education

(Photo: Elaine Briere)

By Jenn Hardy
Briarpatch Magazine
January/February 2010

In the name of education, British Columbia has spent at least half a million dollars teaching wee ones the awesomeness of the Olympics. In response, Olympics opponents are trying to counteract what they call “pro-Olympic propaganda” by introducing classroom workshops of their own.

The $500,000 Sharing the Dream program provides every school in the province with an Olympics “teachable moments” DVD that includes videos, podcasts, teacher guides, hyperlinks and brochures for teachers to use in their classes – all designed to build excitement about the Games.

“Olympic and Paralympic themes span across all courses in the B.C. school curriculum – from language arts to science, physical education to mathematics, social studies to fine arts, technology to career planning,” reads the Sharing the Dream website. “We urge you to embrace these educational opportunities and bring the excitement of the Games to your classroom.”

Olympics opponents dismiss the Sharing the Dream program as a brainwashing tool. “It is a blatant propaganda effort to bolster support for the Games,” says anti-Olympic activist and author of Five Ring Circus: Myths and Realities of the Olympic Games, Chris Shaw. “The same government is cutting off school sports programs.”

The Sharing the Dream program was launched in the wake of massive budget cuts to public education. These same cuts are affecting public school maintenance, staffing, CommunityLINK (a program that supports students in low-income communities), Parent Advisory Council funding and, ironically, $130,000 worth of provincial grants for competitive sports.

Anti-Olympics organizers aren’t short on reasons for opposing the Games. According to Shaw, founder of the watchdog group 2010watch, the Olympics are an assault on the poor, the environment and the public purse. Detractors also point out that the Games are being held on unceded Native land (B.C. territory that was never signed over to European settlers) over the objections of local Native groups.

In response to the Share the Dream program, Shaw and other activists are doing a little educating of their own. In August, the Olympic Resistance Network introduced Teach2010, a workshop geared to elementary and high school students, which aims to restore some balance to the Olympics debate.

The goal of Teach2010 is to provide teachers with resources to do something revolutionary: provide some critical perspectives on a complex and relevant issue.

Unlike Sharing the Dream’s well-funded program, Teach2010 has a budget of just $3,000 (all donated), and relies on a great deal of volunteer labour. Through Teach2010, organizers conduct workshops that teach educators about the issues surrounding the Olympics. They also host youth nights where kids do activities like silkscreening T-shirts. “It’s an opportunity for youth to get informed about the issues,” says organizer Marla Renn. “It gives participants the ability to respond through their creative expression.”

For Teach2010’s high school workshops, Renn, a schoolteacher, takes her small team into classrooms to facilitate discussions about the Olympics. “We begin to look at the issues surrounding the Olympics and then we step away and look at whether those things translate into reality,” she says. “What are the real impacts of the Olympics? If you had an opportunity to participate in the decision-making process, what would you spend $6 billion of public money on?” Students have suggested building hospitals and community centres, or housing everyone on Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside without a home. They’ve even discussed buying an ice cream for everyone in the city.

Renn and the students discuss environmental impacts and dissect organizers’ claims that this will be the “greenest Games ever.” They talk about the motivations of stakeholders like the Vancouver Organizing Committee (VANOC), as well as sponsors and the mainstream news media.

It’s not entirely surprising that the Olympic resistance’s move into the classroom has itself been met with resistance.

Myriam Dumont, an elementary school teacher in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, tried to organize a Teach2010 workshop for teachers at her school in October 2009 to give them ideas for a balanced lesson about the Olympics.

The issue exploded when the Vancouver Sun reported that the Vancouver Elementary School Teachers Association (VESTA) was promoting a Teach2010 workshop. The association had simply put a link on their website to inform teachers that the workshop was taking place.

The Sun article caused a minor media frenzy, and a couple of days later, Sun columnist Cam Cole wrote a piece called “It’s elementary, my dear children: The Olympics are a sham,” in which he sarcastically attacks the Olympic Resistance Network and VESTA, accusing both parties of crushing children’s hopes and dreams.

“Nip those dreams in the bud, I say,” writes Cole. “Get ’em early. That’s the kind of preventive action that makes us all proud to pay your salaries.”

VESTA quickly distanced itself from the event, removing the informational link on its website and replacing it with a disclaimer. The media attention resulted in the cancellation of Dumont’s workshop and her holding it off school property.

“I saw it as an opportunity for teachers to get kids to start thinking about issues and what they can do, how it affects them, and taking action.” She says discussions about the Olympics are especially important in an inner-city Vancouver school, where pro-Olympic propaganda is everywhere.

