators–not just teachers–committed significantly more time to designing the tasks and experiences in which learners were going to be engaged than we did to writing the lesson plans, preparing for tests, marking work, and trying to rush through curriculum expectations. Imagine if deep and transferable learning were the new standard for achievement and success. Imagine if learner engagement was an essential criterion for evaluating teacher effectiveness, more essential than test scores.

  So, how do we begin to make our imaginings come to life?

  Well, I think we can begin by trying to think back on those times when our classrooms really hummed—a time when learners were turned on so much that the recess bell seemed like a rude interruption. For those of you who are not educators in the formal sense, you may recall times in your own schooling where you just couldn’t wait to get to school in the morning, or you didn’t want to leave in the afternoon.

  I’ve thought about those times in my own educational career and I’ve come up with a list of ten criteria that might get the conversation going. Here goes!

  You know you’re really on to something when:

  1. the activity connects with the world of the learner; it is engaging because they can relate to it.
  2. the activity comes from the learner’s own input; it is engaging because they helped to design it
  3. the activity is based on the freedom to choose; it is engaging because they selected it
  4. the activity is meaningful; it is engaging because they feel that they are contributing something to their school, their community or the world
  5.  the activity is challenging; it is engaging because there is a real problem to be solved
  6. the activity draws the outside world in; it is engaging because it is rooted in the non-school world
  7. the activity is awe-inspiring; it is engaging because it encourages learners to look at their world in a different way
  8. the activity is interesting; it is engaging because it forces the learner to say “huh!”
  9. the activity is interdisciplinary; it is engaging because it involves ideas from a variety of traditionally separate curriculum areas
  10. the activity is expansive; it is engaging because it offers the opportunity for further investigation and learning

   I realize that, in this brief space, I’ve just begun to explore the question of what makes for a powerful, high-quality learning environment. But it’s a start!

  I would love to get your input on the list—things that could be added, taken away, expressed in a different way. I would also like to hear about those experiences that you’ve had where learning has been particularly powerful. What made it memorable?

  I believe that, despite the complexity of our current situation, we can begin to design and create schools that are full of life, of excitement and wonder. I’m hoping that something about this issue might capture your imagination and allow us to continue the conversation.

  Stephen Hurley
  stephen.hurley@sympatico.ca

• Preparing The Classroom Garden

  October 7, 2010 7:52 PM Comments Off on Preparing The Classroom Garden

  In my last post I referred you to Sir Ken Robinson’s TED Talk of 2006.  This year he followed up with a call for revolution in education: “We have to recognize that human flourishing is not a mechanical process, it’s an organic process. And you cannot predict the outcome of human development; all you can do, like a farmer, is create the conditions under which they will begin to flourish.”

  Now much as I respect Sir Ken, I cannot agree.  That statement is just too passive and does not acknowledge the power and responsibility that teachers have for actively shaping student experience and proactively nurturing learning.  However, I do agree that ‘human flourishing’ – and learning – is much more organic than mechanistic.  So, as we begin a new school year, what can we do to prepare the educational garden for a bumper crop of learners?

  The Critical Thinking Consortium (http://www.tc2.ca/wp/) asserts that powerful learning depends on supportive relationships, enabling resources, stimulating opportunities and helpful guidance. Let’s start with relationships.

  Supportive relationships – between students and students, students and teachers, students and parents, and teachers and parents – are an important foundation for learning. Creating supportive relationships in the classroom is the first task of teaching.

  So what about that old maxim – Don’t smile until Christmas. To be blunt, it’s nonsense, a remnant of an outdated and unprofessional orientation to “teaching as telling” that required “classroom management” to ensure attentiveness to delivered wisdom rather than the creation of a classroom culture that promotes engagement for constructed understanding.

  Learning is a partnership based on a relationship and few relationships take hold if nobody smiles. So, go ahead, smile. Let’s not confuse sternness with strength. Your students need to know that their teacher is serious about their learning and committed to it, and to them. Simply laying down a bunch of rules does not give them this message.

  Classrooms don’t work best when controlled by the teacher, they work best when well structured by the teacher – which largely obviates the need for control. Classroom structure is the scaffolding that a teacher provides to enable learning. The teacher has to take the lead in creating classroom structures that facilitate smooth operations so that engagement in learning is not impeded, but this is best done in collaboration with students through an appreciative process of identifying what works and spreading it, rather than focussing on what does not work and trying to suppress it.

  I am embarrassed to say that 37 years ago when I faced my first Junior Secondary class I had this backwards and so I gave my best “you’re in the army now” speech on day one to an entirely unimpressed young audience that had heard it all before. I now know that was both unwise and unproductive. Just as you catch more flies with honey, learning proceeds best in response to invitations, not exhortations or demands.

• Waiting for Superman: A Canadian Perspective

  September 30, 2010 12:00 AM Comments Off on Waiting for Superman: A Canadian Perspective

  Canada has consistently performed well in international achievement assessments and is a top performer internationally in Reading, Math and Science. Canada has a unique decentralized education system where funding and policy decisions are made by provincial and territorial governments. Variations in achievement levels and in funding reflect differences in population, geography and economy. Canada’s public education system is open to all children and several provinces provide partial financial support to support independent schools making them more affordable to some families. In response to the desire for choice by families many local school districts allow parents to choose which public school their children will attend. Alberta is the only province that has incorporated charter schools into their public education system. Many school districts, especially in large urban areas offer alternative schools or programs, specialist schools or programs for arts, sports, languages, science and technology. While parents can choose these schools for their children pre-qualifications or lotteries may be used if programs are over-subscribed.
  While Canadian students are doing well, the public believes the quality of education, needs to improve. Canada’s schools produce more equitable results than almost all other countries but there is much work to do to make sure all children share the benefits of a good education. It’s time to build on Canadian success to make sure that all children and youth thrive in this rapidly changing world.

