Addressing Injustices: A Conversation with Sarah Evis (Part 1)
By: Ashleigh. A. Allen
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.
PART 1:
AAA:
Hi Sarah! You can introduce yourself.
SE:
Hi, I'm Sarah Evis. I teach grade seven and eight at an alternative school in Toronto. This will be my 19th year of teaching, and I have been working with Rob Simon and AI for the last eight years.
AAA:
I guess before we get to any questions about the AI project, I am curious about your teaching philosophy. So, if you can speak to that in any way: your values, beliefs about teaching, education - just to get an idea of who you are—
SE:
Just a small question! Wow. I don't even know where to start on that. Can we break it down?
AAA:
Yeah! So, I was just thinking along the lines of your values, beliefs about teaching and education, its purpose, your role in the classroom...
SE:
Oh, okay. Well, my role in the classroom is a learner as well as a teacher. And I try to make my classes as... I like teaching with Socratic discussions. It doesn't work all that well for all kids and I don’t think I do enough to make it better for them, but Socratic discussion is just the way I do things. I love having that immediate feedback. I love just jumping into a topic and seeing what kids are feeling about it. I've grown over the years to know that I need to give them background information. When I first started teaching, I would just say, “Okay, we're gonna learn about this, and because I love it, you should love it.” And then when they didn't love it, I couldn't understand what the deal was. So, now I understand. I don't have any anchor charts in my classroom, but I definitely try to give them information—and good information, almost never textbook information—about the subjects that we're going to be looking at.
I guess most of what I teach is about things that are happening in the world currently. My philosophy of teaching is that I feel like a doctor, like we shouldn't do any damage, or we should do as little damage as possible. I think Ben and I had this conversation years ago, about just feeling like there is some kind of violence about forcing kids to learn and sit in a chair and all of that. I really thought about quitting teaching a few years ago, and Rob and Ben talked me back into it. But I really think I just can't deal with busy work. I can't deal with learning for the sake of wokeness. I can't deal with any of that stuff. I think it's imperative that kids, especially those who are privileged, as most of my students are, learn about what's going on in the world, and learn about injustices. There's always a real decision about how much I can share with them that is really disturbing. That's sort of a back and forth kind of thing. And I'm never comfortable with any of the decisions I have made. I mean, I think the kids should know all about residential schools. There's all of that stuff going around, “If my kids could have survived it, then your kids should have to learn about it,” but no one should have had to survive it, so I don't know what that means.... You know, I just feel like it's important that students are able to understand on an emotional level what happened and is happening, but that there's no point in inflicting it on students..
AAA:
I'm wondering how you choose a topic or text. What comes first when you're choosing the curriculum for your upcoming school year?
SE:
Whatever is going on in the world, almost without exception. So, this year we will learn more about residential schools. And to that end, I'm wading through the Bible of that topic called Shingwauk's Vision, which is the history from the 1500s up until the 1990s. I am going through the whole thing and making notes on every page, which I've never done before. Also, for the, I don't know, tenth time in my teaching career, we have an election in the fall. And that is always an excellent opportunity to learn about civic responsibility, and what really goes on in an election and all the bullshit that's involved with that, to try and get kids to be thinking critically, so they don't just become sheep.
You know, and there's always something. Last summer, it was the Black Lives Matter protests all over. And even though I wasn't at school that September, I made the contracts for everybody based on a Vanity Fair issue with Brianna Taylor on the cover. And the whole issue was devoted to what was going on and interviews with Killer Mike and interviews with all sorts of people. I took that magazine and pulled it all apart and had kids look at all of those different things, all the different people who were involved with different viewpoints, what was going on....
As we get further into the year, I tend to teach things that I feel like I should, regardless of what's going on in the year, but certainly the fall term is always about topical stuff.
AAA:
What is the Addressing Injustices project from your perspective?
SE:
Well, I guess I should mention that it is a literacy project, first and foremost, which is the thing that I always forget, even though that's what we do. And from my perspective... Well, the way it started was when Rob and I sat down at a café… And we were just so excited about the project, what it could do and how we could teach kids and what we would be able to teach them. I remember Rob just constantly saying, “Write that down! Write that down!” I was just writing in my chicken scratch all these ideas.
What we really wanted to do was take the whole world of literacy and the whole world of social justice and put them together for one project. Then we realized that we had to sort of push things out a little bit. And then we had to find a book that we wanted to teach—
AAA:
What do you mean push things out a little bit?
SE:
Well, we had to narrow things down. Rob would say to me, “Hold on!” I'm sure I was just screaming. You know the way I can get. I don't think I've ever been so excited about teaching anything in my life as I was in those conversations – just Rob and I. And he was really excited too.