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By Tyler McCreary
Briarpatch Magazine
September/October 2009

Multiculturalism - the idea that the existence of multiple cultures within Canada should be accepted and encouraged - has been official state policy since 1971. Celebration of the diversity of our northern cultural kaleidoscope has become a mark of national pride. But while the myth of multiculturalism encourages us to imagine Canada as an anti-racist state, it has done little to actually end the racial inequities that permeate Canadian learning. Why?

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Quest for Community participants Ruby Peppard and Don Warthe took a group of students to Cuba in March to help rebuild homes damaged in last fall’s hurricanes.

By Colin Payne, Anna Kirkpatrick, Michelle Miller & Chris Benjamin 
Briarpatch Magazine
September/October 2009

1. Quest for Community: Community-based education in rural British Columbia
By Colin Payne

Quest for Community, a new program of the public school system in the West Kootenay region of British Columbia’s Southern Interior, aims to sow the seeds of community in the most fertile soil there is - the minds of youth.

The program, which launches this fall, is a result of the combined visions of Ruby Peppard and Don Warthe, two teachers at Mount Sentinel Secondary School in South Slocan, a small, rural community near Nelson, B.C.

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Illustration by TJ Vogan

By Joelle Renstrom
Briarpatch Magazine
September/October 2009

“As if that blind rage had washed me clean, rid me of hope;
for the first time, in that night alive with signs and stars,
I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world.”
Albert Camus, The Stranger

1. The Sunday blues are back, familiar and unwelcome like symptoms of an old illness.

Sundays became my nemesis in high school, especially the nights, which I’d spend biting my nails and lying sleeplessly in bed, cataloguing all that was wrong with my life. I asked myself more depressing questions about my future on Sunday nights than at any other time.

The current relapse of the Sunday blues is even worse. Now, instead of attending high school, I teach there. When Sunday night rolls around, I feel as though I’m being forced into the spotlight in front of a tough crowd, and there’s nowhere to hide.

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Illustration by Trevor Waurechen

By Leslie Jermyn
Briarpatch Magazine
September/October 2009

Imagine opening your morning paper to read the following:

“The Minister of Human Resources announced today that she will be working with the provinces to lower university and college enrolments across the country. ‘We don’t think young Canadians should be wasting their time with post-secondary education,’ the Minister said. ‘It’s not good for them and it’s not good for the Canadian economy.’”

Odds are that your reaction would range from shock and outrage to simple gobsmacked disbelief. Education is widely and uncritically accepted as wholly good for everyone - students, their families, society as a whole, and the economy - and the higher you go up the schooling ladder, the better. But whenever something becomes so obvious that to think otherwise appears ridiculous, perhaps it’s time to take a second look.

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Illustration by Nick Craine

By Sue Stock and Shayna Stock
Briarpatch Magazine
September/October 2009

“All schools for miles and miles around
Must take a special test,
To see who’s learning such and such
To see which school’s the best.
If our small school does not do well,
Then it will be torn down,
And you will have to go to school
In dreary Flobbertown.”

“Not Flobbertown!” we shouted,And we shuddered at the name,
For everyone in Flobbertown
Does everything the same.

It’s miserable in Flobbertown,
They dress in just one style.
They sing one song, they never dance,
They walk in single file.
They do not have a playground,
And they do not have a park.
Their lunches have no taste at all,
Their dogs are scared to bark.

-From Hooray for Diffendoofer Day! By Dr. Seuss, with help from Jack Prelutsky and Lane Smith

Remember Grade 3, when school was all about storybooks and gym class and crafts? We had to learn our multiplication tables and cursive writing, too, but these are not the memories we tend to hang on to. We remember field trips to the zoo, creating elaborate self-expressive collages in art class, playing soccer-baseball in phys. ed, gluing seeds on paper in the shape of butterflies, researching and presenting speeches on whatever topic we wanted, creative group work, and writing and illustrating our own imaginatively colourful narratives.

These activities may be the most memorable, but they are not easily testable. And in a culture that places greater and greater emphasis on testing and accountability, activities that inspire creativity, innovation and imagination are the first to be cut out of the lesson plans when teachers need to make room for more standardized tests and the preparation that accompanies them.

Over the past decade, in the name of accountability, the Canadian education system has followed the American trend toward an invasive culture of rigorous universal testing. Canadian students are being tested more frequently and more extensively than ever before. Every province and territory now mandates some form of provincial assessment program. These tests are generally administered to all students in several grades.