• Bringing Critical Thinking to the Main Stage

  September 26, 2010 5:54 PM Comments Off on Bringing Critical Thinking to the Main Stage

  Bringing Critical Thinking to the Main Stage

• The Hard Work of Learning and the Challenges of “Good” Teaching

  September 22, 2010 7:32 PM Comments Off on The Hard Work of Learning and the Challenges of “Good” Teaching

  Everyone knows what ‘good’ teaching is. Or do they?

  We confront this issue regularly at the university level, where most courses end with detailed student evaluations of the instructor. As might be expected, based on student ratings, university professors are distributed along the scale from abysmal to awesome. But there’s a problem. When student ratings of “good teaching” are compared to instructors’ effectiveness in supporting learning (measured through common examinations, for example), we rarely see a strong correlation. The instructors who have walls covered with teaching awards fare no better than their scorned colleagues. How can this be?

  The answer seems to be that students are more occupied with immediate experiences, such as atmosphere and personality (whereby good teaching is assessed in terms of feelings of comfort, security, feedback, being valued, etc.), and instructors are more focused on the longer-term benefits of actually learning something (whereby good teaching is assessed in terms of achievement, retention, life success, etc.). As educators ourselves, we confess to leaning more toward the latter conception. Unfortunately, even when this distinction is made clear, the results and claims of the research on good teaching have been ambiguous at best.

  Perhaps the most commonly cited studies into the matter fall into the category of “value-added” research. Investigators using this approach look for statistical relationships among such variables as student achievement, teachers, class size, and school funding – a strategy that is not without its problems. For example, a frequent criticism is that this research casts effective teaching strictly in terms of student achievement on standardized performance evaluations. We suspect that readers are well aware of the issues around this construct.

  Nevertheless, there are some compelling aspects to this research, thanks in large part to the wealth of data that has been collected through the No Child Left Behind initiative in the United States. In particular, some researchers have shown that, regardless of school demographics and related factors, some teachers seem to inspire their students to outstanding results – year after year. And, of course, the students of other teachers (often in the same school and teaching the same grade) have consistently poor results. As Green summed up this body of inquiry, “When researchers ran the numbers in dozens of different studies, every factor under a school’s control produced just a tiny impact, except for one: which teacher the student had been assigned to.”[1] Why this is the case has been illuminated by Hattie in his synthesis of over 800 meta-analyses relating to achievement. He listed 138 key influences on students’ learning, categorized into the domains of student, teacher/teaching, school, curricula, and home. Variables relating to what teachers do in their classrooms account for 19 of the top 30.[2]

  Perhaps the most intriguing result generated so far was reported by Hanushek and Rivkin. Gauging effective teaching according to student progress, the “top” 5 percent of teachers in their data set managed to encourage their students through an average of about 1.5 grade levels in a single year. At the other end of the spectrum, the “bottom” 5 percent of teachers consistently moved their students through only half a grade level, on average.[3] Even though we have a problem with the fact this research is based on standardized test results, the statistics give us pause. The differences are just too great, especially when they can be disentangled from social background, class size, and other distracters.

  Values-added research – and most educational research for that matter – seems to assume that everyone agrees on what a teacher is supposed to do. That’s simply not a tenable assumption.

  Unfortunately, these sorts of statistics may only be confirming what everybody already knew: there are some really great teachers out there. As for practical advice on how to distinguish among effective and ineffective teaching practices, the situation is not nearly as clear. For example, in a value-added study of high school teachers, Aronson and colleagues were unable to identify specific teacher characteristics or practices that could account for differences in student achievement – summing up with the statement that “the vast majority of the total variation in teacher quality is unexplained by observable teacher characteristics.”[4] To make matters worse, the list of qualities that do not predict effective teaching might be a little unsettling to many readers, including such factors as a graduate-school degree, deep background in a discipline, high SAT or IQ scores, an extroverted personality, politeness, confidence, warmth, and enthusiasm. These seem to be precisely the qualities that students name and that schools of education identify when pressed to distinguish what’s important.

  How to proceed with the question of effective teaching, then?

  We want to suggest here that what makes this question a difficult one is not the word effective but the word teaching. Values-added research – and most educational research for that matter – seems to assume that everyone agrees on what a teacher is supposed to do. That’s simply not a tenable assumption.

  Changes in “Management”

  Elsewhere we’ve offered one account of how the notion of teaching has evolved over recent centuries as prevailing sensibilities shifted and societal needs unfolded.[5] We won’t try to summarize here the evolution of the social role or the word’s meaning, but will mention that a conflicted history and contested usages are evidenced in the hundreds of metaphors and synonyms for teaching that are commonly heard today. A case in point is the obvious contrast between the recent teaching-as-facilitation metaphor that is familiar from constructivist-based writings and the more entrenched teaching-as-instruction interpretation that arose in the early stages of the Scientific Revolution. The two notions couldn’t be further apart in terms of the beliefs about learning that propelled them into common usage, or in terms of their entailments for classroom practice. But it’s not uncommon to encounter them in the same policy statement or teachers’ guide – sometimes in the same sentence.

