Young people with mental health challenges are among our most vulnerable students in Canada. They are also among our most interesting and courageous. Their lives can be difficult and are too often stigmatized, even though so many are working hard to change this. Many of these young people are navigating a sea of additional troubles such as poverty, loneliness, marginalization, fear and frustration that lead to the spirals of decline[1] and cultures of silence[2] that they have so eloquently detailed for us.
We know a lot about the alarming trends in mental illness in the lives of modern Canadian youth. The Canadian Mental Health Association[3] now estimates that 10-20 percent of Canadian youth are affected by a mental illness, with 3.2 million (12-19 years) at risk for developing depression. Others estimate that 30 percent of students suffer from psychological distress[4] with only a minority (1 in 5) receiving formal supports, which suggests why Canada’s youth suicide rate is now the third highest in the industrial world.[5] We also know that the growth in social inequality and poverty are closely related to mental health for youth.[6] In fact, youth from impoverished backgrounds are three times more likely than their wealthier peers to experience mental health challenges. The most pressing factors in poor mental health include poverty, learning difficulties, abuse/neglect, isolation, lack of support, and lack of access to quality health care and education.[7] However, we know far less about the journeys that these young people are taking toward better mental health.
Journeys: knowing young lives
I knew that it wasn’t just being depressed for a few days, but for a long period of time being depressed… everyone says that getting help is easy, but it really isn’t, like when you get help, you have to wait so many months to actually get the help. So I just feel like nobody does anything for those few months while you’re waiting, and that’s what people really need to do.
And when I went to my cousin, because I could trust her, and tell her I was depressed, she said, ‘What do you have to be depressed about?’ and that’s so depressing, because it’s like, do you not realize that being 16 is hard?
Few researchers and educators have yet had the opportunity to focus on the journeys and experiences of these remarkable young people. Most research illustrates the important, if paradoxical, processes of diagnosis and treatment. But too few young people receive either, and diagnoses can also lead to labeling and further stigmatization. Moreover, what awaits too many kids and families is a heartbreaking experience with a youth mental health system that is fractured and ruptured.
Where have these kids been and where are they going? As educators and parents, this is our shared concern. How do we best assist in the life journeys of these young people? Mapping the journeys of young people into and out of mental health care is one good way of seeing the complexity of these young lives and the best ways to help. Journey mapping is a newer approach to research that gathers stories from youth relating to their experiences and provides visual maps of how they have navigated the system. This strategy is now used by international researchers to identify barriers and facilitators in access and care for mental health.
Our systematic review of this international research literature on journeys in youth mental health yielded 25 recently published English-language journal articles from Canada, Italy, Eastern Europe, New Zealand, the U.S., the U.K., India and China. Three themes arose in our synthesis of this literature:
1. youth journeys in mental health are non-linear in character;
2. barriers and facilitators exist at personal and systemic levels and often in paradoxical fashion; and
3. schools and teachers are crucial in this journey.
Young people take individualized and dynamic journeys to seeking mental health supports.[8] These journeys often start long before they receive formal care from a primary health care provider and with their own early experiences and interactions at home and in school.[9] The non-linear character of these journeys shows us where we could best intervene in a too-often fractured system. We can see in the visual maps how the elements of the system become tied together in a back-and-forth motion as youth and families move in and out of primary health care, school supports, acute health care, and so forth. The recent work in patient journey mapping from Kamloops, B.C.[10] offers an excellent illustration of the journey, with long-term wait times and breaks in the continuity of care. We have further developed this model to assemble a journey map that represents lessons and themes found in our review of literature (see illustrations 1 to 4).
Our image shows the paradoxical journey model that we have detected and demonstrates how personal relationships and systemic structures encountered by youth can exacerbate or alleviate problems that accompany mental health challenges. For example, while there is a shortage of skilled mental health professionals in some areas, most work very hard on a daily basis to go above and beyond their job descriptions in providing excellent care despite the heavy loads. Another example of the paradox is that while poverty stretches the resources and time of these families, many parents are going to extraordinary lengths to advocate for their children in the face of great adversity. Thus, mirror-image supports exist for each barrier, as evidenced in a surprising range of facilitators from which we must launch meaningful change for these young people. Teachers, parents, friends and mental health professionals could form a core community of helpers.
Notably, young people also identify their schools as significant in their journey. In some cases, the school is not seen as a safe or supportive place to be and/or to seek advice or information. School peers are identified as “silent actors” in the journey, with a role that remains both unclear and complex. The role of school peers in inciting stigmatization is clear; however there are also signs of school peers acting in supportive and assistive roles. There is a need for schools to do better in providing these safe spaces for knowledge about mental health.[11]
“Taking mental health to school”
With the complexity and nonlinearity of the youth journeys in mental health, we must ask if and how the school can best provide a reasonable space for prevention and assistance. When youth arrive at school each day, they enter the halls and classrooms with the lives they are immersed in. These lives collide with the range of human and structural relationships that make up the everyday spaces of school. We know that these students are asking for early and local access to mental health supports, a place where they belong without stigma, and a school environment that will both increase mental health awareness and decrease stigma.
An important Canadian study was recently released from the Centre of Excellence of Child and Youth Mental Health in Ontario in which the authors provide an overview of the best ways we can “take mental health to school.” The evidence shows how schools are both necessary and helpful in addressing youth mental health. Not surprisingly, the report finds that “student mental health needs exceed the current capacity of school systems to respond adequately. Education leaders are looking for: leadership and coordination, professional development, and guidance in selecting programs and models of cross-sectoral service delivery…”[12] Programs found to be of use in schools relate to stress or anger management, reducing violence and substance abuse, and modifying the school environment to promote self-awareness and positive relationships. School boards were directed to implement such programs with fidelity and in collaboration with local mental health agencies and parents.
In our recent project on mental health in schools, the investigative team from the Hospital for Sick Children and University of Prince Edward Island took the pulse of students and educators regarding mental health literacy.[13] Working with a mural created by eight young people who experienced mental illness, we installed their original image in six secondary schools in Ontario and four in P.E.I., to invoke a conversation about mental health literacy (see photo on page 4). The image has now been viewed by approximately 7,000 students and teachers in Canada who have shared with us a meaningful conversation about mental health and stigma. The installation of the mural was somewhat different in each school, with many young people and teachers assisting us in finding a prominent place for it to hang and acting as ambassadors for the mural during the two weeks of installation in each school. The installation was followed by a large group “talk back” session in the form of an assembly in which the Canadian Mental Health Association joined us in leading a session about the mural and about youth mental health. This was followed by focus group conversations with students and educators (separately) and by analysis of the writings and comments they provided on large sheets of paper and comment cards left for this purpose.
Early analysis of the data from P.E.I. schools suggests that the majority of students and educators were grateful for the opportunity to have a mental health conversation. To many, it seemed long overdue. They also commended the young artists for their demonstration of great courage in sharing their mental health journeys in artistic form. In fact, some of these schools have now taken on similar art-inspired projects with their own students for Mental Health Awareness Week. The students appreciated the use of art in depicting the complex experiences of young people in mental health, as they felt that it allows for deeper understanding and interpretation of the experiences they are facing. Many students also expressed that the mural and conversation in the school provided reassurance that they were not alone in their mental health experiences. They reported a clear desire to learn more about youth mental health and illness. Students wanted the opportunity to have further discussions, learn about the clinical aspects of mental health and illness, and better understand what services are available to them in school and community. They expressed a strong need to better address and eliminate stigma in their schools and communities.
I think the mural spoke of issues that people struggle with. I think the best ways to get knowledge are by having small meetings and discussing it to give everyone the chance to speak in a small group. I think art is a beautiful and approachable way to discuss and get knowledge on mental health. – student
The thing for me is that, I am not trained in that [mental health support]. We are talking about kids, but let’s face it, there are teachers and adults in the community who have all these issues… And my curriculum doesn’t really allow for a broad conversation, right? So I see the mural as a stimulator of mental health discussion and it shows the point of having the conversation, and how we keep that going.” – educator
Our review of the literature and our interviews with students and teachers in the mural project uphold important messages about youth journeys in mental health. We contend that Canada is moving along a good path in addressing the alarming trends in youth mental health. We offer youth journeys as a tremendous jumping-off point in examining the complexity of these young lives and in pointing to promising ways to support them. There is need to better coordinate services, reduce wait times, meaningfully address stigma and open up new spaces for families, schools, and mental health professionals to assist youth in their journeys to mental health. Their experiences call us to action in breaking the spirals of decline and cultures of silence that society has left them to negotiate.
Next Steps
We are pleased to announce ACCESS-MH,[14] a five-year project in Atlantic Canada, funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research. Our study applies youth mental health journeys with related statistical information from Prince Edward Island, Newfoundland, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. Building upon the knowledge and methods now emerging in youth mental health journeys, this project includes conversations with parents, teachers, primary health care providers, and community members. We also invoke arts-based methods of understanding experiences and mapping journeys. The variety of participants will further identify complex problems youth face in seeking mental health care. Our work aims to better assist in the creation of a more coherent network of support and programming for our vulnerable and courageous Canadian youth.
Photo: Katherine Boydell
First published in Education Canada, March 2014
EN BREF – La santé mentale des jeunes est une préoccupation de taille de la société et des écoles canadiennes. En fait, il s’agit d’une question dont on parle de plus en plus dans le monde entier. Ce texte présente une nouvelle façon prometteuse de comprendre le problème en plaçant les parcours de vie des jeunes au centre de notre attention. Nous ouvrons ainsi de nouveaux espaces où les écoles peuvent collaborer avec des partenaires de la collectivité et du domaine médical de la santé mentale pour constituer un système plus cohérent destiné à entourer la vie complexe et courageuse de nos élèves.
[1] K. Tilleczek and V. Campbell, “Barriers to Youth Literacy: Sociological and Canadian insights,” Language and Literacy 15, no. 2 (2013): 77-100.
[2] S. Kutcher and A. McLuckie, Evergreen: A child and youth mental health framework for Canada, for the Child and Youth Advisory Committee, Mental Health Commission of Canada (Calgary: 2010).
[3] Canadian Mental Health Association, Fast Facts About Mental Illness. www.cmha.ca/media/fast-facts-about-mental-illness/#.Us1uj7SmYk8
[4] A. Paglia-Boak, R. E. Mann, E. M. Adlaf, J. H. Beitchman, D. Wolfe, and J. Rehm, The Mental Health and Well-being of Ontario Students 1991–2009: Detailed OSDUHS findings (Toronto: Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, 2010).
[5] E. J. Costello, H. Egger, and A. Angold, “10-year Research Update Review: The epidemiology of child and adolescent psychiatric disorders: Methods and public health burden,” Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry 44, no. 10 (2005): 972–986; CMHA, Fast Facts, www.cmha.ca/media/fast-facts-about-mental-illness/#.Us1uj7SmYk8
[6] For a current review of literature linking social inequality, poverty and mental health see Tilleczek, Ferguson, Campbell and Lezeu (in press), “Mental Health and Poverty in Young Lives: Intersections and directions,” Canadian Journal of Community Mental Health.
[7] E. L. Lipman and M. Boyle, Linking Poverty and Mental Health: A lifespan view (Ottawa: The Provincial Centre of Excellence for Child and Youth Mental Health at CHEO, 2008).
[8] K. Boydell, R. Pong, T. Volpe, K. Tilleczek, E. Wilson, and S. Lemieux, “Family Perspectives on Pathways to Mental Health Care for Children and Youth in Rural Communities,” Journal of Rural Health 21, no. 2 (2006): 182-188.
[9] S. De la Rie, G. Noordendos, M. Donker, and E. van Furth, “Evaluating the Treatment of Eating Disorders from the Patient’s Perspectives,” International Journal of Eating Disorders 39, no. 8 (2006): 667-676.
[10] S. Scott, S. Sze, K. Weatherman, and R. Gorospe, “Kamloops Patient Journey Mapping Report, Child and Youth Mental Health” (unpublished manuscript, 2013).
[11] K. M. Boydell, T. Volpe, B. M. Gladstone, E. Stasiulis, and J. Addington, “Youth at Ultra High Risk for Psychosis: Using the Revised Network Episode Model to examine pathways to mental health care,” Early Intervention In Psychiatry 7, no. 2 (2013): 170-186.
[12] D. Santor, K. Short, and B. Ferguson, Taking Mental Health to School: A policy-oriented paper on school-based mental health for Ontario (Ottawa: The Provincial Centre of Excellence for Child and Youth Mental Health at CHEO, 2009), 6.
[13] K. Boydell, “Using Visual Arts to Enhance Mental Health Literacy in Schools,” in Youth, Education and Marginality: Local and global expressions, eds. K. Tilleczek and B. Ferguson (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2013).
[14] Atlantic Canada Children’s Effective Service Strategies in Mental Health is a CIHR-funded project lead by Dr. Rick Audus (MUN), Dr. Kate Tilleczek (UPEI), Dr. Scott Ronis (UNB) and Dr. Micheal Zhang (SMU).
One of the important functions of art in a modern society is to inspire citizens to new dimensions of hope and possibility. More than policy directives, more than summaries of best practice and even more than research initiatives—as valuable as all of these are—the vision and voice of the artist can draw us towards the future with powerful metaphorical images that allow us to frame our futures in ways that are uniquely compelling!
I RECENTLY INHERITED my grandmother’s recipe box after she passed away. My grandmother spent much of her time in the kitchen creating delicious meals that drew our family together. As I examined her recipes for hot milk sponge cake, chicken pot pie, and others, it suddenly occurred to me that these very recipes probably contributed to my grandmother’s heart attack, and our family’s tendency toward heart disease. Most of them were created before nutritional research confirmed the negative effects of high levels of fat, salt and sugar on health. Although I uphold my grandmother’s adage that great food brings a family together, the kinds of food I feed my own family have changed. The way we eat has been transformed, and we are healthier for it.
Like great food, I have always loved school libraries. They are as important today as they have ever been; however, the recipes for a successful school library program have changed. Loertscher, Koechlin and Zwaan describe the contemporary school library as a learning commons, “the hub of the school, where exemplary learning and teaching are showcased, where professional development, teaching and learning experimentation and action research happen.”[1] Teacher-librarians, once primarily managers of school resources, can become instructional leaders, supporting and collaborating with every teacher in the school, promoting inquiry-based learning and fostering a thriving reading culture.
Our school libraries, at the physical and virtual heart of the school, are ideally positioned to lead and support educational transformation, provided that we are willing to consider new ways of working that better support our students and teachers. I invite your to consider the following recipes:
I grew up in a time when the school librarian was monarch of his or her domain, daring anyone to upset the quiet order of the school library. These days, students have taken over. Flexible furnishings encourage students to sit together and chat about what they are reading or collaborate on an inquiry project. Many libraries host in-person and virtual book clubs, book talks and author visits. Students are now the ones creating book displays and book trailers to encourage each other to read. Students are encouraged to visit the school library learning commons to pursue topics of individual interest. Many school library learning commons incorporate performance spaces where students can “show what they know.”
One of the biggest challenges for contemporary teachers is meeting the needs of a diverse group of students that may include English language learners and students with learning disabilities and other special needs. The school librarian’s availability for co-teaching can help: As Fontichiaro and Buczynski point out, “Co-teaching halves the student-to-teacher ratio and facilitates greater levels of student support via feedback, conferencing, and personalized, differentiated instruction.”[2] The addition of iPads, iPods and eBooks to the library collection ensures that students have access to technologies that engage even reluctant and struggling readers. Add to that the possibility of students using the school library to conduct independent research, as a breakout space from their regular classroom, or as a place to attend book clubs, literature circles and other literacy-based programs, and we have a rich resource for meeting individual learning needs.