After having these sort of theoretical conversations for our first two meetings about what we could do, he already had the framework of working with kids on Eli Wiesel's Night. In fact, that's how I found out about what Rob did was because my students at that time and I just ran into that show when we were at University of Toronto for Remembrance Day. And I approached Rob and I said, “Will you work with me?” Or, “Can I work with you?” Or something! I was begging, and he was like, “Yeah, of course!”
So, then it became one of those Rob questions, “What would it mean to have a class of MT students and a class of grade eight students read the same novel and have discussions and do creative responses together?” So, we ended up that first year with Alexie’s Part Time Indian, which, you know, there have been problems since with Sherman Alexie. But I taught it again this past year for the first time since then because the book is too good to be thrown out… We decided going in that we would just go without a map, which was so exciting to me because that's how I teach. I just want to see what happens. And so, I created a whole bunch of resources for the kids that they could use, everything from a video by a group of Winnipeg MCs to articles that have been recently in the paper to all sorts of other stuff. There was a page about what they could do, and there was a page about themes like power and poverty. So, they have that to start with. And because my kids were used to working with me, I think they were not freaked out by it. I think the Master of Teaching (MT) students were basically freaking out though because they had no idea what the expectation was….
That first year we saw what would come out of it—you have seen the projects, absolutely remarkable projects. So that became the template. And every year after that, we chose and read a book together. We fine-tuned that, but that became the guiding way of doing things.
AAA:
Choose a book that relates to the time that touches on a social issue—
SE:
Sometimes we pick the book; sometimes we pick the topic. So, when we decided to teach Beautiful Music, it was because we felt that we needed to address kids who were transitioning. We looked at a whole bunch of different books. This was a book that very specifically looked at one issue in a way designed very specifically for young adults.
AAA:
And then the people who are involved, like our research team and the MT students, they come up with activities or ways into exploring themes or storylines or—
SE:
Yeah, I mean, at the beginning, everyone was involved. You know, there was benjamin, Ty, me, Amir, and Pam. I think Pam was at the beginning too.
AAA:
And Lee Airton?
SE:
No, no, Lee only worked with us once from a distance when we did Beautiful Music. Everybody came in on the ground floor, and that was the only year that happened … So I think that's what made the first year really special for me… One thing that we learned, especially when you and Ben joined, was how helpful it was to have outside views about what was going on, so that this sort of craziness had some structure...
Anyway, the idea was to be able to, I mean, I don't want to use the word “teach”, but, I mean, to present information to the kids about a particular topic, and to have them buy into it, and then to have them do a lot of their own research about it. And then ultimately, for them to be able to express what they've learned, almost without any guidance, to see what they could come up with. Then the conversations around what everyone had created were… they weren't the final piece because then we vote. And that went on. So, it was just so multi-layered, as you know, these projects.
AAA:
Yeah. One of the things that struck me when I first joined the team was how young people fold these really difficult topics, that a lot of adults and many people the world over choose to ignore, into their conception of what’s possible in a society. So, even something like people who transition. That's something that even some adults don't or won’t really want to think about or understand, and you have created a space where students can explore it in a safe way. And where they can see what transitioning means to them. Whether or not they transition.
SE:
benjamin was a huge piece of that. Because benjamin came in right at the start and did that whole activity that explores the questions: “What does transition mean to you? When is a time in your life that you've transitioned?” This made it something that everybody can relate to, not just very few people. We did book-making and all sorts of activities, and then benjamin shared with us some of the film, where they're talking with their own students at that time about their transition. So, we absorbed that and it was the best presentation ever at the beginning of a book. And Pam too; Pam had done a lot of work. She showed us short films about people who were in housing or prisons or various difficult situations and what it meant for them not to be able to be their authentic selves. So, I felt like we had a huge amount of expertise helping us that first year. Plus, we had James who transitioned during the school year--
AAA:
You had a grade eight student who transitioned at that time?
SE:
Yeah. As we were reading the book. And I think it's no coincidence that they taught the rest of the class about it while we were reading the book. So that became a huge part and parcel of that project. You know, because some students had already known about their transition, and had held on to that knowledge secretly for a while. And then it became, you know, public knowledge. Then everything we did... we didn't want to be like, "Okay, you're the trans person, so you answer these questions." Instead, it made us incredibly mindful about what was going on. I think it really reinforced the idea of how incredibly important it was for kids who were not going to transition to be able to be knowledgeable and empathetic and supportive of their peers, colleagues, and classmates. So that was pretty magical at that time.
AAA:
I feel like benjamin has said something along the lines of - if you expect students then you can support them. Like, if you expect that you will have queer students in your class, if you can expect that someone has transitioned or will transition in the future or might transition this year... that can alter not just the texts that you teach, but how you teach and how you interact with students….
My next question is something you've already touched on with your teaching philosophy and also the AI project... I’m wondering: how does your classroom utilize a social justice framework throughout the school year even when your students are not doing work with AI?