  Because teaching is too big a concept for us to deal with here, let us instead look at the evolution of the notion of management within teaching over the last century. We recently came across a history of teacher education in Calgary and were a little surprised to read about a heavy emphasis on management in Alberta normal schools at the turn of the 20^th century. More specifically, the concern was with “management defects”, which included “faulty questioning, unrestrained calling out, too much teaching, too little seatwork, lack of method in teaching …, and inappropriate classification of pupils.” [6] Moving through this list, it almost seems as though management was used as a descriptor of everything the professional educator was expected to do within a classroom environment. Perhaps this is to be expected, given the backdrop of school organization around the model of a factory, and curricula structured after tasks on an assembly line.

  But a significant shift in meaning occurred in the 1950s, when the broad notion of management was rather suddenly narrowed and conflated with the notion of control, which in turn was seen as the hallmark of good teaching. As behaviourism ascended to the dominant discourse in educational policy and research, discussions of management shifted from a breadth of concerns associated with the efficient functioning of a classroom to focused references to controlling students – their behaviours, their measureable learning outcomes, and so on. Even the group-based notion of “classroom management” was recast in terms of controlling individual actions. Needless to say, there was a concomitant change in understandings of teaching. As revealed in the practicum evaluation forms of the era, good teaching was recast in terms of effective control of what each student was doing.

  This behaviourism-inspired conflation of management and control still lingers, illustrated in the fact that the phrases “classroom management” and “classroom control” are used interchangeably in many contexts. A more recent evolution has been to attempt to separate them once again, discard references to control, and soften conceptions of management. Within learner-centered discussions of classroom life, management tends to be recast not as the principal work of the educator, but as a necessary backdrop to teaching. That is, most commentators still agree it’s important to be able to manage a classroom, but that’s not the same as running a little factory or controlling the actions of each individual in a group. Rather, the current concept of management seems to be more about such specifics as efficient procedures and established routines. As might be expected, with this change comes a further revision in popular understandings of effective teaching. As reflected in the value-added studies, effective teaching is not framed in terms of the actual moment of engagement or the specific actions of the teacher, but in terms of the where students progress relative to where they began. Not surprisingly, as noted, researchers have been unable to reverse engineer this conception of the consequences of good teaching into the qualities and practices of good teaching.

  Challenging Changes

  It’s strangely easy to reconcile the different phases in the recent evolution of notion of management – that is, from the early 20^th century usage as an overarching descriptor of the educator’s responsibilities, to its mid 20^th century usage as a synonym for control, to the late 20^thcentury usage in reference to a teacher’s background competencies. In fact, it’s so easy to see a harmony in these conflicting constructs that we are compelled to suggest that – while understandings of “management” and “effective teaching” have changed – the popular conception of the core notion of teaching has remained relatively stable.

  Indeed, a constant across the evolutions noted above is that teaching has been conceived in terms of effecting change. That is, teachers have consistently and persistently been seen as responsible for ensuring that the persons who exit their classrooms are different from the persons who entered, and this responsibility for changing learners is most often interpreted in terms of causing things to happen.

  No matter how you slice it, the evidence shows the teacher really, really matters.

  We suspect that this entrenched and pervasive belief is at the heart of difficulties associated with specifying what it is that good teachers do that “not-so-good” teachers don’t do, and a reason that researchers can’t seem to find qualities or practices that are common to good teachers. It’s because, simply put, teachers don’t cause learners to change.

  To contextualize this point, the past half century of research into learning – conducted across domains that include genomics, neurology, psychology, sociology, anthropology, and ecology – has underscored that learners are complex, self-determining beings. How a student responds to whatever a teacher does is determined by that student’s complex history – genetic, experiential, social, cultural, and so on. True, the student’s learning is dependent on the teacher’s teaching. No matter how you slice it, the evidence shows the teacher really, really matters. But the student’s learning is not determined by the teacher’s teaching. And that’s a game changer that should prod us to rethink and redefine what teaching is all about.

  To this end, our title is intended to be a little ironic. If we were forced to collect the consequences of emergent research into learning for the pragmatics of teaching, it would be that good teaching isn’t at all about changing students; it’s about challenging them.

  This suggestion isn’t mere wordplay, and the trans-disciplinary conceptual shifts that sit underneath it are anything but subtle. It does more than present a further challenge to the thoroughly critiqued transmission-oriented, delivery-mode conceptions of teaching. It also renders problematic contemporary notions of teaching as facilitating and guiding. It is an assertion that teaching is not so much about easing people toward knowing something they don’t know, but about challenging them to notice in ways they might not have noticed. There are no specifiable ends to education here, only ever-expanding horizons of possibility.

  We have no hard evidence for it, but our strong suspicion is that, if researchers were to reframe their analyses of what’s going on in the classrooms of those 5 percent of teachers whose students are excelling – regardless of where those students start and irrespective of social demographics – they would find that, in fact, what those teachers are up to isn’t all over the map. With regard to practices, they are doubtlessly challenging their students, refusing to make things easy and constantly expecting more than of learners than learners might imagine themselves capable. And with regard to qualities, they are undoubtedly curious – about where ideas come from, how students might have arrived at particular constructs, possibilities that arise when different people and different traditions are juxtaposed, and so on.