Many teacher-librarians are trained in inquiry-based learning. Because they are in the unique position of being able to work with all teachers and all students within the school, teacher-librarians are able to model and encourage best teaching practice, thereby improving the instructional capacity of the entire school. Alberta Learning, for example, proposes that “cooperative planning of an inquiry activity involves a teacher working with a teacher-librarian.”[3] Haycock goes on to suggest that “students learn more, and produce better research products, following planned, integrated information skills instruction by the teacher and teacher-librarian together.”[4] As my grandmother liked to remind me, “Two heads are better than one.”
Collaboration among teachers has been identified as one of the key ingredients for successful school improvement and increased teacher satisfaction. In fact, Zmuda and Harada go so far as to suggest, “Schools must eliminate the waste, turbulence and distractions caused by individuals working in isolation.”[5] The positive result of collaboration in schools is undeniable. Research confirms that “when school teams collaborate to clarify the relationship between design and the effect on achievement, we witness positive and constructive change at staff meetings, in classrooms, and in individual staff-development sessions.”[6]
In times of great change, it is evident that trust, relationships and respect are key components for school success. Haycock suggests that “the core of teacher-librarianship – collaboration and partnerships – rests on positive and productive relationships with colleagues and other staff.”[7] Teacher-librarians, embedded in the day-to-day life of the school community, are ideally positioned to collaborate with teachers and administrators in creating a recipe for success that is responsive to the unique needs of their school.
Schools across this country are being asked to generate improved student outcomes, while at the same time facing unprecedented budget cuts. How can we make every penny count? The answer, once again, is to draw upon the expertise of a qualified teacher-librarian. Being aware of student reading levels and the curriculum being taught across grade levels, teacher-librarians can ensure that the school is purchasing resources that meet the needs of students without creating redundancies. By creating classroom library carts that can be rotated from classroom to classroom, teacher-librarians can ensure that library resources are getting into the hands of students, while reducing the cost of purchasing books for each individual classroom (books that students will eventually tire of). Teacher-librarians are knowledgeable about virtual resources and databases that can fill the inevitable gaps in the school library collection, and direct teachers and students alike to those that address their needs.
EDUCATION IS UNDERGOING unprecedented change. Faced with ever-tightening budgets, some jurisdictions have severely cut back on or eliminated school library services. Other jurisdictions have begun the library-to-learning commons shift by making cosmetic changes to their school library spaces. However, it should be apparent from these recipes that the library-to-learning commons transformation involves more than flexible furnishings and a new coat of paint. In fact, it is great staff, not great stuff, which is the hallmark of a thriving school library learning commons.
If you are fortunate enough to have a teacher-librarian on staff, I encourage you to try some of these recipes, taking advantage of the many benefits of planning and teaching with a like-minded colleague, using your school library as the learning hub and centre of inquiry. If your school has not yet adopted a learning commons approach, I invite you to consider, as a school community, the potential of your school library to create a feast of learning, for teachers and students alike.
Photo: Nicholas Monu (iStock)
First published in Education Canada, January 2014
EN BREF – L’ancien modèle de bibliothèque n’est plus sain pour le personnel enseignant ou pour les élèves. La conversion d’une bibliothèque scolaire en carrefour d’apprentissage constitue l’une des meilleures recettes de réussite scolaire dans le contexte actuel de réforme de l’éducation. La bibliothèque comme carrefour d’apprentissage fonctionne comme une plaque tournante de l’école, où les enseignants et les élèves collaborent, où l’apprentissage fondé sur l’enquête est favorisé et où les enseignants-bibliothécaires soutiennent chacun des membres du personnel enseignant de l’école et engendrent une culture de lecture dynamique.
[1] David V. Loertscher, Carol Koechlin and Sandi Zwaan, The New Learning Commons: Where learners win! (Salt Lake City, UT: Hi Willow Research and Publishing, 2008),123.
[2] Kristin Fontichiaro and Sandy Buczynski, “Connecting Science Notebooking to the Elementary Library Media Center,” in 21st Century Learning in School Libraries, ed. K. Fontichiaro (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC Clio, 2009), 161.
[3] Alberta Learning, Focus on Inquiry: A teacher’s guide to implementing inquiry-based learning (Edmonton, AB: Alberta Learning, 2004), 26.
[4] Ken Haycock, “Research in School Library Programs Linking Teacher-librarians, School Libraries and Student Achievement,” in Achieving Information Literacy: Standards for school library programs in Canada, eds. M. Asselin, J. L. Branch, and D. Oberg (Ottawa, ON: Canadian Association for School Libraries, 2003).
[5] Allison Zmuda and Violet H. Harada, Librarians as Learning Specialists: Meeting the learning imperative for the 21st century (Westport, CT: Libraries Unlimited, 2008), 4.
[6] Zmuda and Harada, Librarians as Learning Specialists, 4.
[7] Ken Haycock, “Leadership from the Middle: Building influence for change,” in The Many Faces of School Library Leadership, ed. Sharon Coatney (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-Clio, 2010), 5.
Innovation in education occurs frequently. A teacher tries something new – he or she reads about it, tries it, refines it and eventually incorporates it into practice; a principal adopts a new form of professional development; a district adopts adaptive assessment technologies; a school ends parent-teacher nights, instead offering social events during which a teacher will quietly chat with a parent about how their child is doing. These small, so-called adopt/adapt innovations are commonplace. They take the form of adopting an idea gathered from somewhere else and adapting it to local circumstance.
Usually when there is talk of innovation the assumption is that it will be disruptive. For example, Alberta’s decision to phase out Provincial Achievement Tests by 2017 and replace them with diagnostic assessments at the beginning of Grades 3, 6 and 9 (and possibly at the start of each school year) using online assessment tools is a major change and will likely be disruptive, at least at first. It is more disruptive when we see this as a shift from “assessment of learning” to “assessment for learning.” Britain’s decision to offer schools the opportunity to cede from the control of a local education authority (school board) and operate as an independent “academy” is disruptive – especially given that any community organization can now establish a free school or academy. The U.S. decision to push a common core curriculum for the nation as a whole is disruptive of local autonomy.
When we look at the pattern of innovation over the career of a teacher, we see that the majority of the innovations he or she will experience are adopt/adapt innovations. While the disruptive innovations come with a great deal of upset and anxiety, they represent a small portion of the innovation experience of a teacher – less than ten percent. The bulk of innovation in education is adopt/adapt.
Adopt/adapt innovation is not to be confused with continuous improvement. True innovation is a different practice which produces significantly different outputs, outcomes and impacts which can be measured. Continuous improvement tends just to modestly improve how something is done with barely discernible impacts on outcomes and impacts. The key difference between innovation and continuous improvement is the scale of the change and the sustaining impact of that change.
The focus for innovation
Innovation in education can be focused on one or more of what McKinsey & Co. refer to as “the seven S’s.”[1]
1. Structure: an innovation that changes how a school, group of schools, district or jurisdiction is structured and organized and, by doing so, improves the outcomes of the organization in specific and sustained ways. The structural changes in the U.K. are examples of this reform as are the increasing number of collaborations between Catholic and public school boards (including shared schools) in Canada.
2. Staff: a change in the way staff are deployed or engaged in their work that produces gains in performance. The use of teaching assistants and specialists with respect to special needs is an example here.
3. Strategy: a change in the strategic intent of the organization that produces sustained gains in outcomes. The decision to personalize the learning activities within a school by leveraging technology and seeing this as a core advantage of the school would be one example. Another would be a school that, in addition to pursuing the provincial curriculum, specializes in art and design or science.
4. Systems: business process innovations that significantly improve both efficiency and outcomes, such that the organization is seen to have made a significant performance improvement. The use of adaptive assessment technologies to track learning on a regular (daily, every other day, weekly) basis, as practiced in Abu Dhabi schools, is an example here.
5. Style/culture: innovative changes in the culture and style of the organization that lead to significant measurable changes in an aspect of the performance of the organization – the widespread use of problem-based learning and constructivist teaching would be an example here.
6. Shared values: innovations that lead to the strengthening of the shared values of the organization within a group of stakeholders or across more than one group of stakeholders, which lead to performance improvements.
7. Skills: the way in which each person in the organization demonstrates a high level of execution of the skills they possess and how the organization enables the continuous development of skill.
Educational innovation can be about just one of these changes or some combination of them – indeed, major innovations usually involve three or more of the S’s. Also note that outcomes need to be defined and measured. Just saying “things are better” isn’t good enough – tangible evidence is needed. For example, does improving shared values increase attendance or lead to higher learning outcomes in a school system? Does changing how we act with respect to attendance improve attendance and learning outcomes and lower the costs of doing so? Does an innovation in relation to an online learning strategy increase access to learning for those who otherwise would not have access to this learning?
Here is a working definition of successful innovation: innovation is a deliberate action that leads to significant and sustained overall positive improvement in the performance of a school or school system on one or more dimensions of the 7S’s.
Sustaining innovation
Some innovations “stick” and some don’t. For example, some innovations are very much the product of the person who introduced them and they do not survive their departure from a school or school system. Some reforms of education – said to be innovations at the time – are temporary and linked to a particular Minister of Education. Some also don’t produce the results that were anticipated – colour coding for learning to read is one example.
In a review of the work undertaken by the Innovation Expedition for the Peter Drucker Awards for Non Profit Innovation in Canada (1993-2000), we looked at outcomes in terms of the following categories. The more an innovation led to change in one or more of these categories, the more sustainable it was:
Innovative practices: the extent to which the organization has had to adopt new work practices, new methods, and new thinking so as to make the project or activity happen.
Organization-wide impact: some projects or activities relate to a small part of the work of the organization, while others have a broader impact on all aspects of the organization’s work. This dimension examines the extent of the impact of a project or activity on the organization.
Outcome: the impact of the activity or project as expressed by outcome measures – specifically, measures of key performance that compare some old way of working with a new, more innovative way of working.
Sustainability: projects or activities that have a strong likelihood of having an impact over time, and creating a continuing momentum for change, are more valued on this dimension than those innovative projects that are “one off” and have an immediate, short-term impact but are not sustainable.
Replicability: a key criteria for the award is the degree to which a project or activity conducted in one organization could be and is likely to be transferred to another – what we have termed here “replicability.” This dimension measures the extent to which a project or activity could be transferred to another organization.
Partnership building: the extent to which the project or activity has created and strengthened alliances and partnerships between two or more organizations in the nonprofit sector or between the nonprofit and private sectors or between the nonprofit and government sectors.
Reviewing hundreds of submissions over the life of this Award, it soon became clear that tangible outcomes and replicability (which might now be called scalability) were key aspects of powerful innovations that proved to be sustainable.
The process of innovation
Denning and Dunham[2] have studied innovation in a variety of settings. Doing so has enabled them to outline a process map of the steps required for an innovation to “catch” and “stick.” It involves three key building blocks and a number of steps.
The first building block they call “the work of invention.” This requires the innovator (an individual or team) to imagine, sense and envision what an opportunity for innovation looks like. For example, when the team at Derek Taylor School (K-9) in Grande Prairie decided that a strong, systematic and strategic focus on emotional intelligence could establish the right culture and create the capacity for high performance, they sensed that this would be the key to their new school, the well-being of its 700 students and being able to establish a positive reputation in the community of Mission Heights. They elaborated their thinking through workshops, study groups, and the use of supports from professional advisors and central office. This work was pre-planning – just scoping.
Having scoped and sensed the work, the staff needed to envision collectively what an innovation might look like – were they looking at embedding emotional intelligence activities and work across the curriculum, just doing occasional work in assemblies and home-room time or other kinds of activities? Was it to be for all students, or just K-5? There were three full staff meetings and a staff workshop before they landed on a plan.
The next building block is referred to as “the work of adoption.” In our Derek Taylor example, staff decided to develop their own resources and activities for homeroom use, assemblies and for use across the curriculum. They began to offer their activities and assignments and quickly adapted them as experience in their use grew. Over the course of a year, over 150 activities were developed, used and shared amongst all staff. Not all worked as well as they might – some were enhanced, others worked every time they were used and some were consigned to the “good try, but not again” bin.
Some staff lacked confidence in their own materials and their use. They felt that they should be using commercial materials, even though they were very expensive. The Alberta Teachers Association paid for some staff to visit a school making use of the commercial materials. This was a key “tipping point” for Derek Taylor School. The teachers returned with the strong view that their own materials were either just as good as or superior to those available commercially and that their school had a more integrated strategy for their use than the other schools they had visited which were using the commercial product. They realized that their innovation was the integration of emotional intelligence into every aspect of the school, not just the occasional use of materials when it seemed appropriate.
This work of adoption involved offering, adopting and sustaining the work. It also involved measuring the impact. Teachers, students and parents developed simple measures of emotional intelligence and began to use these to capture what the students were learning and experiencing. They also ran art projects to capture “the faces of emotion” and encouraged students to use them as a basis for diary-keeping and tracking. Parents and local community members (e.g. shopkeepers, school bus drivers) were also asked to log examples of students showing emotional intelligence (or the lack of it).
In these ways this work became embedded in the work of the school – it was strategic, represented shared values and became a feature of the “style” of the school. This stage of innovation is known as “creating the environment for next practice.” Teachers and school leaders used the work on emotional intelligence to explore and better understand how they were able, as an adult learning community, to create and implement something which had a long-term and sustainable impact on the work of the school. They were able to use this insight and understanding to work on their next innovation – linking emotional intelligence to the learning performance of students.
The Derek Taylor School is not unique in this work. Other examples abound of powerful innovations. For example, in London (Ontario), teachers have adopted and adapted the program Musical Futures, which is transforming the ways in which musical education is pursued by students. Based on a U.K. initiative from the Paul Hamlyn Foundation, this program is offered at Montcalm Secondary School and Our Lady Immaculate with the support of Western University’s Faculty of Music and is a transformative program, likely to expand across Canada.[3]
Differences provide fertile ground for innovation. Unique high-performing schools, not “bog standard schools,” are what we should be looking for.
None of these developments happen overnight – they take time (Derek Taylor School’s journey took three years), are messy and involve many missteps and “retakes” – but they are all led by people who are passionate about “their” innovation and are focused in a systematic and measured way on implementation. Rather than being “whiz-kids” who have a brilliant flash of light and a sudden inspiration, educational innovators tend to be those who have nurtured ideas over a period of time, have looked locally, regionally, nationally and internationally at how something is done and sense and imagine a different and better way of doing something. It’s the combination of passion, commitment and determination, diligence and adaptability that enables a person to become an educational innovator. Providing, that is, that there are some systems supports for innovation in place.
Systems that enable innovation
There are five conditions that need to be in place at the systems level to enable effective innovation within the school and to ensure that innovation “sticks.” These are:
1. Schools are recognized as the key decision centres within a district or system in which they operate. That is, they can act quickly and effectively in support of innovation without layers of permission or approval. In the Canadian system, for example, it is the school, not the central office, that should be enabling innovative activities. The role of the Superintendent is that of servant leader – enabling, encouraging, easing the way. It should also be clear that “no one size fits all” – that schools have a lot of similarity between them, but it is their differences that will provide fertile ground for innovation. Unique high-performing schools, not “bog standard schools,” are what we should be looking for.
2. Schools are resourced for the work they are asked to do and these resources are stable. The cry from school systems for a basic planning period of three to five years of rolling, stable funding is a cry for help. Schools cannot innovate if they do not know from year to year what their resource base will be. It is inefficient and ineffective. What schools need is a degree of certainty about base funding and people resources.
3. Investment in professional development and planning time. Teachers, as professionals at the leading edge of learning developments, need time to plan, research and prepare. In high-performing school systems this time is used for innovation, both small- and large-scale. Teachers cannot be expected to fully leverage new models of learning or new technology without first being able to look at and review the potential of these approaches and resources. We would not tolerate a doctor who has not spent a considerable time keeping up with current developments in medicine or who did not engage in professional development. It is no different for a professional teacher. The balance between time in class and time to prepare and innovate needs to be right.
