Educational Activism Conference

This is a follow-up conference to the Safe Schools for All conference. At the keynote address there was a panel of speakers, one of whom was a grade eleven student who shared how various teachers in her experience have shown her how to become involved in making the world a better place. These teachers were role models in their own activism, and also provided encouragement to her. I thought it was really great that a student who had been encouraged by teachers was now speaking at a conference to encourage future teachers. The circle completes itself.

The first seminar I attended was entitled Children's Health and the Environment. It has been in the news a lot lately about toys with lead and other toxins are being recalled. The media is happy to blame China. What hasn't been widely publicized is that all of us are living everyday in a toxic soup of chemicals that invade almost all of our consumer goods, our food, our water, our air. People generally know that there are plenty of toxic chemicals in our environment, yet we tend to assume that we are not at any particularly great risk, because "they" (the government presumably) wouldn't allow things to get too bad. Of course the government is a big bureaucracy, and we need to wake up to the fact that we are all alone against the powerful corporate forces that have spent decades designing wonderful products for us while ignoring the effects of chronic exposure. Why do you think there is so much cancer today? Why so much asthma? Is the rising level of learning disabilities and behaviour disorders in our students the result of increased detection, or are students affected by neurological disruptors (lead, mercury) in their environment. I had a conversation recently with a friend in which I lamented the current myopic focus on global warming in the public consciousness to the exclusion of issues such as our poisonous environment. In this seminar we were shown a film called "Toxic Trespass". It turns out I went with some friends from OISE a few weeks ago to see the Toronto Premier of this film at the theatre. If I had known that I was going to see it again I probably would have chosen a different seminar to go to, BUT this is really an important film and I think all Canadians should see it, get mad, and exert our collective consumer power on the corporations to clean things up. We have become addicted to cheap goods and having lots of stuff. We need to be ready to make do with less, and pay more for goods that won't slowly kill us and our children.

I attended the second seminar having to do with Math and Social Justice in order to complement a seminar I went to on this topic in the previous conference. The facilitators engaged us with a really fun activity that modeled the world economic situation. We had to build paper chains to sell on the world market and different groups had different materials and tools to do it with. My group started out in a very disadvantaged situation. The other members in my group got down to business trying to work with what they had. The exercise reminded me of the Colombia Role Play that Melissa and I developed and so I was immediately thinking outside the box of our table. I went around to the other tables and started making what could be construed in retrospect as shrewd and selfish deals. Our group ended up winning the game. The thing that was so great about this simulation is that it not only highlights inequities in the world in an effective way, but it really makes some one like me confront my own ingrained behaviours. I can say this is just a game and I get really competitive while playing games, but the sad truth is that I exhibited the same behaviour today by doing whatever I had to do to get ahead (and being rewarded when it worked) that when translated to the world stage is exactly why the world is such a messed up place. That's my confession for the day. Fundamentally, people are selfish and I hope exercises like this can help students to unpack their own attitudes and behaviours and learn how to transform these situations into a more equitable and peaceful reality.

The third seminar I attended was on the topic of black student realities and addressing racism in the classroom. I don't come across a lot of overt racism in my life and I tend to assume that it is mostly subtle and systemic these days, but what was clear from the stories told in this seminar is that overt and open racism is alive and well in Canada and at a shocking level. Unfortunately, the presenters spent most of the time telling anecdotes and I wasn't left with a lot of practical tools on what to do in the classroom to address this issue. One piece of advice is to be courageous and speak to a colleague and ask for advice if we have handled a situation and feel it might have been handled more effectively. On my practicum my associate teacher mentioned that he had a lot of respect for a colleague who asked him to sit in on a few classes to help determine the root of some difficulties that this teacher was having. In the seminar they showed a video clip that included a sequence of black children being asked to select a doll to play with and choosing a white doll over a black one. When asked, the black children believed that the white doll was "good" and the black doll was "bad". This was incredibly painful to watch.