  What does this look like? A simple example:

  One of us (Brent) recently dropped into two mathematics lessons, taught by different teachers whose classrooms were adjacent to one another. The school’s policy was for all classes at the same grade level to stay more-or-less in sync, and so the topics of both lessons was adding single digit numbers for sums up to 18.

  Before going any further, we should mention that both classes were exceedingly well managed. Each teacher was warm, approachable, attentive, and clearly adored by the students. The principal reported proudly that parents are thrilled to have their children assigned to either classroom. For some reason, however, one didn’t seem to sponsor the same sort of enthusiasm for mathematics, nor the same levels of mathematical insight, as the other.

  The reason was obvious to us when Brent stepped from one room into the other. The first was organized around a carefully structured and rehearsed explanation, brief guided discussion, and then focused individual work on well-sequenced practice exercises drawn from a textbook. The other lesson seemed to be little more than a question printed tidily on the whiteboard: “How many different ways can you add two numbers together to get 15?”

  The first of these lessons was about changing students – that is, about manipulating understandings by engineering learning experiences to fine-grained detail. It was a teaching about molding, shaping, instructing, informing, guiding, facilitating – about everyone achieving the same sort of functional competence. And, for the most part, the students performed. The outcomes were anticipated and achieved.

  The other lesson was about challenging students. If we had been compelled to rate what was happening according to the management-based rubrics – regardless of which of the 20^th century interpretations of the word management might be used – this lesson would not have fared as well. Students talked out of turn and over one another, some meandered off task and worked with a sum other than 15, some were using more than two addends to get to 15, some strayed even further afield and included numbers with fractions. One quiet pair in a corner even slipped into integers, hoarding their delight at the realization that the possibilities were endless when you allowed yourself to use “minus numbers”. Although the teacher attempted to anticipate such happenings, she confessed afterward that she really didn’t “do a good job of predicting” where things would go.

  There were many things at work here, but none of them fall into the category of observable and measurable qualities. Our guess is that, had we the time and expertise to unpack what was going on, we would have found that the second teacher had a “growth mindset”,[7] believing intelligence to be more a matter of focused and demanding practice than genetic endowment. She likely had deeper pedagogical content knowledge, suggested by a prompt that invited multiple interpretations of number, addition, equality, and so on. We do know that she perceived herself more as a participant than an overseer, noting that she always learned new things about addition through this sort of prompt and confessing that she too found it “a little challenging.”

  “Telling a kid a secret he [sic] can find out himself is not only bad teaching, it is a crime.”[8] To our ears, this statement by Freudenthal identifies a vital distinction between good and bad teaching. In a culture of education that is focused on changing students, it makes sense to tell, to show how, to lead, to facilitate discovery, to guide toward insight. A teaching that is focused on challenging learners is organized around the much more demanding tasks of setting situations that allow students to negotiate the level of difficulty, of trusting they will choose the tougher route when they are able, of really listening to where they’re coming from and what they know. It is our hope that, as teaching refashions itself in this rapidly evolving world, it finds its excellence in its challenges.

  EN BREF – « Bien » enseigner, tout le monde sait ce que c’est. Vraiment? Quoique la définition d’une bon enseignant ait évolué, les enseignants ont toujours été jugés responsables d’apporter le changement. Selon le modèle à valeur ajoutée en vigueur, un enseignement efficace n’est pas décrit en fonction d’actions spécifiques, mais plutôt en fonction des progrès des élèves par rapport à leur point de départ. Cependant, selon les nouvelles recherches, un bon enseignement ne vise pas à changer les élèves, mais plutôt à les stimuler. Voilà qui transforme la dynamique et qui devrait nous inciter à repenser et à redéfinir la nature de l’enseignement. Un enseignement destiné à stimuler les apprenants est organisé en fonction des tâches beaucoup plus exigeantes d’établir des situations permettant aux élèves de négocier le niveau de difficulté, de s’en remettre à eux pour choisir la voie la plus difficile lorsqu’ils le peuvent, ainsi que de vraiment écouter ce qu’ils ont à dire et ce qu’ils savent.

  ---

  [1] E. Green, “Building a Better Teacher: Can Educators be Educated About How to Educate?” New York Times Magazine, 2 March 2010. Accessed online, 1 June 2010, at www.nytimes.com/2010/03/07/magazine/07Teachers-t.html?pagewanted=1.

  [2] J. A. C. Hattie, Visible Learning: A Synthesis of Over 800 Meta-analyses Relating to Achievement (Abington, UK: Routledge, 2009).

  [3] E. A. Hanushek and S. G. Rivkin, “Generalizations About Using Value-added Measures of Teacher Quality,” American Economic Review 100, no. 2 (2010), 267–271.

  [4] D. Aaronson, L. Barrow, and W. Sander, “Teachers and Student Achievement in the Chicago Public High Schools,” Journal of Labor Economics 25, no. 1 (2007): 95–135.

  [5] B. Davis, D. Sumara, and R. Luce-Kapler, Engaging Minds: Changing Teaching in Complex Times (New York: Routledge, 2008).

  [6] R. M. Stamp, Becoming a Teacher in 20^th Century Calgary (Calgary, AB: Detselig, 2004): 17.

  [7] C. Dweck, Mindset: The New Psychology of Success (New York: Ballantine, 2006).