4. Support for risk taking. The idea that “you can take as many risks as you like as long as they are 100 percent successful” is not an idea that sits well if innovation is the agenda. All innovation is a risk. Sometimes a great idea will not work. Good schools will make honest mistakes. The rule here is “we tried, we learned, we moved on and the students are fine.” A former Minister of Education in Alberta once complained that there were too few failures in our system in terms of approaches to learning. He was right.
5. Recognition. The reward and recognition mechanisms within a school and within a school district should support an agenda for innovation and change rather than inhibit it. For example, when school performance is measured on standardized tests and nothing else, and when schools can be subject to “special measures” for failing to meet some arbitrary improvement target they themselves did not set, then innovation is unlikely to occur. Innovation is a risk business and successful risk taking should be rewarded through appropriate methods of recognition and reward. Many teacher reward and recognition systems, especially in the U.S., are now making innovation less likely to occur.
When these conditions are in place and teachers are seen as instructional leaders, supported by positional leaders acting as servant leaders, then truly remarkable things can happen. Look around – innovation is everywhere.
Illustration: iStock
First published in Education Canada, November 2013
EN BREF – Malgré sa nature itérative et confuse, le processus d’innovation comporte des étapes et des processus distincts. Les trois principales étapes sont les suivantes : a) le travail d’invention – développer une idée qui apporte une contribution réelle; b) le travail d’adoption – s’assurer que d’autres, en particulier des dirigeants et des collègues immédiats, adoptent l’invention et l’adaptent à leur contexte spécifique; c) la mise en place de l’environnement pour la « prochaine » pratique – mobiliser d’autres personnes et faire accepter l’innovation à l’échelle du système. L’article signale aussi certains pièges et suggère certains aspects à privilégier.
[1] For more information about the Seven S’s, see this description: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McKinsey_7S_Framework
[2] P. J. Denning and B. Dunham, The Innovator’s Way: Essential practices for successful innovation (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010).
[3] See Stephen Hurley’s account of this exciting innovation at: http://teachingoutloud.org/2012/06/13/musical-futures-canada-london-calling/
Among the things teachers should have when they enter the field are
As I near the end of my career as teacher and teacher educator I have been reminded of these competencies new teachers need with the announcement that teacher education programs in Ontario are to be extended to two years. While there are many details to be worked out before the new system begins in 2015-16 the simple assumption is that more work in initial teacher education involving university /faculty of education courses and practicum placements in schools will result in more qualified new teachers and ultimately better teaching.
Is the “quantity equals quality” equation warranted?
Historically teachers colleges often get no respect. Hilda Neatby’s So Little for the Mind set the tone sixty years ago in her accusations of too much mushy “progressive” work and not enough rigor. While university arts and science faculties criticize us for a lack of intellectual rigor with practice too seldom grounded in theory, teachers in the field often accuse us of being too theoretical and “out there”, forgetting the complexities of life in real classrooms and real kids. In Ontario one perception we have is that our Ministry of Education puts up with us: we are seldom consulted and often assumed that we know nothing and have therefore little to contribute to curriculum policy. Sometimes our grads complain about the program: too much busy work, not practical enough, and so on. When I was seconded from my school district to contribute to teacher education, the reactions I got included
– “nice retirement gig, John”
– “teach them how to teach and what classrooms are like”
– “don’t get sucked in by all the fads posing as good teaching”
While I believe our programs are more grounded in the realities of schools and their communities than they were when I was a student teacher in 1970, the standards for an “adequate” education are much higher now than back then.
I offer a series of posts in which I suggest directions for us to go in teacher education so that we more effectively deliver on the goals introducing this post. Each post shall focus on an element of such reform: programs within the university setting, practicum placements, and the necessary qualities of people responsible for making both components of initial teacher education work.
Expect to be engaged to inquire further. This is not a defense of what is but suggestions for what could be.
Caption: Said Hassan, an instructor in pharmaceutical manufacturing at Red River College in Winnipeg, is a mentor to students in the Seven Oaks Met School internship program.
Credit: Photo courtesy of Red River College
Many high school students are faced with the dilemma of “what next?” as they go through their final years at school. With new-economy jobs becoming more complex and career paths increasingly convoluted, the decision-making process is no simple task. What do these jobs and careers entail? How does what they are studying in school relate to them? A few students with good scores do end up in their profession of choice, normally a well-known career such as medicine, engineering or law, but many others face the challenge of picking something that is within their reach, interests them and possibly has some career prospects.
Resources within and outside school systems are increasingly being invested to tackle this problem and there are some successes but they are few and far between. There is no single solution to this problem. All parties involved – school boards, postsecondary institutions and public and private enterprises – need to work together to make an impact. Out-of-the-box thinking is needed and new approaches need to be tried and effective models developed.
As a teacher of an applied technology program at a college, I experience the effect of this problem first-hand. Year after year we see students become disillusioned with their educational/career choices, resulting in high failure and dropout rates. In the last couple of years I have talked to high school teachers and guidance counsellors, made presentations and participated in educational events to provide information on the program I teach (pharmaceutical and biotechnology manufacturing) and the industry. The idea is that some dots will connect and some students will be informed about an area that they would not know otherwise.
In 2009 I met a science teacher from Seven Oaks Met School, a school with a unique vision and model of teaching and learning. It didn’t take long for me and my colleague at Red River College, Philip Cheng, to be all ears, listening to and imbibing the concept of Met School. We learned that, as part of their educational model, Met School students spend time twice a week in a work environment of their choice. They then share their learning and experiences with their schoolmates and teachers through project presentations and other activities. At that time a Grade 9 student was interested in an internship in pharmacy and medicine, a close match with the field my colleague and I teach and we decided to give it a try. When we explained our program to the student she became very excited about the prospect of doing her project in our labs. In the next few months she participated in my labs where I was teaching the process of tablet manufacturing. I then engaged her in another project involving chemical analysis of a marketed product to determine its quality. She went on to work with Mr. Cheng on a microbiology project that she subsequently presented in a major science competition (Sanofi Aventis Biotalent Challenge).
Caption: Met School Grade 11 broadcasting student, Adam, with his internship mentor from Breakfast Television, and his teacher, Nancy Janelle. Adam started with Breakfast Television in Grade 9 and worked behind the scenes and on-camera, even producing his own item on distracted driving.)
Credit: Photo courtesy of Seven Oaks School Division
Student motivation and commitment affect me directly and it is not something I could simply wish away. I am also getting an opportunity to learn about high school student mentality, the system they go through and what makes them tick. This provides invaluable insight in how to help them when they arrive in my class.
Through these projects, she not only learned a variety of scientific techniques but also developed insights into many different careers in pharmaceuticals and biotechnology. Her work apparently generated some interest among her classmates and we ended up doing a presentation on biotechnology and biotech industry to her class. I learned that last year she chose to spend time in a pharmacy environment furthering her knowledge and experience of the field. Irrespective of what she is going to opt for in her future education and career, I think the experiences she is taking away from being out in the field are invaluable in helping her make the right decision. Last year, as a result of her presentations at her school, another student showed interest in the field and spent a full term in my lab learning different aspects of pharmaceutical technology. We are hoping to have more students from Met School and expand the scope of the projects.
Caption: Grade 11 student, Candace, at her internship with Mondragon Bookstore and Coffeehouse. Candace immersed herself in all aspects of the cooperative business from the restaurant to the bookstore.)
Credit: Photo courtesy of Seven Oaks School Division
As I reflect on my experiences with Met School students and other mentorships I have taken on, I can’t help thinking that this model could certainly be part of the answer to the “what next?” question, a small part but a crucial one nevertheless. College environments present some advantages as incubators for such projects. College programs tend to be a closer simulation of actual work environments while maintaining academic components. Besides, the emphasis on direct application of learning to solving industrial problems, in my opinion, is a strong motivator to high school students who are disillusioned with the value of what they learn at school.
The big question is: can we replicate the Met School model on a larger scale? College teachers may wonder how to find the time on top of teaching and everything else. I have to say that some investment in terms of time and energy is inevitable. In my case, I had the participating students attend my regular labs, for most part, while giving them some extra coaching. I also had help from an educational assistant and a research assistant in my program area. As I mentioned, more than one instructor was involved with the same student, which further divided the responsibility.
Caption: Met School Grade 11 student, Madison, at her internship with 10,000 Villages. Madison has a strong interest in social justice and organized a fair trade challenge in her larger school community.
Credit: Photo courtesy of Seven Oaks School Division
I personally think that the rewards of getting involved in this type of work are well worth the effort. Student motivation and commitment affect me directly and it is not something I could simply wish away. I am also getting an opportunity to learn about high school student mentality, the system they go through and what makes them tick. This provides invaluable insight in how to help them when they arrive in my class. When I finished high school, computers weren’t around so a few things have changed as you might agree! This year I am looking forward to interacting more with Met School staff and students and participating in more ways than just mentorship projects. I am also hoping that other programs at the College will take part in the process. Perhaps together we will have a few more of the “what next?” questions answered.
I found my locker and I found my classes
Lost my lunch and I broke my glasses
That guy is huge! That girl is wailin’!
First day of school and I’m already failing.
This Is Me in Grade 9
By the Barenaked Ladies
Too much of our students’ high school experience is impersonal. It leaves them feeling alone, vulnerable, and alienated. Evidence from The Learning Bar’s “Tell Them From Me,” the widely subscribed Canadian student survey, tells us that only half of the students in Canadian high schools find their learning interesting, enjoyable, and relevant and only a third report that they are interested and motivated in their learning. For too many kids, high school is more of a gauntlet than a sanctuary. Witness the “It Gets Better” campaign encouraging LGBTTQ youth to hang in, handle the homophobic bullying, and believe that life will be better after high school.
Three years ago our school division initiated the first Canadian high school modeled on the highly successful Met School, founded by Dennis Littky and Elliot Washor, believing that high school could be both fundamentally different and much better, that learning in high school could be built around students’ interest and passion. We’ve been successful, but probably less so than we had thought and with much more effort and greater challenges than we could have imagined.
Caption: Brian O’Leary
Credit: Photo courtesy of Seven Oaks School Division
Virtually every teacher I know became a teacher in order “to make a difference.” In high school the structure gets in the way. Too often the strong teacher/student relationships and motivation we prize are found more in extracurricular involvements than in class. We need to work to see that all of our schools are organized in ways that help us realize our ideals.
We started the Met School full of optimism. We assumed that there was a substantial demand for doing high school differently and better, and that in the space of three years the Met School would be at capacity. Three years later our enrolment is half what we expected. The students and parents who’ve enrolled love the school and its approach. They credit it with altering their lives for the better. But many other students who might well benefit from an education that fosters their passion and self-knowledge opt for a more conventional high school education for what James Herndon termed, “the way it spozed to be.”
This unanticipated challenge underlines for me the need for us to persist in building the Met School as a credible alternative to the conventional high school. Virtually every teacher I know became a teacher in order “to make a difference.” In high school the structure gets in the way. Too often the strong teacher/student relationships and motivation we prize are found more in extracurricular involvements than in class. We need to work to see that all of our schools are organized in ways that help us realize our ideals.
Thanks to Adair Warren and the Met School teachers we have developed a wonderfully different kind of high school, one that has changed the course of students’ lives in profound ways.
When we initiated the Met School we hoped that our three high schools would see and adopt some of the Met’s approaches: advising, internships, long-term relationships, clear pathways to post-secondary entrance, learning in depth, true family partnerships. In our other high schools we have implemented a universal teacher-advisor system and are working to make it as effective as the Met’s (Met students are twice as likely to say they have a real advocate at school as other high school students). We’ve implemented effective internship and mentorship programs and are working to make them universal like the Met’s. We are working to ensure that every high school student in our system has at least one real-world internship experience.
The first students graduated from the Met this past June. Each gave a valedictory address. Attending the grad was a wonderful experience. Students spoke of their passion for learning, the relationships and experiences of their high school years and of their confidence and optimism for their futures. In a large high school it’s not possible for every student to give a valedictory address, but we’ve discovered that it is possible to recognize every grad with a personal citation touching on their best memory of high school, thanking someone who made a difference in their life, and commenting on their plans for the future.
Our goal here is not so much to innovate, to restructure or to reform high school; our goal is to improve the school experience and life prospects for our students and with the example of the Met we are doing so.
Three years ago, one of the featured stories in the Education Canada Theme Issue (“Innovation: Challenging the Status Quo”) described an alternative school that had just opened in the Seven Oaks School Division in Winnipeg, Manitoba. Met School, for grades 9-12, was designed for “kids who want a rich relationship with a teacher that extends over time, real-world learning opportunities” and a program built around students’ needs and passions, Seven Oaks superintendent Brian O’Leary told Education Canada at that time.
Seven Oaks Met School was then, and still is, the only high school in Canada that is part of the Big Picture Learning network of innovative schools that started with a single Met School in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1995. Big Picture schools embody the values described by Mr. O’Leary.
This fall, Seven Oaks Met School entered its fourth year. It graduated its first class of Grade 12 students in June. This seemed a good time to ask: How well has the school fulfilled the vision described by Mr. O’Leary?
It has been a godsend for Darlene Woiden, a mother who had despaired of finding a school that would engage the interest of her son, Parker Hubley. “I love him to bits, but he’s not academically inclined,” she says. “He never was from K to 8.” She described how most days of those nine years started with a struggle to get him to go to school.
Caption: Grade 11 student, Eric, at his internship with Minute Muffler. Eric learned how to repair tires, do oil changes and kept the shop clean and orderly, including tallying and ordering stock.
Credit: Photo courtesy of Seven Oaks School Division
For high school, she considered enrolling Parker in a private school with smaller classes. Then she received a newsletter from Seven Oaks School Division describing its new “Met School” as an alternative approach for some students. She was attracted by the school’s emphasis on a hands-on style of learning that included internships at businesses and institutions in the community. At the time, mistakenly, she wondered if the Met school was a special education class by another name and worried “he’s not going to learn what he needs.” In fact, Met School is designed for students seeking an alternative learning environment in which to pursue their passions and develop a closer relationship with teachers and students. In the end, deciding they had nothing to lose, Parker and his parents took part in an interview – a requirement for coming to the Met school. In 2009, Parker was accepted as a Grade 9 student.
A distinguishing feature of the Met School experience is that a cohort of students stays with the same teacher (known as “advisor”) over four years of high school. The approach is an extension of a practice by all three Seven Oaks high schools to connect every graduating Grade 8 student with a teacher-advisor who introduces stu- dents to high school, helps them navigate the next four years and is the caring adult who presents them with their diploma at graduation.
Another characteristic of the Met School is small “advisory” classes with no more than 15 students, so they get to know each other and interact in a way generally not accommodated in a larger school. By sticking with the same group of students throughout high school, the teacher/advisor gets to know the student on an individual level and stays in regular communication with the parents. That familiarity, says David Zynoberg, one of four Met School teachers, helps put a student’s actions and behaviour in context and guides the advisor on what’s needed in any given situation. “We’ve had parents really highlight how much a student has grown because of having that relationship in life, that adult who cares about them and really pushes them and looks for the best in what they’re capable of,” he says.
In the early months of Parker’s first year at Met School, Ms. Woiden was concerned that the work he was bringing home seemed “vague.” But over time she watched as he became immersed in his studies, especially impressed when her son discovered that his auto mechanics internship required knowledge of the same equations he struggled with in Math. “He took off with that math and he got an 80 out of it,” she recalls.
Internships with businesses and institutions in the community are a core element of the Met School experience, with students spending two-and-a-half to three months in a workplace setting. During a school year, a student may have as many as three internships linked, or not, to career exploration. By working in a professional environment, students develop work and social skills and, as Met School Principal Adair Warren explains, “a broader understanding of the work that people have done to develop their own careers.” Placements have included a college pharmaceutical manufacturing lab, health and medical settings, media, documentary filmmaking, technology, art, animal sciences, robotics, and prosthetics and orthotics, and those are just a few.
