A Few Small Nips: The Impact of “Modernizing Classrooms” on Freedom, Democracy and Learning

Note: This is a repost from last spring. While the government has reduced their proposal of class size average from 28 to 25 and reduced the number of mandatory online courses for high school students from 4 to 2, the proposed changes will still greatly impact our students. The issue, as the government has framed it, is only about salary; here is a different perspective.

On Monday morning, I stood in front of my period 1 class — a group comprised of mostly newcomers, many of whom are Somali and practice Islam — and spoke about the Somalian airline disaster and the Christchurch massacre.

They should have a place to talk about what happened. And they should feel safe at school, and in the broader community. I told them about the conversation with my son and religion (see Praying, Ninja-Style). I reiterated that this classroom, and school, is a community; and, as a community, it is a place where people should feel able to gather and mourn.

Students were given the option of sharing their thoughts in writing: about the massacre specifically, about hate-crimes more generally, or about what we can do as a school or community to ensure all students feel safe and respected.

This is what they wrote:

“What Prophet Muhammed Said: don’t kill an infant, don’t kill the sick, don’t destroy the worship place, don’t force anyone to Islam.”

“Islam? Islam is peace. Islam is respectful. Islam teaches me how to respect other religions, other nations.”

“I want Adult High School to remember who died.”

“I think all teachers should take 10 minutes of their time to talk about what happened last week as our teacher did because I felt better when I knew her thoughts were with us.”

“The best way to make sure the school is safe is to talk about how life must be without war and crisis. If I come to school and see a lot of police officers protecting me, I will not feel safe. I remember in Syria when the war was happening, there were army in the front of our street. It did not make me feel safe.”

I brought their written responses to admin.

Acknowledging this horrific event helped to connect us as a class: it prompted a conversation with admin for supporting students, it opened the door for students to access resources (guidance and school psychologist), and it helped build community within our classroom by providing students with reassurance that we stand together.

It meant a lot to the class. And it meant a lot to me.

This conversation, these written responses, the feedback to admin, and the referrals to guidance would not have happened in an online setting.

Cultivating communities and safe spaces in an online learning environment is hard, at best. Anyone who has taken an online course knows this well. Engagement is tough, and when responding to another student’s post, most of us will respond to the first or second person’s response. After that, everyone stops paying attention.

But in addition to the challenges of cultivating a safe space online, I wonder whether we as teachers will have the freedom to initiate a conversation in the future about hate crimes, social justice, human rights, compassion, unity, and resilience in an online setting.

The recent announcement by the Ontario Minister of Education, which outlines drastic cuts to public education — including increasing the class average from 22 to 28 students, changes to the ‘liberal’ sex-ed curriculum, and bans on cell phones in the classroom — also dictates that high school students will have to take four e-learning courses starting in 2020. Ford’s Government claims to be “modernizing the classroom” by supporting students to become technologically literate.

While teachers have pointed out — and rightly so — that this puts the most vulnerable students at risk, another equally terrifying reality is this statement: “Starting in 2020–21, the government will centralize the delivery of all e-learning courses...”

What does centralization entail? Who will be developing the content for these courses? How much, if any, freedom will we as teachers have to discuss issues of relevance with our classes? There is also a question about whether we, qualified teachers, will be teaching these online courses.

As a teacher and mother, this terrifies me. An education that fosters critical thinking, that is responsive to world issues and events, that cultivates community, acceptance and humanity is key to democracy.

While our systems, practices, and institutions are not perfect, and still reflect colonial narratives (past and present), we have the freedom and responsibility to discuss these narratives and how they are playing out in the current context. The discrepancy between response time to missing Indigenous women vs. white women, for example. Or, the case of Abdirahman Abdi, the unarmed Somali-Canadian man who died after confrontation with police officers.

If we allow the government to take control over the form in which content is delivered (from classroom to e-learning), we have given up control over the content, too.

I am reminded of Frida Kahlo’s painting Unos Cuantos Piquetitos (1935), where she paints herself lying naked on a bed, dead; her husband standing above her with a knife. She references a case of femicide where a husband came home drunk and stabbed his his wife over and over and over. When standing before the judge, he stated, “But all I did was give her a few small nips!”

A few small changes can seem irrelevant and therefore be easily be dismissed. But let’s not mistake these “little nips” for what they really are. This could be the beginning of the end. This is how it starts. Just think about how centralization and modernization has been used to justify coercive ideological shifts in other places, at other times. For this reason, we have to act now if we care about our country, our democracy, our freedom and our children.