  [8] H. Freudenthal, “Geometry Between the Devil and the Deep Sea,” Educational Studies in Mathematics 3, no. 3/4 (1971): 413–435.

• Financial Literacy: Getting Beyond the Markets

  7:21 PM Comments Off on Financial Literacy: Getting Beyond the Markets

  In the wake of the global financial meltdown, there have been many discussions in Canada about the need for greater “financial literacy”. In response to the crisis and its many painful consequences, educators and NGOs have redoubled their calls for financial literacy training among average Canadians. The financial industry itself has long sponsored numerous “investor education” programs (although the objectivity of these initiatives can be rightly questioned). More recently, several Canadian provinces have added financial literacy into core curriculum for high school students (including B.C., Manitoba, Ontario, and P.E.I.). We can expect more such initiatives aimed at introducing financial education into school curricula, even in the lower grades.

  Even the federal government is getting in on the act. In his 2009 budget, federal Finance Minister Jim Flaherty announced the creation of a Task Force to evaluate current financial literacy initiatives and make recommendations for a stronger, more integrated national financial literacy strategy. That Task Force has issued an initial consultation paper (available at www.financialliteracyincanada.com) and plans to issue a final report by the end of the year.

  In announcing the Task Force, Mr. Flaherty suggested it was motivated by the desire “to enable consumers to look after their best interests.”[1] After all, his government had been beset by complaints from individual investors who lost big in the meltdown. In response to these complaints, this budget initiative would equip individual investors to look after their own finances prudently – rather than expecting government to protect them. More broadly, it was suggested, a financially literate public would contribute to a more smoothly functioning and stable financial system.

  This implicit theme of “individual responsibility” is also evident in the consultation report subsequently issued by the federal Task Force. The report argues that “a financially educated population will be better able to weather economic downturns.”[2] Indeed, the Task Force claims that financial literacy will benefit all Canadians (not just investors) by promoting more economic self-sufficiency, less pressure on social programs, enhanced economic stability, and stronger public markets. In other words, if Canadians learn to handle their personal finances better, they won’t need to rely on governments to protect them and financial markets will work better. In short, the whole country will be stronger.

  It is fantasy to hope that greater knowledge on the part of individual “mom and pop” investors could somehow stabilize the workings of macro financial markets.

  Some individuals will do better if they make better financial choices – just as some individuals will find a job more quickly, if they learn how to prepare a better resumé. But would more prudent financial behaviour by Canadians in aggregate really produce more stable financial markets, and even a stronger overall economy? Teaching everyone to prepare a good resumé cannot eliminate unemployment. And teaching Canadians how to plan their household budgets, live within their means, and make wise investment decisions cannot prevent the next financial collapse – let alone solve deeper-rooted problems of poverty and economic hardship that afflict millions of Canadian households.

  In this regard, the timing of this redoubled emphasis on financial literacy is ironic. The Canadian economy, and the global economy, are still trying to recover from a catastrophic failure of the private financial industry. That failure was rooted not in individual ignorance, short-sightedness, or irresponsibility. It was rooted in the sophisticated efforts of major financial institutions to profit from the creation and trade of fundamentally unproductive financial assets. If individual investors had been more aware of the risks involved in their investments, and perhaps more skeptical of the questionable economic underpinning for the whole process, perhaps some could have avoided losses.[3] But it is fantasy to hope that greater knowledge on the part of individual “mom and pop” investors could somehow stabilize the workings of macro financial markets. If this current emphasis on financial literacy steers policymakers away from a badly-needed re-evaluation of the practices of the private financial industry, and of the inadequacies of public financial regulation, then it will have been counterproductive.

  Canadians should indeed learn, in an honest and objective way, about the financial industry: warts and all. We should learn what high finance does, what it doesn’t do, the risks, the costs, and the vested interests associated with this hyperactive world:

  • Let’s learn how shockingly little the typical Canadian saves and how unlikely it is that average Canadians could possibly save enough in an RRSP to pay for a decent pension.

  • Let’s learn how public pensions are far more important to the prosperity of seniors than their personal investments and how those pensions are by far the most secure (and the least costly to administer) of all sources of seniors’ income.

  • Let’s learn, more fundamentally, about how the whole system of personal investing through mutual funds is one step removed from the real processes of investment, innovation, and capital accumulation that generate genuine economic progress.

  • In a similar vein, let’s learn how expensive our overdeveloped system of financial intermediation has become, with layers on layers of interest spreads, commissions, management expense fees, service charges, and other costs.

  • Let’s learn about the enormous (and unprotected) risks of personal financial investing, and that there is no guarantee that expected asset values will be realized when it comes time for us all to start living off our RRSP funds.

  • Finally, let’s learn how skewed and concentrated is the distribution of financial wealth in Canada (and thus the distribution of tax subsidies for personal investing). The richest 10 percent of Canadian households own close to two-thirds of all financial wealth. The richest 1 percent likely owns close to one-third. The bottom 50 percent has essentially no net financial wealth.

  These are relevant, real-world financial topics about which Canadians’ current knowledge is sadly inadequate. And for the most part, the financial industry would like to keep it this way. It has thrived off the current state of affairs, in which Canadians are encouraged, pressured, misled, and heavily subsidized to buy pieces of paper with no inherent worth, paying 2 or 3 percent of their value each year in management fees – all in hopes that the paper will be worth a lot more when they decide to cash it in. A truly financially literate population would likely reject the risks and costs of this system altogether and find a more sensible and productive way to support its elder members at an acceptable standard of living.