In an experience rare for high school, Met students report quarterly on their internships, individual school projects and their academic progress in stand-up “exhibitions” for fellow classmates, parents, staff, internship mentors and anyone else they choose to invite. Typically, a student’s first presentation is a bit awkward, not well focused, and brief, says Mr. Zynoberg. But students improve with each succeeding exhibition, thanks to follow-up activities that include a feedback form for the audience and meetings between the student and staff and family after the presentation.
During the year, advisory-group workshops focus on presentation skills and techniques to help students get ready for their presentations. They need to strike a balance between style and substance, says Mr. Zynoberg. “They want to be proud of their work and look really smart [while presenting] some really complicated things, but at the same time make it accessible to everybody,” he says. “It’s a challenge that they face every presentation.”
Darlene Woiden recalls Parker’s first presentation in 2009: “He would stare at the floor, he was kicking at an imaginary spot, he was mumbling; you could barely understand him.” Then, with obvious pride and a bit of emotion, she described his most recent exhibition, delivered this past June: “He’s animated, he’s looking straight at all the students, he’s telling jokes, he’s getting them involved and he’s passing out samples of the work that the kids did at the Y for him as a present for going away.” (The family moved to Ottawa this past summer.)
Core subjects such as English and Social Studies are very much a part of the Met School program, but typically are integrated in the students’ individual projects and internships. Matt Gereta, a student of Mr. Zynoberg, studied the history of computer processors, used applied math to build a pie chart accompanying his comparative analysis of several video games and wrote an essay comparing two Internet protocols. Mr. Gereta says he “didn’t like reading at all” when he entered high school, but read 13 books in his first year in Met School. Some, but not all, were related to his avid interest in computers. He is one of the five Met School graduates this year and now attends Red River College in Winnipeg where he is studying Business Information Technology.
MASTER OF EDUCATIONAL TECHNOLOGY
Since Met School does not offer Math, Calculus, Biology, Chemistry, Physics and Band, students take those classes at Garden City Collegiate, housed in the same building as the alternative program.
Diversity describes the profile of students who elect to attend Met School, says Ms. Warren, the principal. “Whether it’s honour-roll-type kids or kids who really like to work with their hands more than the academics, we are an inclusive place for all of them,” she says. In its early phase, with little time for Met School to establish its identity, some students found it not was not a good fit for them and left. Others, also unsure, stuck it out and ultimately found the program to their liking. Some students were enthusiastic from the start about the program’s promise of a better way to learn and flourished.
Caption: Met School Grade 11 film student, Anna, working on her documentary film on refugees called “Fight for Freedom.” Anna’s film was accepted into a California film festival.
Credit: Photo courtesy of Seven Oaks School Division
Far from the laid-back image often associated with alternative schools, Met School puts its energy into helping students develop self-knowledge, essential skills and a sense of direction – a strategy common to schools in the Big Picture education reform movement.
As a result, says Mr. O’Leary, students seeking a crack to hide in at school soon discover they won’t be overlooked by the teachers. Students are challenged to find and declare their interests and passions and then, with the help of their advisor, begin to build the pieces that will make up their learning plan. This includes courses, research, projects and internships, and is done in full view of – often with the help and cooperation of – their peers in the advisory.
When Seven Oaks established the Met School, Mr. O’Leary put two personal expectations at the top of his list. One was that it provide, as he puts it, “an alternative for kids looking for a more authentic personal experience in high school that doesn’t follow the standard and unfortunate recipe of grouping all at-risk kids together and just dumbing it down” and second, that the school would “help kids get to know themselves.”
Based on feedback from students and parents, he’s gratified that Met School is meeting those expectations. “I think lots of kids go through school on auto-pilot,” he says. “Unless we can really tap into their motivation, we won’t succeed with them. They have to be doing it for their own reasons, and ultimately just for the joy of the experience and learning.”
I think lots of kids go through school on auto-pilot. Unless we can really tap into their motivation, we won’t succeed with them. They have to be doing it for their own reasons, and ultimately just for the joy of the experience and learning.
Still, he is disappointed that Met School was not able to reach and retain everyone. Some students, he said, saw Met School “as a relief from what they’ve found to be kind of a boring routine. But people [here] know them and they’re in their face more and they really have to get engaged to deal with stuff.” When confronted with the need to face up to their challenges, some students are not ready to do so.
Met School’s enrolment of 50 students is less than half the 120 that was projected before the school opened – a disappointment but not a game-changer for Mr. O’Leary. “One of my rules in starting things is that we delude ourselves as to how much work it’s going to be: We underestimate how much work it’s going to be and over-estimate the results. If we didn’t have that capacity for self-deception, we’d never start anything.”
Looking ahead, Mr. O’Leary is encouraged that recruitment this year for Met School “is much easier than it’s been. Kids are coming forward. We have staff who come to the division and want to work there. We have huge competition to work there, and really talented people. We almost always get to the point that [new programs such as Met School are] better than we expected , but years one, two, and three are always more work than we had thought.”
Some elements of the Met School program elements can now be found in the three Seven Oaks mainstream high schools. All three schools have teacher-advisors and are adding to their roster of internships. In one case, West Kildonan Collegiate has changed its timetable, occasionally allowing a “whole-period day” that gives students the day to carry out a variety of integrated activities related to a particular course.
West Kildonan also has divided its 800 students into four learning clusters, each with its own science lab, with the same teacher for core courses in Grade 9 and Grade 10. “What that’s done is really cut down on failure rates,” says Mr. O’Leary. “Instead of teachers feeling pressured that they have limited time, they know they have two years, 240 hours with these kids over time. If the kid does not get the credit, the teacher who taught them is responsible for remediating them.”
Mr. O’Leary noted “a strong correlation between kids failing a single credit in Grade 9 and not graduating.” He adds “keeping students with teachers for a second year, keeping teachers responsible for kids who don’t meet their standards” is a way to reduce failures.
From his perspective as the top official in Seven Oaks School Division, Mr. O’Leary is convinced that Met School values and learning framework have had “a profound effect” on Seven Oaks high schools. Still, despite media attention and a constant flow of visitors interested in the work of Met School, he frets that “we’ve not challenged the thinking of people in other at-risk programs.” He says “people tend to see what [Met School is] doing and usually not dismiss it but say, ‘Oh, we’re doing that already’ – when they don’t.”
But those in the Met School family know exactly what the program is doing for their children. Susan Mitchell says her daughter, Candace Houle, entered Met School in Grade 9 when the school opened three years ago and has had the same teacher-advisor, Nancy Janelle, as a constant presence in her high school life. Ms. Mitchell says Candace needed a more flexible, active learning style after struggling in middle school. “Particularly in the high school years … you need to have a nurturing environment where the teachers are willing to go the extra mile. That’s what Met School has given Candace.”
For her part, Ms. Houle has sparked to the Met School experience. She’s had internships at the Winnipeg Zoo, a vegan bookstore and café, two different record labels and a local radio station. The latter two have spurred her to pursue a career in the music industry and she expects to enter Fanshawe College in London, Ontario, next fall in music, arts and industry. “I’m glad I made the decision to go [to Met School],” she says. “It’s been super-great for me.”
Haily Seguin, now in Grade 10, last year did a project on brain development in young children and another on 9/11, as well as collaborating with a friend on a project they called “What’s in Your Burger?” Met School has made a difference for her, she says, “because it allows me to see what the real world is going to bring me once I graduate.”
Darlene Woiden still marvels at the transformation of her son, Parker. In preparation for the family’s move to Ottawa, she and her husband took Parker to an Ottawa high school she describes as much like Met School in orientation. “He was this young adult in the room that my husband and I had never seen. He spoke of the program and he spoke of his army cadets, and he explained to them … that from his Met School he learned that learning was fun and he wanted to be in a school that could help him to keep that attitude. And the Vice-Principal just kind of looked at [me and my husband] and I just got teary-eyed and almost had to leave the room.”
EN BREF – Seule école secondaire canadienne faisant partie du réseau américain Big Picture Learning regroupant des écoles innovantes, l’école Seven Oaks Met School a remis des diplômes à sa première cohorte ce printemps. Les stages réalisés dans des entreprises et des établissements constituent un élément fondamental de l’expérience de cette école. Les élèves préparent un rapport portant sur leur stage, ainsi que sur des projets individuels et sur leurs progrès scolaires, et présentent des exposés oraux trimestriels d’une heure devant des camarades de leur groupe consultatif, des parents, des membres du personnel, des mentors de stage et d’autres invités qu’ils choisissent. L’enseignant-conseiller de la classe suit le même groupe d’élèves pendant leurs quatre années au secondaire.
At the opening of Olds High School, Principal Tom Christensen held his breath as he watched students inspect the new facilities designed with a new approach to learning in mind.
The Alberta school is divided into four so-called “quads,” each housing one-quarter of the school’s 800 students, with flexible learning spaces to accommodate small or large groups, self-directed study, project-based learning and other forms of inquiry and collaboration.
“You could hear the students – they just got it right away,” says Mr. Christensen, delighted by their response.
In many ways, Olds is not your average high school.
It is located on the campus of Olds College, which partnered with Chinook’s Edge School Division to create a shared, multi-facility complex known as the Community Learning Campus (CLC). The high school occupies about 20 percent of the CLC’s Ralph Klein Centre, which also houses the CLC’s Health and Wellness Centre, the Central Alberta Child and Family Services Authority, Alberta Employment and Immigration, Integrated Career Centre, as well as counseling and health services.
Other facilities that make up the learning campus include a fine arts centre for theatre and performing arts for students and the community, as well as a Bell e-Learning Centre that serves as a high-tech hub for learning resources accessible to students, staff, and communities in the vicinity of Olds, Alberta.
As a measure of the physical integration of education facilities, high school students make use of career, technical and shop facilities, renovated as part of the CLC project and located on the college campus. In addition to saving money, the shared facilities enable smooth pathways from college to post-secondary education or training.
Former Chinook’s Edge Superintendent Jim Gibbons says students can “do a transition from, say, a level of skill at Grade 9 or 10 and then easily transition to the trades as well.” High school students can use the college library as well, with no need to duplicate the facility.
The layout of the high school is designed to get students thinking about their interests and possible career pathways. Students in the Grade 9 quad explore a “Who Am I?” theme that introduces them to project-based learning. In the past, says Mr. Christensen, a project might consist of: “we studied Columbus, now write a report on him.” Now, he says, “a project has a driving question; it’s based on the inquiry idea.”
A project has a driving question; it’s based on the inquiry idea.
Grade 10-12 students choose among three different quads. The Blue and Gold quads are organized along the familiar “classroom-based” model (“We don’t like to use the word ‘traditional’ anymore,” Mr. Christensen says). This model was inspired by small K-12 community schools in which teachers know high-school-age students and their parents well. “When we were setting up the idea of the quads, we were trying to make the four areas of our school function like small schools,” says Mr. Christensen. For example, in the Blue and Gold quads, teachers of Math, English and Social Science stay with the students through their three years of high school. The timetable accommodates team teaching as another form of learning enrichment.
The “Green” quad, by contrast, subscribes to an inquiry-based form of learning, with projects and seminars that allow students to be more self-directed in their activities. Students stay with the same two core-subject teachers for three years. Green quad students don’t have to be honour students, and many are not, according to Mr. Christensen, but they do need to be self-motivated and have a good work ethic. The self-directed approach is designed to create a university-like atmosphere to ease the transition from high school to university. Although the other three quads were developed as part of the planning for the new school, the Green-quad concept, previously known as the “academic team,” has been part of the Olds High School program for more than 10 years.
Enabling students to direct their own learning means students are not constrained by disciplines organized into the usual hourly units of classroom study. “We know as adults we learn at different rates,” says Mr. Gibbons, now a Senior Advisor with the Alberta School Boards Association. He says most schools hang onto the outmoded Carnegie unit “that suggests if we have students spend 60, 70, 80 minutes in a classroom they will come out with this defined amount of knowledge and learning. It doesn’t make sense.”
Not all teachers are comfortable in the kind of setting adopted by Olds High School. Four teachers among the staff of 30 decided not to stay after the new program was introduced, even though some participated in the planning and visioning. They included some master teachers. “I’m very good friends with them and I respect that they did that, says Mr. Christensen. “But it opened opportunities for me to hire people that were ready to really embrace what we’re doing.”
In 2003, a group of parents in Olds, Alberta, rejected a provincial grant of $6.8 million to renovate their aging high school, which they felt should be replaced. Their refusal – even with the provincial minister of infrastructure ready to hand over an oversize cheque – set in motion a remarkable collaboration among education institutions accustomed to working in their own spheres.
What transpired in Olds, a rural community of 8,200 people located midway between Calgary and Edmonton, is the result of a shared vision that transcended institutional boundaries to create facilities and learning opportunities far beyond the means of its individual partners.
By working together, and drawing widespread support in the community and beyond, Chinook’s Edge School Division (CESD) and Olds College conceived a plan that materialized over seven years into a $70-million Community Learning Campus (CLC) serving high school, college, and adult learners in Olds and mid-central Alberta. In 2010, the new complex opened as a joint venture between Chinook’s Edge, the largest rural school division in Alberta, and Olds College, with facilities including a 390-seat theatre, a fitness centre, an e-learning centre (for distance learning and on-site training), and not least, a new $22-million high school on the campus of the 1,300- student college.
The CLC sprang from the conviction of the leaders of the two institutions that they could accomplish a great deal more by joining forces than by living in largely separate silos. In the end, the project succeeded thanks to a multi-stakeholder group of “gladiators,” the development of a well-defined business case, and bits of serendipity along the way. The CLC was selected by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) as a case study in its Innovative Learning Environments Project.
The timing was right for a collaboration.
“At that point in time, the college really needed to come into the 21st century, particularly from an infrastructure and programmatic standpoint,” says H.J. (Tom) Thompson, president of Olds College. “There was a stark reality that if we were to continue to be a traditionalist in terms of working with government as primary sponsor of infrastructural renewal, we’ll still be waiting today.”
I think high schools have to be much more flexible and need to find ways to engage kids so they see this bigger picture of a career path
For his part, then-Chinook’s Edge Superintendent Jim Gibbons had to figure out how to replace an aging high school separated from its sport fields by a busy highway and dependent on a nearby church to house a music program. But he was also concerned about preparing students for a 21st century economy requiring higher levels of education than in the past. “I think high schools have to be much more flexible and need to find ways to engage kids so they see this bigger picture of a career path,” he says. “We know kids are going to have multiple careers and so how do you get some experience and try things out?” (See Shared Campus, below)
Mr. Gibbons approached Mr. Thompson about possibly relocating the high school on a parcel of the Olds College campus, but Mr. Thompson was not interested selling a piece of college land for a “siloed, standalone entity.” Recalling the conversation, he says he told Mr. Gibbons, now a Senior Advisor to the Alberta School Boards Association, “if you want to talk about something just a little bit different, maybe a whole lot different, I said I think you would have the interest of our college and certainly our leaders here.”
Thus began a collaboration of two “visionaries,” as others described them, who met over coffee to map out a partnership that would work for both institutions and expand opportunities for their students and the wider community. Early on, the two leaders recruited key allies – Olds High School principal Tom Christensen and Dorothy (Dot) Negropontes, then an Assistant Superintendent in Chinook’s Edge. Ms. Negropontes was an alumnus of Olds High School who had deep roots in the community and a strong reputation for organizational skills.