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By Dave Oswald Mitchell
Briarpatch Magazine
September/October 2009

“Who could bear to hold privilege that meant the suffering and death of others if they had not been trained from early childhood to see these others as not real?

“Who would tolerate, for even an hour, the inhuman conditions imposed by the privileged, if they had not been trained from early childhood to feel themselves not fully entitled to life?”

Aurora Levins Morales, Medicine Stories

For two summers several years ago I worked as a literacy tutor for migrant workers in southern Ontario. I had read Paolo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed and brought with me all kinds of ideas about popular education, but it was all just theory for me at that point. Those two summers taught me more about power, privilege, dignity and the emancipatory potential of education than anything I have done before or since.

I remember one hot August evening, a greenhouse worker named Christopher dropped by the migrant worker support centre and told me that he wanted to improve his reading and writing.

We sat in the backyard, and I handed him a short poem about Malcolm X I had found in an adult literacy reader. Christopher read the poem aloud without much difficulty. After a nervous pause, he then told me that to get a driver’s license in Jamaica, where he was from, you need to pass a basic literacy test that involves reading a few words aloud and then writing a sentence. It was the sentence that frightened him; he’d heard rumours that the test is given in a crowded room, and that everyone would laugh at you if you failed.

“You just read that poem no problem,” I said. “Do you want to try to write a sentence about it?”

Christopher picked up a pencil and, with meticulous attention, wrote the following:

Malcolm is a black man most people look up on. He talk about rights and justis for people all over the world.

I haven’t seen Christopher since, but I would bet he’s got his driver’s license now. He had wanted it so he could get a better job at home in Jamaica, so he wouldn’t have to come back to an Ontario greenhouse anymore. I hope he got his wish.

I share this story because I can’t think how else to preface an issue about education. The topic is at once too broad and too personal - we could have filled several times the space with articles that explore the politics of education and profiles of initiatives that are revolutionizing the way we teach and learn.

What follows, then, is just a sampling of the complexity, importance and urgency of the topic - a rich sampling, I would venture, but we offer it in the knowledge that much more can, and must, be said on the topic.

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By Alethea Spiridon
Briarpatch Magazine
September/October 2009

“Education costs money, but then so does ignorance.”
Sir Claus Moser

I n 1992, I was a high school graduate enrolled in studies at the University of Saskatchewan. Post-secondary education had never been a can-do for me - it was always a must-do. My family was entrenched in middle-class mediocrity, my dad a high school teacher and my mother a stay-at-home mom. The only means of financing an education was through government-funded student loans, but according to the loan assessor that year, my father, the sole breadwinner of the family, earned too much (at $45,000 per year) for me to qualify for assistance. He managed to fund that initial year; the next six years of study - four university, two college - were my responsibility. If I wanted the education I felt I needed to secure some kind of reasonable career and livelihood, I, like so many other students, would have to take on thousands of dollars in debt.

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By Don Sawyer
Briarpatch Magazine
September/October 2009

Introducing learning objectives to the ivory tower

University professors are a curious bunch. Many are gifted and dedicated post-secondary teachers, working hard to educate and inspire their students, while others, despite having succeeded only at school work, exude arrogance and an exaggerated sense of themselves. Rumour has it that shortly after Okanagan College, where I worked, was magically transformed into a “university college” some years ago, one professor stood up at a faculty meeting and declared, “I am ashamed to be working at an institution that also teaches welding.”

Why such hubris? Because these arrogant folks have managed to churn out tedious dissertations on such urgent topics as The Metallurgy of Coinage in pre-Confederation Upper Canada? Because they publish regularly in the several academic journals devoted to this subject while attending as many pertinent international conferences as possible?

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By Roger Langen
Briarpatch Magazine
November 2008

“I should have remained academic and abstract but for the war.”
-Bertrand Russell

At last fall’s University of Toronto conference on academic freedom, Freedom of Speech, Freedom to Teach, James Turk, executive director of the Canadian Association of University Teachers, offered some useful reminders about the intersection of schools with free expression. The concept of academic freedom, he pointed out, is a convention without hard supports in law, including at the university. It is contingent and discretionary. High schools are organized around obedience, not awareness, and while colleges and universities have some free speech protections under the Charter, only collective agreements can link academic freedom to job security. Without strong collective agreements, universities will remain elite institutions, disguising power as knowledge while constraining the individual voice within a narrow range of accepted opinion.

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