  But given the context and tone of Mr. Flaherty’s mandate to the Task Force, it seems clear that the current financial literacy “push” is likely to reinforce the existing culture and practices of personal investing. The discourse of financial literacy locates the root cause of Canadians’ financial distress in individual actions, choices, and failings: not saving enough, not planning ahead, not reading the fine print on those risky investments. It assumes that financial education alone (rather than a more concrete change in the real circumstances of Canadians’ economic lives) will be enough to change those outcomes. It endorses the current practices and culture of personal investing, and in fact stresses that we need more of it. Most dangerously, it begins to create a context in which governments can shrug off their responsibilities (whether that be regulating financial industries or providing for basic income security for Canadians of all ages) by establishing the expectation that Canadians should be able “to look after their own best interests”.

  There’s certainly no doubt that Canadian households are experiencing increasing financial stress – and not just because of the financial crisis. Household debt levels have risen dramatically over the last two decades, facilitated by easier access to a broader range of debt products; total personal debt now equals almost 150 percent of Canadians’ disposable income. Household spending grew twice as fast since 1990 as household income. Personal bankruptcy rates have quadrupled in the same time. In survey evidence cited by the Task Force, one third of Canadians report struggling or being unable to keep up with monthly expenses, and 60 percent of Canadians worry about their financial future – almost a quarter worry enough to lose sleep over it.

  Does this financial distress result, to any meaningful degree, from a lack of financial literacy? Would financial literacy education significantly change any of those outcomes?

  The federal Task Force, and other financial literacy advocates, clearly think so. I fundamentally beg to differ. The reason more Canadian households are in financial distress is not because of their individual behaviour and choices. It is because our economy, and our society, have evolved in ways that have resulted in greater inequality, greater insecurity, and greater hardship for many (not all) Canadians.

  Two recent research reports from the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives have tried to put hard numbers on the day-to-day minimal requirements of household life. [4] They have documented a fundamental mismatch between the earnings generated in Canada’s increasingly flexible, rugged, and unequal labour market, and the minimal costs of supporting a family. Addressing that mismatch (through policies to increase wages, and/or reduce costs for low-income families) is essential for alleviating personal financial distress. Learning to budget carefully, avoid financial fraud, reduce credit costs, and other helpful lessons from financial literacy training can certainly help hard-pressed families survive the difficult economic world they inhabit. But they cannot alleviate the more fundamental, structural causes of their financial problems.

  The Task Force report admits that the changing labour market is a key reason that financial literacy is more necessary today than it was, say, 40 years ago. Back then, the report suggests, “many Canadians had seemingly secure lifelong employment, with predictable pensions.”[5] Not so anymore, and that’s why financial literacy is important – to help Canadians to grapple with a world that has become fundamentally less secure. But what if we asked a prior question ­– why should we take as inevitable or permanent the present, increasingly polarized circumstances of economic life for Canadians? Why can’t we make jobs more secure, or pensions more predictable? We want financial literacy to genuinely educate Canadians about the causes and potential solutions to their financial problems, rather than encouraging them to accept the fundamental dimensions of an unfair, unequal world, and then adjust themselves to it.

  Financial literacy, in principle, should be a great thing… It’s a prerequisite for effective democracy that average people learn more about how the economy really works.

  Obviously, regardless of how difficult one’s personal economic circumstances may be, some practices and problems can make them even worse. It pays to avoid loan sharks and payday loan shops. It pays to avoid regular credit card debt. It pays to own your own home, if you can save a down payment and crack the market. Investors of all stripes, big and small, should be fully cognizant that when they purchase anything other than a term deposit or a government bond, what they are buying could be worthless next week. They should also be aware that 2 or 3 percent of their painfully-saved wealth is creamed off the top by money managers who, economically, fulfil no productive function whatsoever.

  Financial literacy, in principle, should be a great thing. I spend a large portion of my time conducting grass-roots economics education courses for working adults, and writing and disseminating educational materials about the economy, finance, and other topics. I think it’s a prerequisite for effective democracy that average people learn more about how the economy really works. That means cutting through the phony, pseudo-technical mystique that economists so often wrap around their profession. It means showing that real economic progress depends on work and productivity and innovation – not the mindless, repetitive ups and downs of the stock market.

  So financial literacy can be a welcome addition to curriculum, but it should be reviewed and used with caution. Teachers should make sure that it is promoting a genuine, complete, and balanced understanding of personal finances and broader financial issues. Some financial literacy tools (especially those provided “free of charge” by financial institutions and associations) are little more than disguised advertisements for the mutual fund industry, admonishing people to save more, and to always consult their financial advisor. Instead of genuinely acknowledging the deep risks associated with most of the products they sell, they disguise these problems in abstract discussions about “knowing your own tolerance for risk.”

  In contrast, a good financial literacy program should provide a complete description of all of the sources of Canadians’ financial well-being, and a well-rounded, arms-length depiction of how the private financial industry functions. A complete curriculum should do the following:

  • Explain the full range and relative importance of income sources for Canadians, both before and after retirement. Explain that most lifetime income for most Canadians comes from employment. Income from personal investments is a small share of total income, even after retirement.