What emerged from the discussions was the notion of shared facilities – under the banner of the Community Learning Campus – that would, among other things, facilitate a seamless transition for high school students into the workplace, apprenticeship, college or university. Reaching beyond their institutional walls, Mr. Gibbons and Mr. Thompson also looked to connect 13 communities within the Chinook’s Edge School Division to an e-learning centre for education and training. Area residents also would have access to a health and wellness facility and a fine arts complex for community and school events.
The shared arrangement also had implications for how best to equip a variety of students for tomorrow’s economy. “We looked at the learner as a high school learner, a college learner, a college learner that might choose to go on to a university program, a community lifelong learner and, most importantly, [we envisioned] a region that could be served so much better if we would append the technology,” says Mr. Thompson. “That was something the government latched onto big-time.”
His strategy to generate provincial support for CLC was to hold the government accountable for its “rhetoric” on public policy in three areas: “Go Alberta,” a 20-year vision for the province; a rural Alberta development strategy; and “Campus Alberta,” a plan to improve student transitions between college and university. The three policies, he says, were “rich in rhetoric.”
Caption: Olds High students in the CLC’s Bell e-Learning lab
Credit: Photo courtesy of Chinook’s Edge School Division
Engaging rural members of the provincial legislature, for example, was an important part of presenting the learning campus as beneficial to the region. “That’s a very important strategic consideration because you’re increasing your political critical mass,” says Mr. Thompson. “Why rural institutions are suffering and dying, quite frankly, is because they can’t compete for resources against urban institutions that are surrounded with political firepower. This proposition had plenty of political firepower, both geographically and also because we brought government services into the mix of the building of a mall in concert with that [Health and Wellness Centre] and a social services mall that would have Child and Family Services, human resources employment, and Alberta Health – that brings in three more ministers.”
The CLC proposal was based on a solid business plan developed under a joint-venture arrangement between the school division and Olds College. “It’s different than a partnership,” explains Mr. Gibbons. Under a joint venture, he says “you only own the assets together in pursuit of the vision you’ve described. You don’t own them individually. You can’t take your ball and go home.” The arrangement set out separate responsibilities for each partner and spelled out sharing of revenue from leasing of office space, memberships for the fitness facility, special-event rental of the fine arts facility, and other sources to cover the ongoing operations of the CLC. The project planners made certain to communicate regularly with provincial politicians, whose constituencies stood to benefit from the CLC.
There were bumps along the road. At a critical moment, the project needed key approvals from the minister of infrastructure and the minister of education to proceed to the engineering and design phase – a $500,000 commitment. The request came on the eve of an election call and, without ministerial sign-offs that day, the project could have been delayed by six to nine months, estimates Mr. Thompson. In the end, the then-Chairman of Chinook’s Edge, a former member of the legislature, corralled both ministers in Edmonton for the necessary government commitment.
Another bump for the project came during the construction phase, as inflation hit at a rate of 2.5 percent per month in the latter part of the Ralph Klein administration. A number of projects failed to move ahead because they could not adapt to the fast-rising cost of materials. The CLC team took a different tack. “What we said was … if we don’t fix this ourselves and keep driving this forward, somebody somewhere else is going to pull the plug,” recalls Mr. Thompson. “So we became…a model [to the provincial government] of how to manage through an inflationary period.”
CLC architect Craig Webber, principal architect of Group2 Architecture Interior Design, says fast-rising costs were a catalyst to shrink the project 20 per cent without losing key elements. In the end, with a focus on shared spaces that would serve different functions at different times, his firm created a high school with capacity for 1,100 students –higher than the initial plan of 750 – without expanding the physical space. “Not only can we have better spaces, we can create better teaching environments in smaller spaces,” he says.
Not only can we have better spaces, we can create better teaching environments in smaller spaces
On February 22, 2010, led by the police and a local radio station, Olds High School Principal Tom Christensen and members of the student body walked from the old school to the new complex 25 minutes away. A soft-spoken administrator with a strong commitment to expanded learning opportunities for students, Mr. Christensen recalls what stood out for him in planning for the new high school. The “idea of being able to actually talk program and then build a school after [planning the] program, that’s what’s cool about the actual facilities,” he says.
One outgrowth of the school’s close relationship with – and physical proximity to – the college is the development of a dual credit program for high school students from Olds and other division schools to earn college credits at Olds College while completing their high school diploma. Chinook’s Edge was part of a dual-credit pilot project sponsored by Alberta Education as the province sought to articulate college credits with high school credits and develop a dual-credit policy. Dual-credit opportunities, plus the province’s Ca- reer and Technology Studies (CTS) program, have fortified the school division’s curriculum in support of career pathways for students. Chinook’s Edge also piloted CTS courses in recreation leadership, community care services, human and social services and health care sciences.
Meanwhile, Olds High School students have other learning opportunities outside the classroom, such as staffing the fine arts building. “They’re learning how the technology side of things in theatre works, learning how sound works,” says Mr. Christensen. A hairstyling salon will open this year and a hospitality pathway will be developed to take advantage of a hotel being built on the Olds College campus through a public-private partnership. In all, he estimates that about a third of Olds High School students are out in the community as part of their studies.
It’s not the same school it was when Mr. Christensen began his teaching career there in 1984. “Where I’m working now, I might as well have been transferred from Antarctica,” he says. “I used to judge success by how quiet the hallways were, whether the doors were shut. Now I take excitement from where I see kids working individually in the open areas. That’s how I judge success now. That was an interesting transformation in myself.”
Caption: Olds High students in an Olds College machining lab. This is one of the CLC’s dual-credit offerings.
Credit: Photo courtesy of Chinook’s Edge School Division
He also sees a new culture of learning at Olds High. “You would think that by giving students more time that you’re going to lose your culture of rigour, when you [include] work experience time you’re going to lose your rigour. I used to hear that all the time: ‘We’re an academic place and we’re going to lose this by giving these kids freedom.’ It’s the opposite. I think we had last year on our Grade 12 exit exams …a 98 percent success rate. We used to be like 88-89. So in giving the students more time and giving them more individual responsibility, and personalizing it more, I’ll be darned but they do better.”
Once in operation, CLC lost some of its early momentum. Day-to-day operations moved ahead satisfactorily, but the big-picture ambitions became blurred. Mr. Gibbons retired in mid-2010 while early supporters of CLC on the school division board had moved on as well. Mr. Thompson says a sense of complacency set in the year after construction. He describes that period as “probably the most disappointing time for me. It’s almost like you give somebody a Ferrari and they treat it like a lawnmower.” But with the arrival of new players as advocates for CLC, he has regained his enthusiasm. “It’s moving back towards the Ferrari now,” he says.
Last year, Jason Dewling joined Olds College as Vice-President, Academics and Research, and, importantly, as his institution’s point-man to drive revitalization of the governance of CLC. He recognized how much effort had gone into getting the project off the ground, but concluded that less time had been devoted to the question of “now what?” He turned to Ms. Negropontes, now retired from the school division, to assess how to regain momentum for CLC. With her insider’s knowledge of the project, she was given a mandate to ask probing questions of dozens of CLC stakeholders on how to fulfill the project’s visionary ambitions.
Her report concluded that respondents enthusiastically endorsed the vision and appreciated the range of high-end facilities on the learning campus available for students and the wider community. Those interviewed also praised the high level of collaboration among institutions. But Ms. Negropontes also found that stakeholders identified several problem areas: a lack of clarity in roles, interests, needs, standards, and procedures related to the joint venture. Repairing and building relationships appeared to be a key requirement for moving ahead.
Her report has proved to be a catalyst to get back on track. “We are really in a very different place than we were last year,” says Mr. Dewling. “Dot’s report has made such a big difference.”
With revenue from ongoing activities, CLC hired Barb Mulholland as Director of Learning. Ms. Mulholland comes with a rich understanding of the potential for CLC, having served as the Chinook’s Edge Learning Services Coordinator who led the pilot project on dual credits. She has developed a three-year learning plan that calls for an increase in dual-credit opportunities and she is mapping out opportunities for curriculum intersections between the high school and the college. Revenues from facilities rentals are on the rise. The fine arts theatre is up to 200 bookings a year. The wide variety of activities going on within the campus brings a rich mixture of generations into contact with one another.
In addition to Ms. Mulholland, the CLC funds three other positions, with support from Olds College and CESD: director of CLC facilities and operations and Olds College business development; administrative assistant/receptionist for the Ralph Klein Centre and a sport recreation community programmer.
Although a few of the 13 community engagement sites have developed programming as first imagined by CLC, there are fresh efforts under way to rekindle interest. Campus Alberta Central has sprung up with a mission to reach rural learners with post-secondary learning opportunities, so the CLC will also be looking for ways to complement and cooperate with that program.
A governance team, headed by the President of Olds College and the Superintendent of Chinooks’ Edge, is keeper of the vision and has overall responsibility for the joint venture. Others on the 12-member team include board members, administration, faculty and students from CESD and Olds College, a CESD parent and representatives of the Town of Olds, Mountain View County, and the University of Alberta. They are partners “in association” in the joint venture.
Beyond the CLC campus, the town of Olds is turning into a regional “hub,” says Ms. Negropontes, attracting new residents.
She also says, ruefully, that it is harder to get a doctor’s appointment. Still, with all the new activity “it’s still very much of a small-town feel,” she says.
As a participant in the evolution of CLC – and now asked to give advice on other co-operative arrangements between institutions – Ms. Negropontes describes the collaboration in Olds as an example of the “third space,” a concept she takes from A Guide to Building Education Partnerships: Navigating Diverse Cultural Contexts to Turn Challenge into Promise. A third space like CLC, she says, “is the absolute pinnacle of collaboration.”
EN BREF – Lorsqu’un groupe de parents d’Olds, en Alberta, a refusé une subvention provinciale destinée à rénover leur école secondaire en 2003, la remarquable collaboration qui s’est ensuivie a donné lieu à un campus d’apprentissage novateur pour toute la communauté, et même au-delà. Ouverte en 2010, la nouvelle école secondaire Olds fait partie intégrante du Community Learning Campus (CLC), une initiative conjointe du conseil scolaire Chinook’s Edge School Division et du Olds College. Situé sur le campus du collège, le CLC est issu de la conviction des dirigeants des établissements qu’ils pouvaient accomplir beaucoup plus en unissant leurs forces qu’en les répartissant dans plusieurs silos distincts.
I am not happy these days. I teach in the humanities at a Canadian University. And – unlike my more Protestant-minded, less eudemonistical colleagues – I think persistent, intractable unhappiness is a clear sign that something is wrong. The following remarks are therefore a hybrid of personal therapy and scholarly analysis. My suspicion is that the state of post-secondary humanities education is the source of my unhappiness. Curing myself, or less ambitiously, simply understanding the cause of my malaise, will require a little self-reflection and a little rummaging around in the potpourri of modern higher education.
Twenty years ago I enjoyed my job and looked forward to teaching classes. I do not mean to suggest that all was well in those days; it wasn’t – not by a long shot. As early as 1969, George Grant argued that a fundamental shift in the university – away from study of the liberal arts and sciences toward the creation of research institutions animated by the spirit of technology and aimed at mastery of human and non-human nature – had been underway for decades and was already nearing completion.[1] If Grant was right, then the pleasant experiences I remember as a young scholar were merely the residual influence of a tradition that had, in fact, capitulated decades earlier and in whose glory I was basking naively, like an amateur astronomer delighting in the light of a star that has been dark for centuries.
By turns sobering and discouraging, this awareness makes me wonder what in the world I am doing. I am trying to make an argument my betters made over forty years ago without having any appreciable influence on their institutions; and I am making it in a context so far removed from theirs that the voice of that small residue of tradition is growing fainter by the day and can no longer be appealed to without soliciting looks of incredulity. So thin is the living, experiential core of that traditional world that even shame can no longer be counted on as a means of getting people to pause and reflect before jumping into the humanities curriculum with both entrepreneurial feet.
It won’t do therefore merely to defend the university as it was in my day. That might satisfy my nostalgia and make me happier for a time, but it won’t address the problem at its source. If we are going to learn once again what a genuine and robust education in the humanities is about, we’re going to have to question our nostalgia and memory as vigorously as our immediate circumstances. And in order to do that we will need to explore that strange thing on which humanities education ultimately rests – our humanity.
Of course, that sounds like the simplest thing in the world. We’re all human. But it turns out our humanity is a moving target and much more slippery and open to abuse than we might imagine. Indeed there are days when I feel so far removed from my humanity that I wonder whether our condition is so different from that of Winston Smith in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. I don’t mean that we live under a totalitarian regime that actively prohibits us from thinking beyond its dehumanizing agenda – though there are days. I am thinking rather of the difficulty Winston has discovering a true measure by which to judge the unreality of his condition, an unreality he senses but has no words to describe. When an old clipping from the Times “inadvertently” crosses his desk and “proves” the earlier confessions of three Party members were pure fabrications, Winston is first shocked and then elated; he thinks the clipping so powerful that it alone could “blow the Party to atoms” – much like today’s journalistic exposés. However, what Winston fails to realize is that the clipping itself is just another Party lie. In the end Winston recognizes his dilemma and describes it with stunning clarity in the following formula: “I understand HOW: I do not understand WHY.” [2]
It is the “why” question that promises real freedom – for Winston and for us. Why am I unhappy? Why is it that everything that seems meaningfully to me is disregarded as irrelevant? Such questions are the natural expression of our disaffection with our world. What is more human than that experience, even in this strange age of compulsory happiness? Doubting, questioning, and wondering – if we would only follow these promptings, our humanity itself would lead us back to the humanities proper and teach us what we lose through their neglect.
Doubting, questioning, and wondering – if we would only follow these promptings, our humanity itself would lead us back to the humanities proper and teach us what we lose through their neglect.
* * *
Asking hard, unpopular questions is never easy. But it is particularly difficult if you are alone or if doing so exposes or calls into question the interests of an institution that has little financial or ideological reason to encourage public audit and discussion. I would argue that universities have become such institutions.
To begin, they are everywhere tied to business interests, whether small or large, and in many instances are actually in business with private companies, frequently with faculty members having roles on both sides of the commercial arrangement. This is new. To indicate how new it is, I remember in my student days that you could not even buy a decent cup of coffee on campus, not because students and faculty members had lower culinary standards back then but because they still believed that academic independence would be compromised by being tied to commercial interests. This idea now seems quaint to us in an age in which many universities have their own malls. And like all malls and the businesses they house, universities are run by bosses – administrative elites like Presidents, Vice Presidents, and their minions – who are responsible for many things, among them “compelling” a recalcitrant mass known as The Faculty to perform in a way that mirrors the productive ethos of the administrative caste itself.
Productivity is the raison d’être of Western capitalist societies. Malls retail domestically the fruits of productivity. Universities do R & D and create “ideas” that support the manufacturing sector which supplies retail markets with their goods. Ken Auletta describes succinctly the nature of this new relationship between universities and business in his recent article in The New Yorker, “Get Rich U”: “Stanford is the farm system for Silicon Valley.”[3]
The productive ethos works well enough so long as you are producing widgets to sell to widget lovers. But it proves disastrous when applied to humanities education, though it is much more tolerated by faculty members today than it was in the past. This toleration is likely due to a combination of exhaustion, corruption, and a shift in values. You can fight only so many losing battles before you say to hell with it, the devil take them, and run for your pension. The depletion of the old guard through attrition coupled with the addition of new faculty members schooled from birth in the new ethos explains the decline in large part. After all, university professors too share the productive ethos. We live in a productive society, animated by productive people, which profits immeasurably from productive practices. Why wouldn’t we share that ethos?
