1 Conversations

Nothing connected to, nor contained within, schooling is a neutral, values-free enterprise. The risks involved in stepping onto the terrain of transformative possibilities in education become less onerous when they are held up to the reflective lens of more traditional methods of viewing and actuating schooling and schooling practices. Although it might be frightening to “take apart” the world as we know it, to try to envision the world of schooling as it might or could be, not taking those risks means staying with what we already have. When these taken-for-granted assumptions about schooling and schooling practices go unnoticed and/or unchallenged, we as educators are contributing to an environment in which active and inveterate harm is a very real and probable consequence for many of our students.

One of the things that our work is about is having courageous conversations. In order to have these courageous conversations, there are some parameters that must first be set up in order to have effective conversation while also attempting to do no harm to the classroom participants. We set these parameters in our classrooms of adults, and model and articulate both how to develop respectful spaces and the need to develop these agreements. The conversations are important – indeed, they are crucial to doing social justice pedagogies. But they cannot be enacted in a room at the expense of some. In plainer words, it is not okay to set up a learning environment where some learn and others are harmed. We use the example of colour-blindness to talk about this with pre-service teachers: well-intentioned teachers will sometimes say “Oh, I don’t worry about racism in my classes – I treat all my kids the same. I just don’t see colour.” And our response to that is “Well, how incredibly dis-respectful that is.” BIPOC children walk into our classrooms every day already knowing, already having experienced, the everyday and ongoing disparities of the social world in which they live. If they are then met by a teacher who in effect says “I don’t see/recognize the everyday material conditions of your life” then they are being asked to leave integral parts of their life outside the classroom. And when some children are expected to do this, and other children (that is, non-BIPOC children) are allowed to bring their whole lives into their classrooms, then we have a racist, inequitable foundation to every single thing that then happens in that room.

Now – this is a very hard conversation to have – and we are having it with adults. We acknowledge that in some ways, it might be even a harder conversation to have with children in schools. But hard does not erase the necessity. So we work with pre-service teachers to figure out strategies for how to have these necessary, difficult conversations – with them, and in their turn, with their students.

One of the first parameters we discuss and set up is language: there are some language conventions to consider. To begin, we assume that everyone is doing the very best they can/have at this moment in terms of language/knowledge/understanding. Based on that assumption, we need to get our conversations and questions out there. There is often a fear of speaking up in this context because someone thinks they don’t know “the right words” – and that is legitimate – language changes – this is a good thing because, as our views change and grow, the language we use changes and grows too. We would always prefer to have someone ask a question using the most respectful language they know, rather than not ask their question. If the language has changed, we can answer the question and talk about the language – so we learn two things simultaneously. If the questions aren’t put out there to discuss, then they just go underground, and learning doesn’t occur. As Beverley Daniel Tatum (2008) asks in her book Can we talk about race?:

Can we talk about race? Do we know how? Does the childhood segregation of our schools and neighborhoods and the silence about race in our culture inhibit our capacity to have meaningful dialogue with others, particularly in the context of cross-racial relationships? Can we get beyond our fear, our sweaty palms, our anxiety about saying the wrong things, or using the wrong words, and have an honest conversation about racial issues? (p.xiii, italics in original)

One of the terms we use frequently in our work is “the dominant group”. It is important to know that when this term is used, it does not refer to a numerical majority. In critical pedagogy, dominant group refers to the people who have – or had – the most access to law and rule setting.

One of the things that we as teachers discourage is the use of phrases such as, “This is probably a dumb question, but…” because that statement is almost always a gendered statement (this type of statement is overwhelmingly a lead-in from women in our classrooms) and the statement itself leads listeners to dismiss what you are going to say before you even say it. Similarly, we dissuade the reliance on such phrases as, “I’m just playing devil’s advocate here, but…”. If you have a thought or opinion, own it – even if it is just for that moment. Failing to take responsibility for what you are about to say in a public space, such as a classroom, can sometimes mean people don’t stop to think carefully about what they want to say, or the harm that might be caused to another listener, because they can brush off the harm done because it was some ephemeral “they say”.

With respect to opinions, there is a common perception in Canada that everyone has a right to both hold and to speak their opinion, under “freedom of speech”. This needs to be unpacked a little. Each of you – each of us – is certainly entitled to hold any opinion at all. However, when it comes to freedom of speech, to say it wherever, whenever you wish, is simply not true. In the national context, we have federal legislation which states, very specifically, that you cannot say anything you want, wherever you want to, if what you want to say is legally regarded as hate speech and if the place in which you want to say it is a public space. Freedom of speech in Canada is protected as a fundamental freedom within the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Freedom of speech in Canada is not absolute, however: Section 1 of the Charter allows the government to pass laws that limit free expression so long as the limits are reasonable and can be justified. The same rules apply in this country’s public school classrooms and to the teachers who occupy those spaces. Two notable examples of teachers who violated this tenet are the cases of Jim Keegstra and Malcolm Ross. First charged in 1984, Keegstra was charged under the Criminal Code of Canada with “willfully promoting hatred against an identifiable group”. After numerous decisions and appeals, in 1996 the Justices confirmed that Keegstra’s claims of freedom of speech could not and should not be used as justification for the dissemination of hate propaganda in his classroom instruction. In 1991, Malcolm Ross was accused of creating a toxic classroom environment; again, after numerous decisions and appeals, in 1996 the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that Ross’s removal from the classroom was justifiable, on the grounds that, “although it did constitute a violation of his freedoms, this was a reasonable limit, as schoolteachers must be held to a higher standard of behaviour.” For those who wish to read more thoroughly about this case, see W. Hare’s (2013) insightful and incisive Propaganda in the classroom: The Keegstra case.