  • Explain that boosting lifetime employment income is the most important way for most Canadians to become better off. Explain the determinants of employment income, including a worker’s occupation, industry, level of education, whether or not the job is unionized, and the impact of regulatory and institutional factors (like minimum wages).

  • Explain that public pensions are the most important source of post-retirement income and how different types of pensions are funded and secured.

  • Discuss average incomes in Canada, the average cost of living in Canada, and the difficulty that most Canadian households have in balancing their household finances.

  • Explain the difference between income and wealth, the different forms of wealth (non-financial as well as financial) and the importance of home ownership in Canadians’ net worth.

  • Provide information on household wealth in Canada, average levels, and its distribution. This will allow Canadians to position themselves within the spectrum of actual wealth outcomes – as opposed to the idealized scenarios of mutual fund brochures (where everyone is a potential millionaire).

  • Explain the functions of the financial industry. Consider the orthodox claim that financial markets are “intermediaries” which facilitate capital accumulation. Contrast that to more critical accounts of what the financial industry does, how it performs, and how much it costs. Discuss the history and role of financial regulation.

  • Explain the costs and risks of personal investing. Explain that the value of your mutual fund 20 or 30 years from now depends on factors over which you have no control. Explain which assets are guaranteed by government (and why), and which are not. Explain how money managers are paid (including in so-called “no-load” products).

  • Explain that it is not always appropriate at the individual level to accumulate personal savings (especially when there is no guarantee that personal investments will be realized when they are needed). At the macroeconomic level, more saving can actually be harmful: in fact, the recent recession was caused in part by a sudden increase in personal saving (the flip side of the sudden decrease in consumer spending).

  By all means, let’s encourage Canadians to avoid risky or costly financial practices (be they payday loan shops or the latest ill-founded financial fad). But let’s not lose sight of the big picture that explains why Canadians are financially pressured. And let’s stay focused on the macro-level solutions (from higher wages to financial regulations to stronger public pensions) that would address those challenges more realistically and effectively – rather than fruitlessly trying to pick the right mutual fund. Our students, and all Canadians, deserve an arms-length and critical education in financial affairs and financial issues.

  EN BREF – Plusieurs provinces canadiennes ont récemment ajouté la littératie financière au curriculum de base des élèves du secondaire. Dans son budget de 2009, le ministre des Finances, Jim Flaherty, a annoncé la mise sur pied d’un groupe de travail chargé d’évaluer ces initiatives de littératie financière, lesquelles mettent typiquement l’accent sur la « responsabilité individuelle », laissant entendre que, si les Canadiens apprenaient à mieux gérer leurs finances personnelles et n’ont plus à compter sur le gouvernement pour les protéger, les marchés financiers fonctionneront mieux et le pays sera plus fort. Il est pourtant chimérique d’espérer que l’acquisition de meilleures connaissances par les investisseurs individuels stabilisera les macromarchés financiers. La littératie financière peut constituer un élément légitime du curriculum, mais elle devrait porter sur les causes et les solutions possibles aux problèmes financiers des Canadiens, notamment en examinant honnêtement le secteur financier, plutôt que d’inciter la population à accepter un monde injuste, inéquitable et à s’y adapter.

  ---

  [1] Dept. of Finance, Budget Plan 2010, p. 89.

  [2] Task Force on Financial Literacy, Leveraging Excellence: Charting a Course of Action to Strengthen Financial Literacy in Canada, February 2010, p. 5.

  [3] On the other hand, I expect that even educated investors will be lured by greed, envy, and herd behaviour to jump into the next ill-founded financial mania – financial literacy or no. Perhaps the main benefit of financial literacy in that event, is in promoting the resigned conclusion that those investors have no one to blame but themselves. That doesn’t leave those households, or the economy as a whole, any better off.

  [4] These basic living costs did not include personal savings or pension contributions. Both studies are available at www.policyalternatives.ca: see Hugh Mackenzie and Jim Stanford (2009), A Living Wage for Toronto (Ottawa: Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives), 28 pp.; and Tim Richards, Marcy Cohen, Seth Klein, and Deborah Littman (2008), Working for Living Wage: Making Paid Work Meet Basic Family Needs in Vancouver and Victoria (Vancouver, Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives), 52 pp.

  [5] Task Force Report, 11.

• November Eleventh

  7:15 PM Comments Off on November Eleventh

  When I was a child my father would pack my sister and me into the car and drive to Vancouver’s Cenotaph where we would observe Remembrance Day. When I close my eyes and think of those days, I see grey rain, black umbrellas, and red felt poppies. One year my sister wore a kilt. Both of us usually wore wool stockings, even under pants, to help stave off the cold. Because we were so young, neither of us appreciated why we stood in the streets silent with other darkly clad people. In turns, my dad would hoist us onto his shoulders so we could see the solemn parade of veterans. We would hold our hands over our hearts and sing about our true patriot love, not understanding the words as they left our mouths. I remember being careful and proud of the red poppy my dad would pin to the fabric of my jacket, just over my heart. This ritual was important to my father and, whatever my sister and I failed to understand, we knew that standing there in the rain with his daughters meant something to him.