Consider one of the fundamental principles of the productive ethos – the quantitative principle. Though it may be possible to argue that an academic whose pile of publications at the end of a stipulated period – say the period covered by the annual report – weighs ten pounds is more productive than an academic whose publications over the course of the same period weighs only five pounds, still we might wonder what we actually know about either person’s work as a result of the application of the quantitative principle. For instance, if Hamlet is one of the documents tucked into that five pound package while the ten-pounder includes two recent volumes by John Grisham, surely we would want to revise our judgment. In any event, if an unvarnished application of the quantitative principle seems unlikely and insufficiently nuanced to be a legitimate measure of performance in the context of an annual academic report (though I would caution anyone about underestimating the proclivities of the administrative caste when it comes to the ethos of productivity), we might add the matter of the work’s “impact” to the calculation to arrive at a better metric. Impact too is a quantitative measure, though a more complex one. It asks concerning the effect of one’s work on other things – institutions, political and social events, people – both within and without the university, though today preference is given to the latter in keeping with the business ethic underlying the productive ethos.
The impact test is one that Stephan Collini has analyzed in his recent book What Are Universities For? Collini teaches us that the most problematic aspect of the impact test derives from the term itself. To impact something is to strike or bang into it – in my experience never a good measure of anything except perhaps in war and at those demolition derbies my father used to take me to. But setting aside the silliness of the term, a more troubling picture emerges regarding its actual consequences when tied to funding formulas. As Collini demonstrates, you can have an absolutely first-rate piece of scholarship that illuminates, say, the transition from a feudal to a capitalist economy, that ranks as completely worthless when measured by its impact and when compared to the impacts of “products” issuing from other faculties within the university.[4] Placed alongside a new gadget for collecting pennies, the impact of which would be staggering, this little corner of the human experience seems trivial at best. But what an odd inversion of things that judgement entails. A gadget which, beyond its economic potential, could not hold your attention for more than a few moments trumps an intrinsically interesting field of study whose complexity alone offers the mind a rich, expansive field in which to explore the human condition. No wonder humanities professors are unhappy. How could they possibly compete with penny rolls? And why would they want to?
No wonder humanities professors are unhappy. How could they possibly compete with penny rolls? And why would they want to?
Collini wishes to defend humanities education, but like all of us today he has trouble knowing how when all the measures of intellectual worth seem to guarantee the irrelevance of our teaching and research from the outset. In other words, the game is rigged, and Collini knows it. This is the thing I find most refreshing about his book – he is not taken in by the old lines and strategies.
During an earlier dispensation of the game, humanities professors naively thought they could beat the odds by playing the game on its own terms. What they did was to concede the fundamental point of the defenders of the productive ethos – namely, that humanities education was intrinsically worthless. However, they argued that the matter of its intrinsic worth being settled, its practical value as a cultivator and provider of intellectual “skills” was considerable. The argument worked well enough for a time, if by “worked” we mean kept the wolves at bay and the reformer’s axe away from the root of the tree. But two can play at that game. Once the concession was made, administrators and fellow-travelling faculty members argued that these skills could be much more effectively cultivated by completely different pedagogical strategies and curricula.
The old argument said: medieval history might be an awful waste of time, but at least it produces people who can think analytically and write clear and penetrating memos once they find themselves in the corporate world. [5] As Collini says, this argument amounts to the assertion that “what is valuable about leaning to play the violin well is that it helps us develop the manual dexterity that will be useful for typing.” The new model says: if it is a waste of time, then it is a waste of time. Let’s get rid of the curriculum and those expensive curriculum delivery units (faculty) and just teach memo writing and critical thinking. That is a parody, to be sure, but not much of one. Every humanities professor feels its contempt somewhere deep down in her bones. (Let me quickly add that this contempt is felt equally by my colleagues in the sciences and social sciences. In the former case, it is present in the denial of funding for “discovery-based” research in favour of short term projects with obvious financial potential and technological applications.)
* * *
An old professor of mine used to say that there is living and there is living well. The productive ethos that guides our society has created a civilization that lives more comfortably, more affluently, and longer than any other in history. As to living well, early supporters of the ethos still had enough culture (pardon the word) and sense to leave a few places untouched by its demands. These were, again according to my professor, sacred spaces – churches, theatres, museums, and universities. But the ethos has grown in our time and has spread around the globe. Now we are told that our mere survival is predicated not only on its acceptance but on a single-minded pursuit of its goods in all aspects of our lives. So, we adjust the curriculum, eliminate a couple more departments, and erase yet another body of images of humankind’s long effort to live well. We will survive, as a result, and live, at least for a time. But in those moments when the lights go out and the TV goes dark, I fear we will no longer understand our unhappiness or what we have lost.
EN BREF – La productivité est devenue la raison d’être des sociétés occidentales capitalistes, soutenue par des principes fondamentaux : la quantité et l’impact. Ces deux principes bien connus des universités placent les connaissances utilitaires au-dessus des préoccupations relatives à la condition humaine, au doute, au questionnement et à la curiosité. La prédominance de cette forme d’éthique place les facultés de sciences humaines devant un dilemme : soit reformuler leurs programmes en fonction de l’éthique de la productivité, soit en conserver l’intégrité, au risque d’être taxées de manquer de pertinence. Quoique la stratégie laisse entendre qu’un choix existe, les deux options mènent à la même issue : l’élimination d’une éducation authentique en sciences humaines. Le mécontentement des professeurs de sciences humaines n’étonne donc pas. Pour réapprendre ce qu’est une éducation véritable et solide en sciences humaines, nous devrons explorer cette chose étrange sur laquelle elle repose ultimement : notre humanité.
[1] George Grant, Technology and Empire: Perspectives on North America (Toronto: House of Anansi, 1969), 113-133.
[2] George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (London: Penguin, 1990), 78-80.
[3] Ken Auletta, “Get Rich U,” The New Yorker, April 30, 2012. Accessed at http://www.newyorker.com/reporting
/2012/04/30/120430fa_fact_auletta
[4] Stephan Collini, What Are Universities For? (London: Penguin, 2012), 168-177.
[5] Ibid., 91.
A review of More High School Graduates: How Schools Can Save Students From Dropping Out by Ben Levin. Corwin Sage, 2012. ISBN 978-1-4129-9224-4 Paper
In a participatory and constantly changing world, high school completion has far-reaching social, cultural, generational, and economic benefits both for individuals and for society as a whole. Statistics Canada reports the majority of Canadian young people aged 18 to 19 in all provinces graduate from high school (76.9 percent); this figure rises dramatically to 89.5 percent among young people aged 20 to 24.[1] Nevertheless, improving high school completion rates continues to be a priority across Canada, in part because these promising figures mask a persistent gender gap (more girls graduate than boys) and a variation among provinces.
Critics question the relevance and quality of our nation’s secondary schools. In More High School Graduates, Ben Levin acknowledges the challenges: too many students are disengaged and do not believe they learn anything meaningful at school; teachers are trapped in the unholy trinity of textbooks, lectures, and tests that focus on memorization versus creating knowledge; timetables, subjects, tracking and streaming, and teacher assignments are designed to work for the adults in high schools rather than for the students.
In response, he has written a comprehensive guide to improving high schools for learners and increasing graduation, based on strategies (tested in Ontario) that can work in all high schools in a district, a province, or across the country.
In eight chapters on how schools can keep students in school and also support them in better educational attainments, Levin offers practical and specific learner-focused ideas within an overall strategy, and a set of priorities that provides a clear road map for improvement. He argues that all high schools need to work on improvement; that improvement requires an integrated, multifaceted strategy; and that improvement is a matter of systematic and sustained effort over time rather than the result of brilliant design or policy.
Levin outlines a context-sensitive, interdependent, four-part framework: Connect With Every Student; Work with Curriculum and Graduation Requirements; Improve Teaching and Learning; and Connect with the Community. Levin’s four strategies reflect an understanding of why students do not graduate. All four strategies are necessary and each needs to be addressed for success.
First, educators need to know the status and progress of every student, identify the reasons for any problems, and intervene as soon as they see signs of difficulties. Research demonstrates that strong personal connections with every student is an important factor in student success.
Second, educators need to provide curriculum and programs that enable all students to achieve a good outcome. This is where Levin’s strategy really shines, in setting high expectations and providing appropriate supports that lead to an improved learning and school experience for every student, not just targeted groups. Program flexibility, credit rescue and credit recovery options, opportunities for self direction, offering credentials that have real value, establishing partnerships with other organizations, and whole school programming, are key factors in a high school that works for all students.
Third, educators must focus on improved teaching and learning every day. The core business of any high school is to support students’ learning; Levin argues that using assessment both for learning and for improving teaching practices, increasing student voice and input into class design, and increasing opportunities for independent work, are key factors for achieving better outcomes. Levin acknowledges the role of professional judgment, arguing that membership in the teaching profession implies shared beliefs and a commitment to research-informed practices which, in combination with experience, identify how to proceed. He encourages educators to intentionally draw upon the larger knowledge base on effective learning and teaching practices when making changes to their practice.
Fourth, schools must be connected deeply to the local and broader communities of which they are a part. High school students will benefit from strong outreach programs that foster interaction and engagement with the broader community, from families and neighbourhoods, to employers, post-secondary institutions, and non-profit agencies. Community connections can support learning opportunities that, in turn, increase success in school.
Taken together, these four themes provide a clear, credible, and useful strategy for improving high school graduation rates. The one significant gap in this work is Levin’s failure to address the design and implementation of technology enabled learning environments in any meaningful way. However, he states up front that he offers practical strategies that can be implemented immediately in any school. Levin takes aim at improving the schools we have right now rather than trying to create entirely new, innovative, and technology-enabled approaches to learning in high school.
Ben Levin’s book is a positive and convincing call to action for every teacher, principal, superintendent, and school board member who wants to make high schools better for learners. Based on relevant research and documented increases in graduation rates in Ontario high schools, Levin’s four interrelated strategies for improvement work. And the rest of Canada should pay attention.
[1] Statistics Canada, Education Matters: Insights on Education, Learning and Training in Canada, 9, no. 1 (2012). Retrieved from: http://www5.statcan.gc.ca/bsolc/olc-cel/olc-cel?catno=81-004-X&lang=eng
Forum Highlights: Searching for Certainty in Uncertain Times – Youth Confidence in School, Community, and the Future.
Zeros for missed work unfairly skew grades: education experts – Edmonton Journal
Paul Budra, my colleague in the English Department at Simon Fraser University, recently brought to my attention his engaging essay, “The Case for Teaching Grammar”, published in Education Canada in 2010.[1] Although my response is a bit tardy, the topic – the value of grammar instruction in improving students’ writing – has been debated for at least 150 years, and is showing no signs of tiring. Though Budra’s proposal is a modest one – that instructors “carve out a bit of time in the K–12 years to teach writing skills” (by which he means grammar lessons) – I would argue that the impact of such instruction will be even more modest, perhaps nonexistent; in fact, I want to make the case for not teaching grammar. I should emphasize at the outset that my disagreement is pedagogical, not personal: Paul is not only the most collegial of colleagues, but an experienced and award-winning teacher.
As a frequent instructor of SFU’s first-year English courses, Budra knows from experience that students’ writing often contains grammatical errors:
I recently . . . found myself having to explain the rules of punctuation to a class of first year students who had just been accepted into what Maclean’s ranks as Canada’s top comprehensive university. . . . Students leaving high school and entering university do not have, for the most part, the necessary skills to make themselves consistently understood in writing.[2]
The simple solution, it would seem, is to teach those skills. “We teach students skills in physical education class so they can play sports; we teach them skills in music class so they can play instruments.” So why don’t high school English teachers teach grammar skills? To find out, Budra consults Professor of Education Paul Neufeld, who identifies the source of the problem: the emergence of “process” pedagogy in 1966, “a new pedagogical model that emphasized ‘personal growth’.”
“Since the revolution of ’66,” Neufeld explains, “skills have been seen as an enemy to writing.” Under the process approach, “students are asked to generate ideas, plan their writing, do the actual writing, get feedback (often from peers), and then ‘publish.’” Budra believes his own children have been taught this way, as they “regularly produced little ‘books’. They were charming and creative but, like much of the work my university students are doing, full of grammatical errors.”
Unfortunately, Neufeld’s brief history of composition is not only simplistic but also incorrect, most significantly in his confusion of personal-growth pedagogy (better known as expressivism) with process pedagogy, two approaches that are in many ways incompatible. As a result, while the criticisms of Neufeld and Budra apply pretty well to expressivism, they apply not at all to process pedagogy. And when the subject is expressivism, I’ll borrow the stick from Budra and Neufeld and take a few whacks myself. Expressivism did not originate in 1966 but a century before in British Romanticism and American Transcendentalism: “To believe that what is true for you is true for all men,” writes Emerson, “that is genius. Speak your latent conviction, and it shall be the universal sense.”[3] In its purest form, expressivist pedagogy rejects process because expressivists value one’s first thoughts, straight from the writer within and uncorrupted by stifling concerns about audience or rhetorical purpose. Students do freewriting exercises to access their authentic voices and those inspired first thoughts, and write intimately in their journals. To its credit, expressivism honours a student’s subjectivity. But to its serious discredit, it completely solipsizes writing, removing it from the world of action and communication to the inner world of the writer’s mind.
As for process-based writing pedagogy, there is nothing necessarily revolutionary, and certainly nothing anti-skills, about recognizing that writing is a process. In fact, Budra’s description of process pedagogy describes what we English professors do: we generate ideas, plan our writing, do the actual writing, get feedback (often from peers), and then publish our little books. Nor is this a “new pedagogical model”: Aristotle recognized that composition is a process. Understood in its technical sense, as an approach to composition, modern process pedagogy is a reaction against both expressivism and what compositionists call current-traditional pedagogy: the grammar-based approach Neufeld and Budra seem to endorse.
The teaching of writing as a recursive, adaptable process of invention, research, arrangement, drafting, discussing, and revising challenges the current-traditional approach of teaching writing as a prescriptive, uniform method: come up with a thesis, do an outline, write a five-paragraph essay. Understood in a nontechnical sense, the claim that writing is a process – that it does not just flow forth from the wellspring of genius – is so trivially true and obvious that one wonders why anyone would object to it – unless they’re confusing it with something else, like expressivism.
Having cleared up that misunderstanding, there remains the issue central to Budra’s essay: grammar instruction. “As long as I have been teaching,” Budra writes, “instructors have been complaining about student writing.” Indeed they have, and in fact the complaints are so similar as to constitute a genre I call the Literarist’s Lament. All the laments make the same argument: in Budra’s words, “student writing has been demonstrated again and again to have deteriorated since basic grammatical skills stopped being taught.” A prominent lamenter is celebrity English Professor Stanley Fish who, in his NYTimes.com blog, “Think Again,” complains that “student writing has only gotten worse:…millions of American college and high school students will stride across the stage, take diploma in hand and set out to the wider world, most of them utterly unable to write a clear and coherent English sentence.”[4] Likewise does Harvard President Charles Eliot lament first-year students’ “ignorance of the simplest rules of punctuation.”[5]
The solution offered in the laments is always the same and is always, we are told, “simple and obvious”:[6] what is needed, Budra asserts, is training in “the basics”. Fish too calls for “a return to basics,” since the study of grammar will (although Fish admits he has no evidence), “translate into a greater alertness to the operations of form in [one’s] own writing.”[7] Under Eliot’s leadership, Harvard introduced its own back-to-basics composition requirement, emphasizing “punctuation, grammar, and expression.”[8] Although it’s been demonstrated (again and again) that student writing is not worse than ever,[9] the Literarist’s Lament has a history even longer than Budra realizes: Eliot’s was written in 1871. Budra’s assertion above should be revised to read, “people continue to believe that student writing has deteriorated, and have likely been believing this for as long as there have been both students and writing.” Why we remain so invested in this belief must be the topic for another essay.