Every province and territory in Canada has at least one governing body that oversees the licensing and professional conduct of its public school teachers. Each provincial and territorial governing body also has a Code of Conduct or Ethics, to which its licensed educators must adhere. Without exception, all of these various Codes of Conduct have a written clause that says, in essence, that teachers should avoid giving offence to the moral and/or cultural principles of pupils and/or their parents/guardians, or to engage in behaviours/conduct that bring disrepute to their profession.

Another parameter we set up in our classrooms, in order to have these necessary courageous conversations, is to be very clear with our students that there is a final authority in the room as to if or when a conversation needs to end. We are absolutely firm on this: the teacher – in our university classrooms, that is us, and in their classrooms, it will be them – must be prepared to stop a conversation if it has veered from honest, open inquiry into a place where harm is being spoken or visited upon another, whether or not they believe that other someone to be in the room. And we also remind them that they have no idea who is actually in the room. You cannot assume anything at all about another person by looking at them. And when we have that conversation in our classrooms, it helps to set up another measure of respect and safety. Nevertheless, at the end of the day, it is the absolute responsibility of whoever is the teacher in the room to simply and absolutely end a conversation that has taken that turn into harm. As Joe Kincheloe (2008) says, in discussing conversations he had with Paulo Freire, “It is the teacher…who is responsible for the health, safety, and learning of students. To deny the role of authority the teacher occupies is insincere at best, dishonest at worst” (p. 17). And while the teacher is the final and absolute authority, we do not set ourselves up as the only authority; we have had students speak up to say that something that has been said is harmful, or hurtful, to them, or about someone in their lives. This learning process happens for all of us in the room, as a collective, and is in no way a one-way process. That’s not how dialogue and conversation works. We share here one example of an incident that happened a few years ago: one of us (it was Valda) for some now not-remembered reason went off in class one day about the horrors of a recently-opened big-box store, and how these enormous stores destroy communities and shut down small businesses, and contribute little to local economies, and etc. At the end, she said “And that’s why I will never shop in Store ABC”. And a woman who was a student in the room leaned back a little and said “Well, isn’t it nice that you have the financial security to be able to choose where you will shop based on your politics, and not where you get the most impact for your money”. And wow – what a learning experience for every single person in that room – including the not-nearly-so-proud-of-her-politics-now teacher at the front of the room.

Our experiences (between us, sixty-five years of teaching) have contributed directly to our passionate belief in the crucial importance of teachers not only being invested in having courageous conversations in classrooms, but also of the necessity of teachers having opportunities to learn how to have these conversations, with one another as colleagues and in classrooms with children. One may hold a belief in social justice or the need for social equity, but strongly held beliefs are only one part of actually doing this work; in our experience, many teachers hold a strong desire to be effective, supportive agents of social change, but they simply do not know where or how to put this passion into active practice within their classrooms. To this end, we work to develop, with our students, our classrooms to be spaces of open and reflective dialogues. Our teaching is designed to illustrate and support teacher awareness, student engagement (and, therefore, also classroom organization and “management”), and the social contexts within which teachers and students interact with schooling processes. In our teaching, and throughout these small books, we provide examples of everyday work being done by many teachers already, breaking down activities and curricular practices to examine the ways in which we can build and rebuild what we do for the respectful support to which all students are entitled.

We offer one example here as illustration of how we do this in our own classrooms: a couple of years ago (2019/2020), a video was making the rounds on social media, which depicted a high school teacher who had lined up his students at one end of a field. He proceeded to ask a series of questions, accompanied by directions to take a prescribed number of steps forward if a particular statement were true in someone’s life. The questions he asked were all linked to social privilege, whether that privilege was income related, racialized, gender related (he did stay away from sexuality and religion). By the time he stopped, some students were halfway up the field, and others were left at the starting line. Our pre-service teachers (and indeed, some of our graduate students) thought this was a wonderful exercise, one which would immediately illustrate social inequities, those ways in which the “race is won by those on the inside track”, to use Didi Khayatt’s (2000) language and example. In the view of many of our students, the video was an excellent, tangible demonstration that allowed students to “learn about privilege”. We invited our students to re-watch the video, and instead of watching the students on the move, focus on the faces of the students left at the starting line. Then we had conversations about for whom this “excellent learning experience” was a benefit: the answer, of course, is for students who themselves hold privilege (unconscious though they may be to this). The students left on the starting line are already keenly aware of the social inequities with which they themselves live on an everyday basis; to have that not only reinforced through this activity, but to be the subjects of the startled gaze of the students further up the field, resulted in active harm for some of these students. You can see their faces, their body language, as they realize what is happening as the teacher asks more questions: some of them turn away, sit down, or hang their heads. We talked with our students about an imperative that is inherent in the training of medical students: “First, do no harm”. We believe that this is equally as vital for teachers, to use in their analysis of all of their planned classroom activities; indeed, to keep at the forefront of their minds as they develop curricular lesson plans for the day/week/term.

In addition to the principle of do no harm, we support the call of R.W. Connell (1992) regarding the need for educators to rethink how we plan our curriculum for enactment in classrooms. Connell says:

The principle of advantaging the least advantaged…has strong implications for curriculum…and the way the current hegemonic curriculum embodies the interests of the most advantaged. Justice requires a counter-hegemonic curriculum (Connell, 1988), designed to embody the interests and perspectives of the least advantaged (1992, p. 139, italics in original).

Starting from ‘the standpoint of the least advantaged’ in our planning processes, indeed, in all of our work, from curriculum development through implementation, offers a jumping off point from which to develop more equitable classroom practices.