  As November 11^th neared during my first year at Rockridge Secondary, I prepared for the type of ritual I had attended as a student. I thought we would go through the motions, have the obligatory moment of silence, watch a veteran place a wreath against the podium and listen as one of the band students played The Last Post. I suppose that in the glitz and distraction of consumer culture, I subconsciously believed that war was too distant, too historic, too unfathomable for Canada’s privileged youth. But, perhaps because of 9-11 and other recent acts of war, or maybe because parents continue to introduce their children to the reality of November 11^th, or maybe because humanity simply doesn’t forget, Canada’s youth today remember and honour the cost of their freedom in a way that truly means something.

  The entire student body was summoned into the gym. Chairs had been set up in rows and each student took a seat. A stage had been erected at the front of the room. Beside it a small group of band students warmed up. I took my seat near my students and welcomed the chance to relax for a few minutes.

  As soon as all one thousand of us were seated in the gym, the lights went dark and a spotlight shone on a lone student standing centre stage. He was wearing a beige jacket and soldier’s cap. When he spoke, he told us of how he had enlisted that morning. He told of the pain in leaving his loved ones and of the obligation he felt to protect them. After his monologue we heard from a series of characters, his friends and family, until finally his girlfriend took the stage. Tears pricked my eyes as she shared her worries and sorrow. Then, the stage went dark and audio of a battle shot into the darkness. When the lights finally came up to cast a cold glow over the stage, the girlfriend was crying in the front corner as she read a letter informing her of the boy’s honourable death. Behind her and projected onto a large screen played images of her life with the boy she’d had dreams of marrying. I was glad of the dark.

  Next we listened as a Japanese student dressed in a shimmering kimono of reds and purples recited a poem about Hiroshima. As she read, the poem’s English translation scrolled across the screen over images of the mushroom cloud and people’s pain. I was in awe of how this student-led assembly managed to make history so current. I have not experienced war first-hand. Neither have my parents. But that day I found myself close enough to imagine its smells, sounds, and devastation.

  The only other time I have felt the presence of war was at my Great-Papa’s 100^th birthday party, when I was 12 years old. The evening had been full of cake and relatives and congratulations and balloons, and he was tired from all the excitement. So my aunt, my sister, and I had wheeled him up to his room in the retirement home. As she went to turn down his sheets, my Great-Papa, who only moments before had been dozing with his head on his chest, suddenly grabbed my wrist with ferocity. The silver bracelet I wore bit into my flesh as he gripped tighter and tighter.

  “You’re too slow! Damn it! Get in the hole! Get in the hole! They’re going to kill you! They’ll kill you! Run!” His watery voice was now booming and clear, his shaking muscles now firm and steady. My aunt met my terrified eyes as I tried to twist my wrist from his vice grip.

  “Get down! Get down! You’re too slow! You’re too slow! You’re too slow!” The panic in my Great-Papa’s voice made my throat tight because, in that moment, he took me to an actual battlefield, muddied with rain and blood, noxious with gas and fear.

  “Grand-dad,” my aunt said, “Grand-dad it’s okay. Everything is okay. You’re in your room and we’re here with you, your grandchildren. It’s okay.”

  Now he straddled both worlds and looked at her, pleading, “But he’s going to die! They’ll get him ‘cause he’s too slow. He’s too slow…” his voice drifted into tears and my aunt, having freed my wrist, motioned for me to wait in the hall.

  Back in the darkened gym, students stood at attention as the bugle sounded. Fresh in our minds played images of small children running from black rain, a young boy just enlisted, and row upon row of committed white crosses. I held my wrist and said a silent thank you to my Great-Papa, who now rests in peace, and to these students who, without even meeting him, honoured him so well.

• The Power of Language

  7:13 PM Comments Off on The Power of Language

  In this issue of Education Canada, an article by Paul Budra on why we should be teaching grammar gives me the opportunity to muse about one of my own passions – the importance of language competence.

  As an editor, I am immersed in the complexities and the nuances of language daily. It’s an immersion I love. I happily swim about among verb tenses, dependent and independent clauses, and tricky word choices. But throw many of our young people into that sea of linguistic complexity, and they flounder – or drown.

  I would never argue that teaching the structure of the language automatically confers good communication skills, or that young people should be discouraged from the free, unfettered communication of “free writing”. But I do think we deprive them of a great gift when we choose not to offer them the power that a deeper understanding of their language provides.

  Like Budra, I think many students would be intrigued by the intricacy of grammar and syntax, just as many are intrigued by the intricacy of mathematical formulae and biological diversity. Not all, of course. But we’re not even giving them a chance. For a few years I taught a writing course to first- and second-year university students; we couldn’t discuss writing issues sensibly because they didn’t have the basic vocabulary. What’s an active verb? For that matter, what’s a verb? Naming parts of speech may seem trivial, but if you were helping a friend put up a shelf, would you ask for “the thing with the flat metal end you can use to pound the pointy object into the wood”? We need to be able to talk about the tools at our disposal ­– whether they’re hammers or prepositions.

  There is so much more at stake here than passing a provincial literacy test or doing well on a history assignment. Language competence ­– real comfort with the language and its almost infinite flexibility – opens the door to varieties of expression that, in turn, open the door to varieties of ideas. It truly is a revolving door; expressing ideas in words helps us clarify and modify our thoughts, and that ability, I would argue, is central to the effective functioning of a democratic society.

  So ­– does our democracy depend on teaching subject-verb agreement and comma usage in public schools? Probably not. But it does depend on ensuring that our young people can juggle increasingly complex ideas and both understand and express nuances of meaning. If teaching the technical skills of writing helps even some of them do that, we can’t afford to overlook it.

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