Budra concedes two possible objections to his proposal to teach the basics: “The first is that teaching these ‘rote’ skills stifles the creativity of students. . . . A more serious objection is that teaching traditional writing skills imposes the arbitrary standards of a hegemonic cultural elite on a youthful population who are creating new forms of literacy.” Demonstrating the conventionality of the lament genre, Fish imagines the very same objections: that he is “urging a series of arid exercises that could not possibly engage the interest of any student,”[10] and that “notions of correctness are devices by means of which the powers that be extend their illegitimate hegemony.”[11]
Wistfully recalling a time (which never actually existed) when students were grammatically virtuous, current-traditionalists continue to demand more grammar instruction, either unaware of or unfazed by the decades of research proving its uselessness.
There are, however, at least two other objections, which the laments never mention: grammar exercises don’t work, and the “basic skills” of writing are not grammatical at all. “Massive evidence,” writes W. Ross Winterowd, “leads one to conclude that systematic grammatical study of any kind does not improve one’s writing or speaking ability”: the study of grammar does not translate to students’ writing. The numerous studies Winterowd cites for support are just the tip of a mountain of empirical evidence proving that grammar exercises “are a vandalistic waste of time”: grammar exercises make one proficient not in writing but in grammar exercises.[12] Nevertheless, wistfully recalling a time (which never actually existed) when students were grammatically virtuous, current-traditionalists continue to demand more grammar instruction, either unaware of or unfazed by the decades of research proving its uselessness. Arguing that the majority of first-year college students are “unable to write a paper relatively free of errors,” Budra asserts that “this sort of negative outcome would, in most areas of human endeavour, be taken as empirical evidence of the failure of a technique.” In reality, current-traditionalism has not been conquered by expressivism, but continues to structure English pedagogy in many high schools worldwide and in more than half of college writing programs.[13] Therefore, if one believes that students enter university ill-prepared, then one must accept that the failed technique is not process pedagogy or even expressivism, but grammar-based current-traditionalism.
My second objection to grammar instruction is that the basic skills of writing are not grammatical at all.
My second objection to grammar instruction is that the basic skills of writing are not grammatical at all. Writing is not, as it is imagined by current-traditionalists, a bottom-up process moving from words, to sentences, to paragraphs, to the dreaded five-paragraph essay. Students “can’t write clean English sentences,” Fish laments, “because they are not being taught what sentences are.”[14] Budra seems to concur: “This is what needs to be taught: first, that a sentence is a complete thought.” In fact, a sentence is not a thought, complete or otherwise, nor even an utterance; it is a formal, syntactic structure. The belief that complete sentences are isomorphic representations of complete thoughts – and that, by extension, correct and orderly writing reflects an orderly mind – originates in seventeenth-century theories of cognition and remains a central tenet of current-traditionalism. These theories survive nowhere but in the assumptions underlying current-traditional pedagogy and are as valid as believing that personality is governed by the humours or that burning objects give off phlogiston. Writing is a top-down process, beginning with the writer’s motives in relation to some perceived exigence. The “basic skills” of writing are not grammatical rules, but rhetorical strategies pertaining to the different stages of the writing process: strategies for invention, research, arrangement, drafting, discussing, and revising. Writing is about know-how, not know-what: if we want to teach people to drive, we don’t have them memorize the parts of an engine.
The “basic skills” of writing are not grammatical rules, but rhetorical strategies pertaining to the different stages of the writing process: strategies for invention, research, arrangement, drafting, discussing, and revising.
I must note that, while Fish believes a writing class should teach only form and grammar, Budra wants grammar to get just “a bit of time.” And indeed, little grammatical reminders may help one remember a particular point of usage: “its” vs. “it’s,” for example. But why emphasize that, of all things? I respond to students’ writing using a six-point rubric devised by the Writing Program at the University of Southern California: addressing the issue, cogency, support, control, style, and grammar/mechanics. If these are the important features of effective writing, why focus on grammar – as opposed to, say, cogency or support? One reason is that grammar lessons are, as Budra states, “easy to teach.” He wants K–12 teachers to have “the basic skills they need to teach grammar.” But you don’t need any skills to teach grammar; all you need is a grammar book. And since grammar is easy to teach, it should be easy to learn; therefore, students who still don’t write well are assumed to be not very bright. Criticism which should be directed at grammar-based pedagogy is thus directed instead at the students of that pedagogy.
All English professors agree that writing is important, but most would rather have high school teachers teach it – and then criticize them for not doing a good job.
A less obvious and pragmatic reason for the persistence of current-traditional pedagogy is that it is philosophically consistent with the literarist vision of English as a discipline. Budra suggests that, “the pedagogical ideology of our present education system is preventing students from learning simple writing skills.” Those skills, I have argued, are not grammatical (or simple) but rhetorical. And Budra is right; the pedagogical ideology of English departments is indeed preventing students from learning these skills – but he and I are not referring to the same ideology. The ideology in most English classrooms is belletristic: literary texts (belles lettres) are considered the height of written expression, superior to practical and nonfiction forms of writing. The belletristic view of English coincided historically with the rise of current-traditional writing pedagogy, and the two work hand-in-glove: since anyone can teach the masses how to write (if by “writing” one means “grammar”), the professoriate can focus on teaching literature to the smart ones. Thus not only do few English professors today have the expertise to teach writing, the majority don’t want to. All English professors agree that writing is important, but most would rather have high school teachers teach it – and then criticize them for not doing a good job. Meanwhile, high school teachers are damned if they do and damned if they don’t: they’re blamed for using expressivist methods that don’t teach effective writing, and for not using current-traditional methods that, as I’ve indicated above, don’t teach effective writing either. Under expressivism, as Budra so aptly puts it, students “can’t write but can tell you what color their feelings are”; under current-traditionalism, students can’t write but can tell you what a gerund is. But aren’t those the only two approaches? No. If we teach writing rhetorically, then we address the interrelationship among the writer’s motives, the audience, the text, and the context. Within such a pedagogy, students learn to write well – that is, effectively – by determining what they’re trying to do and who their audience is, by analyzing the rhetoric of effective texts, and by imitating, practicing, and revising.
A “little bit” of grammar instruction? Okay, I guess, but don’t expect it to accomplish much beyond superficial improvement. And if people must – and I fear they must – continue to demand more grammar, let’s at least stop demanding it on the fallacious grounds that students’ writing is worse than ever – it isn’t – or that K-12 teachers lack “the basic skills” to teach well – they don’t. Let’s recognize that, at most, the rules of grammar comprise one small piece of a complex process that begins with and supports the students’ intention to communicate.
EN BREF – Le débat portant sur l’importance d’enseigner la grammaire pour améliorer l’écriture des élèves a cours depuis au moins 150 ans, et est loin d’être terminé. Mais l’enseignement de la grammaire améliore-t-il vraiment l’écriture? De nombreuses études démontrent que les élèves qui étudient la grammaire n’écrivent pas mieux. En fait, les éléments « de base » de l’écriture ne sont pas grammaticaux. L’écriture n’est pas un processus ascendant passant des mots, aux phrases, aux paragraphes et enfin au redouté essai de cinq paragraphes. L’écriture est un processus descendant dont les éléments de base ne sont pas des règles grammaticales, mais des stratégies rhétoriques liées aux différentes étapes du processus d’écriture : des stratégies d’invention, de recherche, d’organisation, de rédaction, de discussion et de révision. Lorsqu’on enseigne la grammaire pour améliorer l’écriture des élèves, il faut admettre que, tout au plus, les règles grammaticales ne sont qu’un petit élément d’un processus complexe qui commence par l’intention de communication de l’élève et qui la soutient.
[1] Education Canada 15.4 (2010), np. <http://www.cea-ace.ca/education-canada/article/case-teaching-grammar>.
[2] Ibid. All Budra quotations are from the above essay.
[3] Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self-Reliance” in The Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Brooks Atkinson, ed. (New York: Modern Library, 1950), 145.
[4] Stanley Fish, “The Writing Lesson.” NYTimes.com. 4 May 2006, np. <http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2006/05/04/the-writing-lesson>.
[5] Qtd. in Heidemarie Z. Weidner, “Back to the Future” (Chicago: Conference on College Composition and Communication, 1990), 3.
[6] Fish.
[7] Ibid.
[8] Weidner, 3.
[9] Although students are making different kinds of formal errors than in times past, they are not making more errors. See Robert J. Connors and Andrea Lunsford, “Frequency of Formal Errors in Current College Writing, or Ma and Pa Kettle Do Research,” College Composition and Communication (1986).
[10] Fish.
[11] Stanley Fish, Save the World on Your Own Time (New York: Oxford, 2008), 49.
[12] W. Ross Winterowd, The English Department (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1998), 43.
[13] Sharon Crowley, The Methodical Memory: Invention in Current-Traditional Rhetoric (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1990), 139.
[14] Fish, “The Writing Lesson.”
A colleague recently asked me, “Which situation makes you more anxious – presenting to high school students or to the police?” I didn’t have to think twice. “Definitely high school students!” I present to both groups regularly now, but it hasn’t always been that way.
Last September, I started having weekly conversations with Hamilton Police Services about Creating Positive Space for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans, and Queer (LGBTQ) people. It’s part of their block training, and by the time we wrap up in June, all 800 or so civilians and sworn officers will have had a chance to explore this topic, both as individuals and as an organization.
I am also often asked to speak to high school students about creating LGBTQ Positive Space Groups (PSGs) in their learning environments. That started in 2010, after I compiled a manual for students, teachers, and administrators to assist with implementing PSGs in the Hamilton-Wentworth District School Board (HWDSB), an initiative of then Director of Education, Chris Spence. Of the 18 secondary schools in the Hamilton-Wentworth District School Board, 17 now have PSGs.
Lately however, I’ve had to rethink the anxiety question. The more I assist LGBTQ students in initiating PSGs in their secondary schools – along with their ally classmates and teachers – the more my anxiety dissipates. It’s not just because I’m getting used to the experience; it’s because the response to the conversation is so powerful. The students are more anxious than I am because they’ve been waiting to talk openly about their lives for a long time. Once I say the word “lesbian” or “queer” out loud, it’s as if I’ve given permission for the floodgates to open.
I recently showed up at McKinnon Park Secondary School in Caledonia, Ontario expecting two or three teachers and a handful of students to talk about how to get a group going. Instead, there were nine teachers and almost 30 students. Everyone was eating lunch, and I was nervous, wondering whether I’d be able to pull their attention away from food and fun chatter. However, after a few opening remarks you could hear the proverbial pin drop, and once I opened it up to hear whether homo/bi/transphobia was a reality in their school, community, or families, the sharing was tremendous. One of the lead ally teachers later remarked that she’d never heard students speak so candidly about what they or others were facing because of LGBTQ oppression.
That’s the gift, for both LGBTQ students and their allies; PSGs transform an educational site. LGBTQ teachers, who are often closeted, feel the impact, too, so the benefits can go even further afield.
LGBTQ Positive Space Groups (PSGs) are intended to help create a school that
The term Positive Space was coined in 1996 at the University of Toronto in response to a homophobic assault on a professor. A module of training on LGBTQ realities was developed, and all participants – faculty, staff, and students – received a sticker with the newly created Positive Space symbol: a mash-up of the rainbow flag and the inverted triangle that was used to mark LGBTQ people during the Holocaust.
While the term Positive Space Group has been promoted here in Hamilton, the majority of groups in the U.S. and Canada are identified with the moniker Gay-Straight Alliance (GSA). However, GSA is problematic under an anti-oppression framework because “gay” does not necessarily refer to lesbian, bisexual, or trans-identities and can, therefore, been seen as exclusive.
In the end, since the groups are primarily started by and for LGBTQ students, it is best when they name them in a way that resonates for their own school community. However, it is important that the name reflect the fact that the groups are specifically for LGBTQ students and are not meant to address diversity in some broader way.
Equality For Gays and Lesbians Everywhere (EGALE) Canada launched a website (www.mygsa.ca) in 2010 to help connect PSGs across Canada. The site also provides resources for educators and parents and identifies 220 groups from coast to coast. PSGs are encouraged to register and provide information about their particular group. Approximately 125 of the groups have GSA in their names, as it is still the most commonly used term. See the sidebar for a province-by-province summary of groups – including some creative names – registered on the EGALE website.
Some of these PSGs have an online presence while others are invisible when searching through student club lists. Pauline Johnson Collegiate and Vocational School in Brantford has a Positive Space symbol right on its homepage with a link to information about upcoming PSG meetings, teachers you can talk to about the group, and some great video links. Rainbow Alliance at a Vancouver school has a video from its 2012 Pink Project, where 1,500 students from Vancouver danced to Lady Gaga’s “Born this Way”.
Not all schools and school systems have been receptive to the concept of PSGs. Premier Dalton McGuinty’s introduction of an amendment to the Education Act to make GSAs mandatory in all Ontario secondary schools, public and Catholic, sparked intense debate in the Separate School system. The response from the Catholic boards has been to ban any reference to sexual orientation or “rainbow” in the group name, and to allow only groups that focus on broader diversity issues.
Benefits for Both LGBTQ Students and Allies
The isolation experienced by LGBTQ youth, who are closeted in all or parts of their lives, leads to a higher rate of alcohol and drug use, smoking, mental health issues, and suicide.2 In a focus group with 15 youth for a Needs Assessment on LGBTQ people in Hamilton, three had already attempted suicide because of feelings of isolation. Although the research to date has been limited on this population in general, national studies in the U.S. and Canada show that LGBTQ youth are three to six times more likely to commit suicide than their straight counterparts and that 30 percent of all completed youth suicides are related to issues of sexual identity.
The isolation experienced by LGBTQ youth, who are closeted in all or parts of their lives, leads to a higher rate of alcohol and drug use, smoking, mental health issues, and suicide.
The Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network (GLSEN) has been conducting an annual National School Climate Survey in the U.S. since 1999. In 2009, they reported on the experiences of 7,261 middle and high school students and found that nearly nine out of 10 LGBTQ students experienced harassment at school in the past year, and nearly two-thirds felt unsafe because of their sexual orientation. The survey results verified that homophobia and transphobia are having detrimental impacts on student achievement and academic success.
The good news was that students in schools with GSAs reported hearing fewer homophobic remarks, experienced less harassment and assault because of their sexual and gender orientation, and were more likely to report incidents of harassment and assault to school staff. They were also less likely to feel unsafe because of their sexual orientation or gender expression, were less likely to miss school because of safety concerns, and reported a greater sense of belonging to their school community.
A homophobic environment has an impact on academic performance, as well. The reported grade point average of students who were more frequently harassed because of their sexual orientation or gender expression was almost half a grade lower than for students who were less often harassed. There is no reason to believe that the experience of LGBTQ youth in Canada would be much different in any of these areas.
In fact, EGALE Canada has replicated some of that research in its first national study in 2011, “Every Class in Every School: The First National Climate Survey on Homophobia, Biphobia, and Transphobia in Canadian Schools”. Both LGBTQ and non-LGBTQ students completed the survey.
While the Canadian findings identify high rates of homophobic and transphobic verbal and physical harassment, they also found that Safer Schools Policies can have an impact in reducing harassment.
While the Canadian findings identify high rates of homophobic and transphobic verbal and physical harassment, they also found that Safer Schools Policies can have an impact in reducing harassment.
The EGALE research identified that “generic safe school policies that do not include specific measures on homophobia are not effective in improving the school climate for LGBTQ students.” In fact, “LGBTQ students from schools with anti-homophobia policies reported significantly fewer incidents of physical and verbal harassment due to their sexual orientation.
Students from schools with PSGs (both LGBTQ and non-LGBTQ) are much more likely to
The Ontario Positive Space Teacher’s Association (OPSTA) is an organization committed to helping teachers “transform Ontario schools into learning environments that explicitly welcome, respect, include, support, inspire, and reflect LGBTQ students through their policies and practices.”
Started last year by five teachers from the HWDSB, this group functions mainly through an online presence (www.opsta.com). The site provides a wealth of resources available for students, parents, and teachers to help create Positive Space in their secondary schools.