SE:
I think that over the years, the work that I did with AI has really influenced the way I teach in the classroom. Specifically, I have gone back and re-taught three of the books that Rob and I have taught together. And it was really, really challenging to do by myself what I had done with a team of people -- filmmakers and doctoral students and everything else and Rob -- helping to varying degrees of success. Also, when I retaught Beautiful Music, a couple years had gone by, it seemed less acceptable that we had a non-trans author. We had a whole damn film about the first thing, and it was remarkable. I taught Maus this year, and I did a really good job of it. And I had to teach it to a split grade, half of which weren't reading the book. And we had to read the book, we had to read the book because anti-Semitism is on the rise again, there was all sorts of garbage going on, we have a class set of the book… And we had a number, as we always seem to have, of kids who are the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of Holocaust survivors. And it was good. It didn't have all the bells and whistles -- we didn't do a creative response, because we were all going home again, because of Covid, but the reading of it, and the essays that kids wrote around it were remarkable. I asked them to write broadly about the similarities between the rise of anti-Semitism in the US under Trump, and what happened with the Third Reich. I got some nonsensical essays back, and I got university level stuff back, too. Staggering stuff.
So that's a very specific part of how I teach. But I think now, whenever I teach literacy, the way we taught together is just always a part of it now. You know the introduction –the classic question: "Do you let the kids read the book on their own first so that we can all be in the same place together?" Well, that never works because they won't, even when we did Part Time Indian this year… It has so much offensive language that I had forgotten - horrendous stuff in it. I read the whole book out loud to them on zoom three times to all three cohorts. Because I just needed to be able to be there every step of the way to talk about each part of the book, "This is part of the book and this is why we're upset about it," you know, walk them through it. So does that answer the question?
AAA:
Yeah, sort of. You're sort of speaking to your curriculum choices. But I feel like you answered that when you were—
SE:
One thing that it requires is time, and I have a lot of time. I'm able to do it at my school, and I mean, part of the conversation has to be that if I wasn't at my school, I couldn't do any of this. Or I could do a very limited amount of it. But I often do cross-curricular work, and I put English, history, geography, and art all together, so that we can just dig in deep. I don't have to have all these little projects for each subject that need to be assessed or whatever, and we can just see where it goes. Sometimes it doesn't do too much with the geography and does a lot with English, or art, or whatever, but no one's checking up on me. So, I'm good with that.
AAA:
That’s awesome! I wonder – what does Addressing Injustices specifically offer your students?
SE:
Oh, my God. So, so, so, so much. First of all, it offers them instead of one adult to sometimes 30 kids, it offers them almost a one-on-one situation which you never, ever, ever get in teaching. I just can't imagine, unless you've partnered with another group of people, how that would work. You know, and that is staggering.
And I love the fact, increasingly as I get older, that there is a much smaller age gap between the MTs and the kids than there is between them and me, you know, and so there's a lot of times where I can see that the kids really relate to someone in their MT group, because they see them as being far ahead of where they are.
There's so much of the time that my students teach the MT students that it gives them an opportunity to be the knowledge keepers or the knowledgeable ones – and it has happened every single time. I don't think there has ever been a book that we have chosen where at some point, one of our groups of kids hasn’t just laid down the law. And the MT students have been like, “Whoa.”
AAA:
Yeah, I think teachers need to learn that lesson early on – that you are not the expert of your students’ experiences or many other things, but especially that.
SE:
Yeah!... The ability for the students to be the teachers themselves, the ability to have this time that we've put aside, because it always takes forever to do this. So a really in-depth, time-intensive project.... And there’s the creative response part, which is the "Leila effect". Right? You know, we would not have gotten that response if we hadn't done things the way we did, specifically with the poetry activities. That just opened up a whole world for her and her learning. So every time the students do something, whether it's like the group that had the fire hats and the library, or any of the other groups, I know they take that stuff with them into high school. I think a problem in high school is that they get crushed with some of the ideas they have. But they also know that knowledge doesn't just look like whatever they've researched on the Internet. It can look like what we have discovered ourselves by creating this tree stump with things coming out of it, you know, and making these creative pieces, which I think is huge.
AAA:
Well, that goes back to how your class is a social justice classroom -- you're troubling who has the knowledge and when as well as what that knowledge is... Who has the knowledge is who has the power, and I think that's part of what your classroom is; it's a space that troubles those power structures.
SE:
Yes, and anything that troubles the power structures is brilliant, which is the thing that some administrators can’t deal with. Everything I do troubles power structures.
Citations
Alexie, S. (2007). Part time indian. New York: Little, Brown Books for Young Readers
Cronn-Mills, K. (2012). Beautiful music for ugly children. Minnesota: North Star Editions .
Miller, J. R. (2009). Shingwauk's vision: A history of native residential schools. Toronto:
University of Toronto Press.
Wiesel, E. (1960). Night. New York, Hill and Wang.