What are alternatives to positioning teachers as experts and students as passive learners? What happens when teachers position themselves next to students, as co-learners? What changes when we invite students to teach teachers?
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“It was a powerful book. It really hit me. I cried at some parts … It also explained what some transgender people go through” — Amissa, Delta Student
As we celebrate Pride this month (and always!), we are looking back at the film, Gender is Like an Ocean, made from our work with grade 8 students in 2016. The film shows grade 8 students from Delta Alternative School, alongside Masters of Teaching (MT) students from OISE, create arts-based projects connected to their experiences of gender as a response to Kirstin Cronn-Mills’ book Beautiful Music for Ugly Children (2012).
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What does it mean to re-imagine curriculum without predetermined outcomes?
What happens when teachers encourage students to raise questions and follow where those questions lead them?
Teachers often experience curriculum imposed on them from outside their schools and classrooms. Ranging from recommended titles to instructional mandates, curriculum in schools is often backwards mapped from prefigured outcomes.
Read MoreHow can expanding what counts as curriculum help to challenge and change power relationships in schools?
Teaching Writers Speak, a new podcast produced by members of the Toronto Writing Project (www.torontowritingproject.com), launched back in March and is hosted by our very own Ty Walkland. Teaching Writers Speak is for educators, researchers, and creative folks like us who view writing as a vehicle for change, both in our institutions and in the world at large. Ty chats with teachers, professors, community educators, and researchers so that we can all better support one another as teachers of writing, our students as writers, and our work as scholars in the field of critical literacy.
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“I’m often overwhelmed when I pause and allow myself to feel the enormity of human experience in classrooms,” Elizabeth Dutro (2019) writes in the opening pages of her recent and remarkable book, The Vulnerable Heart of Literacy: Centering Trauma as Powerful Pedagogy. “How can one room possibly contain it all?”
If any one classroom comes close, Dutro argues, it is surely the literacy classroom. “After all,” she writes, “literacy practices are the means through which life stories are encountered, shared, and witnessed in classrooms.” As a testament, her book traces a years’ worth of writing produced by a class of third-graders and their teacher who drew upon their own life experiences—including difficult and traumatic experiences—to enliven and enrich their school literacies, and learn to be more critical and compassionate witnesses of each other’s lives.
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Teaching is political. The choices we make, and the books we teach, provide windows and mirrors for our students, opportunities for them to see themselves, develop empathy, and imagine a better world. As social justice educator Linda Christensen (1999) notes, literature is “what Chilean writer Ariel Dorfman (1983, p. 7) calls a ‘social blueprint’ about what it means to be men, women, poor, people of color, gay, or straight. And that vision is political—whether it portrays the status quo or argues for a reorganization of society” (p. 54).
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As book banning has reared its head once again in the news, we at Addressing Injustices have been reflecting on our experiences reading Maus with grade 8 students. It is a text that we've used twice in Sarah's classroom, each time to powerful effect.
In fact, we are currently putting the finished touches on an article co-written with several of the youth involved in our most recent investigation of Maus. Many of them expressed the importance of education as a way of resisting injustice and fostering change, and all of them were clearly impacted by exploring Maus in a classroom together.
Recalling our time in the classroom with these students has also led me to reflect on some of our frameworks as teachers and researchers. When engaging with potent historical material such as the Holocaust, it is surprisingly easy to slip into a kind of moralizing lecture where the Holocaust is reduced to “a terrible thing that happened in the past,” a fact that can no longer be engaged with or explored. Our approach with Addressing Injustices has been to emphasize the process of inquiry, and to foreground the interconnection between historical traumas and contemporary injustices. In doing so, we are inviting students to ask questions that matter to them about the world they're in, and trust that collectively the relevance of history will come alive through their inquiries.
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Earlier this year, Rob Simon and his colleagues Richard Beach, Deborah Appleman, and Bob Fecho, released the fourth edition of their book Teaching Literature to Adolescents, which features examples drawn from our research in the Addressing Injustices Project. In addition to teaching ideas from our research partner, Sarah Evis, and her students, this new addition includes contributions from Addressing Injustices team members, Ashleigh Allen, Ben Gallagher, and Ty Walkland.
If you are not able to access Teaching Literature to Adolescents through your school library and are interested in purchasing a copy, you can enter the code SS2130 to get 30% off from the publisher, Routledge
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The Addressing Injustices Project began in 2013, developing from discussions between Sarah Evis and Rob Simon. Since then, they have brought generations of grade 8 students from Sarah’s classroom together with teacher candidates from Rob’s classroom to explore issues of equity and social justice through the arts.
In August 2021, teacher/ researcher/ artist Sarah Evis and researcher/ poet/ writer Ashleigh A. Allen met up to discuss Addressing Injustices. Below is the second part of their two-hour conversation.
Sarah and Ashleigh acknowledge they live and work as uninvited guests on traditional, ancestral, unceded land of the Haudenosaunee, Huron-Wendat, Anishinaabe and Mississaugas of the Credit River peoples in the Dish With One Spoon territory called Toronto/Tkaranto.
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The Addressing Injustices Project began in 2013, developing from discussions between Sarah Evis and Rob Simon. Since then, they have brought generations of grade 8 students from Sarah’s classroom together with teacher candidates from Rob’s classroom to explore issues of equity and social justice through the arts.
In August 2021, teacher/ researcher/ artist Sarah Evis and researcher/ poet/ writer Ashleigh A. Allen met up to discuss Addressing Injustices. Below is the first part of their two-hour conversation.
Sarah and Ashleigh acknowledge they live and work as uninvited guests on traditional, ancestral, unceded land of the Haudenosaunee, Huron-Wendat, Anishinaabe and Mississaugas of the Credit River peoples in the Dish With One Spoon territory called Toronto/Tkaranto.
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In our work in Addressing Injustices, we have used sound inquiry as a way for students and teachers to explore their responses to texts and contexts they navigate (Friesen & Simon, 2021). In this multi-voiced blog post, we describe work we engaged in together related to sound and hearing over two English classes at Parkdale Collegiate, a public secondary school in Toronto. Madison, a student from this school, shared reflections on Doug’s visit to the classroom. During his visit, Doug, a music and sound educator in the Toronto District School Board (TDSB), asked students to record two significant sounds from daily life then to use these to create a sound piece with digital audio editing software. Following Madison’s reflection and introduction to the sound project, Doug describes the theories that informed his teaching. Our inquiry is guided by the question: What happens when you ask secondary students to record and describe significant sounds in their lives?
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What sounds can you hear now as you read?
What sounds are farthest away from you?
What is the first sound you can remember hearing?
Can you still hear it now?
We explore these questions in a recent article about sound inquiries with youth and teachers, which was published in the summer issue Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy. We describe how grade 8 students and teacher candidates used sound and listening to remix the dystopian novel Fahrenheit 451 (Bradbury, 2011) to, in the words of a participating teacher candidate, make the novel “come to life.”
Last May, George Floyd was murdered in Minneapolis by police officers, sparking another wave of the Black Lives Matter protests and demonstrations. Demonstrations and protests from Black Lives Matter are not new. In 2016, BLM stopped the Toronto Pride parade, only re-starting after Pride Toronto executive director Mathieu Chantelois signed a document agreeing to the group's demands. BLM Toronto released a list of demands, including a commitment to increase representation among Pride Toronto staff, and to prioritize the hiring of black transgender women and Indigenous people, as well as the removal of police officers from walking in the parade. Police violence is not new in Toronto or Canada, and the waves of demands felt in Minneapolis have rippled and unsettled a long dormant white and colonial institution.
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This Pride Month (or anytime!), we invite you to take 45 minutes to watch and maybe even be inspired by the movie Gender Is Like An Ocean, which the Addressing Injustices Project made from our work with grade 8 students at an alternative school in Toronto in 2016. This movie shows the grade 8 students alongside Masters of Teaching (MT) students from OISE as they create arts-based projects related to their experiences of gender and identity in response to the book Beautiful Music for Ugly Children (2012) by Kirstin Cronn-Mills.
It is important to us that you note the work documented in Gender Is Like An Ocean occurred five years ago. Some of the people and their perspectives shared in this movie have likely shifted, or aren’t exactly the same, as they’ve changed as people. (For instance, these grade 8 students are now adults!) Our friend and co-researcher benjamin lee hicks wisely says, “We are all always in transition,” and it’s important to us that you keep this idea in mind as you watch and reflect on the film
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English Journal published our article “Unsettling a Canonical Text through Erasure Poetry” in their May 2021 issue. In this article we look at our erasure poetry writing workshop with grade 8 students, which was part of a novel study of Ray Bradbury’s (1953) dystopian novel Fahrenheit 451. In addition to unpacking our writing workshop, we explain the value of using erasure poetry to disrupt the literary canon and how this activity prompts students to think critically about the power texts hold and the power they, as readers and writers, have over texts. As we say in the article, “The process of creating erasure poems allowed us to investigate censorship, the literary canon, the creative possibilities of resistance, and the creative potential in destruction.” The students’ erasure poems were ultimately compiled into a book-length erasure poem they titled Free 451
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Language arts teachers spend a lot of time crafting questions that will avoid simple answers like these (“I liked it, I didn’t”). Many of us learn in teacher’s college to avoid broad, open-ended inquiries, and so our questions sometimes swing wildly from the microcosmic—“What did this character say to so and so?”—and the macro—“What is the theme of the poem?” We want to know what meaning our students make of the novels, poems, and short stories we ask them to read. We want to know if they’ve read them at all, let alone discovered patterns and resonances across their experiences with other written forms and the world at large. And so we spend entire semesters—careers, even—scratching our heads, hoping that if we ask the right questions, we’ll elicit meaningful responses. I know, because I’ve spent hours dreaming up juicy queries, and even more time grading responses that tend to be flat, formulaic, and frightfully repetitive.
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As practicing poets as well as members of the Addressing Injustices research team, Ashleigh Allen and I have often brought our approaches to teaching poetry into our research work. We have also been facilitating creative writing workshops for teachers through the Toronto Writing Project for the past three years. While poetry month is typically focused on encouraging students to write poetry, and helping teachers to find new ways to bring poetry into classrooms, both Ashleigh and I believe strongly in the importance of teachers of writing also having their own writing practices. By developing and sustaining our own creative writing as teachers, we're able to tap into the transformative and restorative potential of writing that has been freed from goals and assessment, and then bring that energy to students in classrooms.
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First established in 1996 south of the border by the Academy of American Poets, National Poetry Month arrived in Canada two years later and there’s been no turning back. Government agencies, school boards, educators, libraries and their librarians are all in on the annual celebration. While it is thrilling to see poetry intentionally folded into educational spaces for one month a year, I wish us educators of all subjects and stripes were always leaning into reading, writing and teaching poetry.
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Our principal investigator, Rob Simon, was recently interviewed by the Teaching Tomorrow podcast, hosted by Celeste Kirsh.
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