Given evidence of the powerful impact of the LGBTQ Positive Space movement for LGBTQ students, students with LGBTQ parents (or other family members), and allies, it’s high time the leadership in every secondary school took on the task of ensuring PSGs are up and running. Both the research and resources are there to support this action. Then we can move on to elementary schools, where the conversation needs to start.
EN BREF – L’isolement vécu par les jeunes LGBTQ, dissimulant leur orientation sexuelle dans une partie, voire la totalité de leur vie, accroît leur taux de consommation d’alcool, de drogues et de cigarettes, ainsi que les problèmes de santé mentale et de suicide. Selon des études nationales américaines et canadiennes, les jeunes LGBTQ sont de trois à six fois plus susceptibles de se suicider que leurs pairs hétérosexuels et 30 pour cent des suicides chez les jeunes se rapportent à leur identité sexuelle. Toutefois, les élèves fréquentant des écoles où il y a des alliances entre gais et hétérosexuels disent entendre moins de remarques homophobes, subir moins d’intimidation et d’attaques liées à leur orientation sexuelle et être plus enclins à rapporter des incidents d’intimidation et d’agression au personnel scolaire. Ils ont moins tendance à éprouver de l’insécurité due à leur orientation sexuelle et s’absentent moins de l’école. Ils ressentent aussi un plus grand sentiment d’appartenance à leur milieu scolaire.
1 Deirdre Pike, Creating and Supporting LGBTQ Positive Space Groups in the Hamilton Wentworth-District School Board – A Resource Guide for Secondary School Administrators, Teachers, and Support Staff (2010), 8. www.sprc.hamilton.on.ca/reports.php)
2 A. Peterkin and C. Risdon,Caring for Lesbian and Gay People: A Clinical Guide (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003)
Interview excerpts with Deirdre Pike, author of The Gift of Positive Space Groups: A Transformation for LGBTQ Students.
Feminists have long sought to examine the multiplicities of female identities, power, and marginality. It is time to do the same for boys and men – and to question ongoing assertions about male privilege and patriarchy. To this end, I seek to examine which identities in society are authorized and made legitimate and, conversely, which identities are unauthorized, punished, and even made invisible, to bring to light knowledge about boys and men that, for some, may be difficult to bear.
A disturbing caveat to those daring to delve into the ways in which males lack power and are marginalized is the threat of being labeled misogynous. Studying boys and men as other than victimizers and privileged can even engender moral outrage. This prejudice impedes addressing the challenges facing many males, from their flagging literacy rates to their significantly higher rates of suicide, incarceration, homelessness, addiction, and workplace injuries and fatality. According to the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), female students significantly outperform male students in literacy in every country and in every Canadian province;1 and as a single indication of the greater risks men face in their daily lives, in Canada, in 2008, there were 987 workplace fatalities for men and 48 for women.2
Boys in school are subjected to homophobia, racism, classism, and shame as a means of policing their burgeoning identities, and stifling anything that may be construed as “feminine”, so that being studious becomes considered “gay” or “sissy” or even “White”.
Portrayals of men in popular culture tend to be brutish, ignorant, and violent – often in sexual and predatory ways. Boys in school are subjected to homophobia, racism, classism, and shame as a means of policing their burgeoning identities, and stifling anything that may be construed as “feminine”, so that being studious becomes considered “gay” or “sissy” or even “White”. Both girls and boys, and men and women, enforce these behaviours in implicit and explicit ways. I contend that narrow social expectations, and lack of options for enacting socially acceptable masculinities, are at the root of contemporary struggles for boys and men, and become negative self-fulfilling prophecies.
At the same time, the majority of boys and men – who behave honourably and contribute to the betterment of society in their work, at home, and in their communities – are frequently ignored. Society fuels greater resources towards girls and women, from scholarships for postsecondary education3 to research on female health issues,4 and this despite the fact that girls and women dominate in most professional faculties today – including law and medicine,5 and, it can be argued, enjoy longer and healthier lives.6 There are programs for teen moms, but far fewer for teen dads. Do we value young men as fathers less, then? It is difficult to gain funding for programs for boys and men, or for research into their problems. Either we are wearing blinders that obscure the barriers confronting many of our boys and men, or we believe that that they will stoically “man up”.
Parents, guardians, educators, and scholars are starting to realize the plight of many males. There are committees to enhance the teaching and learning of boys, including exploration of single-sex classrooms and school options, such as the recently opened All–boys Alternative Program at Sir James Lougheed School in Calgary, a male-mentor reading program in conjunction with St. Thomas University in Fredericton, and the Boys2Men mentoring program in the Toronto District School Board. Times are changing, but we need to gain momentum and stop ignoring a long-standing, problematic, social and gender code for males.
To become a “man”, I (and others) argue that males still must undergo a rigorous, even punishing process of socialization whereby boys and men are forced to repress many emotions and attain autonomy at all costs. Indeed, “manhood” may be such a shaky state that it is unattainable for any significant period and must be constantly re-earned. Risky behaviours, including suicide, dramatically increase when boys enter adolescence and young adulthood, for this is when uncompromising pressures to become “a real man” intensify. Indeed, Martin Luther King, Jr., Bell Hooks, and other writers on freedom, equality, and democracy suggest that oppression can be defined as a lack of options.
It is time to confront the implicit and explicit ways that society – including men and women of diverse backgrounds, affiliations, and identities – contribute to maintaining status quo assumptions and options surrounding what it is to be a boy or a man.
It is time to confront the implicit and explicit ways that society – including men and women of diverse backgrounds, affiliations, and identities – contribute to maintaining status quo assumptions and options surrounding what it is to be a boy or a man. We must strive to provide more options for our boys and men on their journey through life, just as we have successfully done for girls and women over the past decades. Pollack describes a so-called “Boy Code” which delineates traditional gender roles for boys, in which – like “sturdy oaks” – boys are encouraged to be stoic, stable, independent, and never show weakness; boys are pressured to achieve status, dominance, and power, to avoid shame at all costs; perhaps most damaging of all, boys are taught to inhibit expression of feelings or urges erroneously seen as “feminine”, such as warmth, dependence, and empathy; and finally, boys are destructively led to believe that they should act macho, even to the point of violence, and engage in risky behaviours that could injure themselves or others – like their role models in popular culture from wrestling, hockey, and football, to action movies and video games.7
Increasingly, researchers in the growing field of boys’ and men’s studies are challenging traditions that perpetuate a patriarchal perception of boys and men, and instead subscribe to “masculinities”, or validating varied ways of being “male”. These new identities may include being a metrosexual, bisexual, or heterosexual; a househusband, artist, or a chief executive officer; a high school hockey player or a peer mentor to junior boys; a boy who loves to read or a boy who loves sports; a straight guy who defends his peers against homophobia and heterosexism, a gay truck driver, or a man who chooses to pursue a career as a daycare worker. However, stubborn societal prejudices persist that inhibit this enlargement of gender roles for boys and men – prejudices related to misandry, androgenophobia, and erastephopbia.
Misandry may be defined as the fear, distrust, and contempt of men, rife in popular culture and our legal system. It is unfortunate but revealing, that not only must I define this little-known misandry, but also that I had to invent two new terms – androgenophobia and erastephobia, to frame contemporary impediments to evolution in our treatment and expectations of boys and men.8 Androgenophobia is the prevalent societal conviction that maleness, the male body, and male sexualities are somehow unclean, perverse, and menacing, while erastephobia is the fear of impending pedophilia by males in general, including fathers, youth workers, volunteers, and male teachers in schools. All three concepts operate to confine and restrict what boys and men may become, and are omnipresent in our popular culture, from movies to video games, and in our school systems, thereby contributing to a kind of mass contempt for males.
Elements of misandy, androgenophobia, and erastephobia are incorporated in the following list, which I present here to provoke debate, break silences, and highlight some of the constraints facing diverse males in social and educational contexts.9 This list was inspired by my years of research into men, masculinities, and male sexualities, listening to boys and men tell their stories, and a multitude of sources in both academic literature and popular culture.10 It is my hope not only that dualisms of male-female, White-colour, and privilege and lack-of-privilege be challenged, but also that all boys and men may be looked at with sympathy, love, and compassion, rather than annoyance, impatience, suspicion, and fear, as is far too often the case. Our expectations – for better or worse – can and do become realities.
EN BREF – Des préjugés sociaux persistants entravent l’élargissement des rôles assignés aux garçons et aux hommes. Dans la culture populaire, les hommes sont fréquemment représentés comme des êtres brutaux, ignorants et violents – souvent de façons sexuelles et prédatrices. À l’école, les garçons font l’objet d’homophobie, de racisme, de classisme et de honte pour policer leurs identités en devenir et étouffer ce qui pourrait être vu comme étant « féminin ». Être studieux est ainsi qualifié de « gai », d’« efféminé », ou même de « blanc ». L’exiguïté des attentes sociales et l’absence d’options de masculinités socialement acceptables sont à la source des difficultés contemporaines des garçons et des hommes et risquent de devenir des prophéties négatives auto-réalisatrices. Dans le domaine grandissant des études des hommes et des garçons, les chercheurs remettent en question les traditions perpétuant une perception patriarcale, souscrivant plutôt au principe des « masculinités » et validant des façons multiples d’être « mâle ».
1 D. Klinger, L. Shulha, and L. Wade-Woolley, Towards an Understanding of Gender Differences in Literacy Achievement. (Toronto: The Education and Accountability Office, 2009).
2 National Work Injury, Disease and Fatality Statistics, 2006-2008, Report of the Association of Workers’ Compensation Boards of Canada (AWCBC):103-105; 134-138.
3 C. Abrahams, (2010, October 21). “Designated Scholarships Overwhelmingly Favour Women, Globe and Mail, 21 October 2010. www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/time-to-lead/failing-boys/designated-scholarships-overwhelmingly-favour-women/article1766443/
4 “Men’s Mental Illness: A Silent Crisis,” Canadian Mental Health Association, 2011. www.cmha.ca/bins/content_page.asp?cid=3-726
5 J. Intini, “Are We Raising Our Boys to be Underachieving Men?” MacLean’s (25 October 2010): 66-71.
6 “Health-adjusted Life Expectancy, by Sex,” Statistics Canada (2010). www40.statcan.ca/l01/cst01/HLTH67-eng.htm
7 W. Pollack, Real Boys: Rescuing Our Sons From the Myth of Boyhood (New York: Random House, 1998).
8 D. Gosse and A. Facchinetti, “What’s in a Male?” Education Today 11, no. 2 (2011): 26-30.
9 D. Gosse, “A Misandrous Queer List,” in Jackytar, A Novel (St. John’s, NL: Jesperson Publishing Ltd., 2005), 122-125.
10 D. Gosse, ed., Breaking Silences and Exploring Masculinities: A Critical Supplement to the Novel Jackytar (St. John’s, NL: Breakwater Books, 2008); Peggy McIntosh, White Privilege and Male Privilege: A Personal Account of Coming to See Correspondence Through Work in Women’s Studies. Working paper #189 (Wellesley, MA: Wellesley College Center for Research on Women, 1988).
Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law. – Immanuel Kant
As we turn the calendar it is natural to wonder what this year will bring. Of course we cannot know what the future holds – who could have predicted the stories that dominate retrospective news reports on the top stories of 2010 – but we do know things will change. Life is dynamic. There will be progress and regression, disaster and triumph, sadness and delight. Surprise dominates, but the agony, for the most part, will find you of its own accord while the ecstasy has to be initiated. So that’s a good reason for some annual introspection and perhaps a well-crafted resolution or two.
But looking beyond our own immediate personal interests, it’s also a good time to think about the world around us. What is it becoming and what would we like it to become? It’s easy to feel that we cannot influence the grand course of events, but someone will, and if it’s not us then the future that is forged by those who do take action may very well not be to our liking. You can be sure that somewhere others are hard at work trying to change some of the things you hold most dear. If, as Yeats observed in the aftermath of the First World War, “the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity,” then we should indeed worry about “what rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Bethlehem to be born.”
That is not to say that we should all immediately start forming Facebook action groups and joining political parties – although, hopefully, some of us will – but it does mean that we should all be overt and intentional about our values and take action within our sphere of influence to actively promote and enact those values. In the end, it’s neither the Nelson Mandela’s nor the Osama bin Laden’s who change the world, it’s the people whom they inspire to do things differently within their own lives.
And this is true not just of changing things but also of preserving things. Like our relationships, the good things about our schools and our communities do not just sustain themselves. It takes constant attention to preserve what we value. It may be true of carburetors or plumbing that if it ain’t broke you shouldn’t fix it, but laissez-faire is the death knell for human endeavours. That which is neglected, decays.
So what are you grateful for and what would you prefer? There is no better time than now to give that some careful thought – and then to do something to reinforce what you value or influence what you regret. It can be small but it must be specific, and it’s even better if you recruit a couple of friends. Then, if they tell two friends, and they tell two friends and … well, you never know what might happen.
It’s time to really ‘out’ the conversation about Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer (LGBTQ) realities in our schools and beyond. Not just a paragraph or two in an equity policy, but steps must be taken that result in real change like mandatory LGBTQ Positive Space Training for all staff , Positive Space Groups in every school and changes in curricula that include LGBTQ content.
Having spent the last three years outing the conversation about the need for LGBTQ Positive Space in personal, organizational and political spheres with hundreds of teachers in many Ontario communities, one thing is always clear – teachers are individuals who present at work with intersections of their identity that seem to make them unable to interrupt homophobic, biphobic, or transphobic comments. Whether it’s their faith, culture, lack of exposure and understanding, or something else, it is time to implement serious training conversations about the responsibility of staff in this area.
EGALE is Canada’s LGBTQ Rights Organization and last year they produced a study on LGBTQ students in Canada. According to Every Class in Every School, almost two thirds (64%) of LGBTQ students and 61% of students with LGBTQ parents reported that they feel unsafe at school. In fact, although LBGTQ students will hear homophobic slurs 26 times in a day, only 3% of those will be interrupted by faculty. This is unacceptable and is part and parcel of the high rate of suicide for our LGBTQ youth.
I spent the lunch period recently with an LGBTQ Positive Space Group at a local high school in Hamilton. What a resilient group of students! Some had been kicked out of their homes for their sexual orientation; others were living in fear about telling their parents who they love; still others were too afraid to come to a place where they could identify their sexual orientation to themselves let alone others.
I spent the lunch period recently with an LGBTQ Positive Space Group at a local high school in Hamilton. What a resilient group of students! Some had been kicked out of their homes for their sexual orientation; others were living in fear about telling their parents who they love; still others were too afraid to come to a place where they could identify their sexual orientation to themselves let alone others.
In September, a public school teacher approached me at the end of a training session and was very concerned about how she could possibly interrupt homophobia when she belongs to a Christian church that teaches that homosexuality is a sin. This is a conversation that needs to happen.
It must be a very conflicting place to be but it is time to have it out. How do you do your job of making the school environment safe for everyone when you look at 10 – 15% of your student population and any of your queer staff as sinners?
By the time we finished our conversation, the teacher had come to a point where she realized her views were standing in the way of student safety and achievement. She agreed she needed to spend time reflecting and learning about LGBTQ people. She is the possibility of transformation but without that conversation she would be another teacher standing in silence as a student says, “That’s so gay” within earshot of an LGBTQ student or a student with a gay parent.
I always like to ask teachers what they would do if they heard a student say, “That’s so Christian” or “That’s so Muslim”? I doubt if there’d be much hesitation before that was interrupted. What do you think needs to happen to create positive space for LGBTQ staff and students in your school?
I always like to ask teachers what they would do if they heard a student say, “That’s so Christian” or “That’s so Muslim”? I doubt if there’d be much hesitation before that was interrupted. What do you think needs to happen to create positive space for LGBTQ staff and students in your school?
Related Education Canada articles: