Brave New Schools: Identity and Power in Canadian Education

1
Brave New Schools Identity and Power in Canadian
Education

• Jim Cummins
• Ontario Institute for Studies in Education
• 2008 R.W.B Jackson Lecture

2
The Toronto District School Board wins the Carl
Bertelsmann Prize 2008 The Prize honors
exemplary work in fostering integration and
promoting equal opportunity in education
Students at the Don Mills Collegiate
Institute. The Bertelsmann Foundation has
announced that the Toronto District School Board
has won this year's Carl Bertelsmann Prize of
150,000 for its exemplary work in promoting
social integration and improving equal learning
opportunities at its schools. The equity
policy of the TDSB represents a holistic,
systemic approach to ensuring equal participation
and chances especially for students of migrant
origin.
3
(No Transcript)
4
PISA Data on First and Second Generation Migrant
Student Achievement
5
(No Transcript)
6
OverviewFrom Effective to Inspirational Pedagogy

• Pedagogical orientation
• pedagogy as instrumental
• pedagogy as personal
• pedagogy as political
• How linguistic and other forms of diversity are
  constructed in school policy and practice
• diversity as problem to be resolved
• diversity as resource for learning
• How educators individually and collectively
  position themselves with the matrix of societal
  power relations
• coercive relations of power
• collaborative relations of power

7
Power and the Negotiation of Identity in
Classrooms

• Societal power relations are flowing through the
  teacher to his or her students. However, through
  their pedagogical choices, teachers can seize
  this power and re-direct it so that it becomes
  collaborative and promotes empowerment.
• Coercive Relations of Power
• exercise of power by a dominant individual,
  group, or country to the detriment of a
  subordinated individual, group, or country (power
  over)
• Collaborative Relations of Power
• collaborative relations of power operate on
  the assumption that power is not a ?xed
  pre-determined quantity but rather can be
  generated in interpersonal and intergroup
  relations. Participants in the relationship are
  empowered through their collaboration such that
  each is more af?rmed in her or his identity and
  has a greater sense of ef?cacy to create change
  in his or her life or social situation (power
  with)
• Empowerment
• the collaborative creation of power

8
(No Transcript)
9
(No Transcript)
10
(No Transcript)
11
Power and Identity in Brave New World

• "We also predestine and condition. We decant our
  babies as socialized human beings, as Alphas or
  Epsilons
• There was a pause then the voice began again.
• Alpha children wear grey. They work much harder
  than we do, because they're so frightfully
  clever. I'm really awfully glad I'm a Beta,
  because I don't work so hard. And then we are
  much better than the Gammas and Deltas. Gammas
  are stupid. They all wear green, and Delta
  children wear khaki. Oh no, I don't want to play
  with Delta children. And Epsilons are still
  worse. They're too stupid to be able
• Fiction? One of the most consistent research
  findings across international contexts is that
  schools largely reproduce the social class
  divisions and power relations of the society.
• Is this because we lack instructional techniques
  or because we choose as a society not to
  challenge established systems of power and status
  relations?

12
Power and Identity in Teacher Education The OISE
Policy (from the 2009 Applicant Profile)

• OISE is strongly committed to social justice in
  everything it does. This means that we are
  committed to the just treatment of each
  individual member of our community and the
  communities we serve.
• This question is an opportunity for you to show
  that you understand that who you are will affect
  your work as a teacher.
•  
• Each person's social identity is influenced by
  gender, race, socio-economic status, sexuality,
  religion, geographic region, ethnicity, age,
  dis/ability, and other characteristics. The
  students in every school are diverse in at least
  some of these ways.
• Describe your social identity. How and why do
  you think your social identity will influence
  your work as a teacher with groups of students
  who are diverse in their social identities?

13
Identity Destruction in Residential Schools

• Dolphus Shaes testimony to the Berger Inquiry
  (1977) of his
• experiences at the Aklavik Residential School
• Before I went to school the only English I knew
  was hello and when we got there we were told
  that if we spoke Indian they would whip us until
  our hands were blue on both sides. And also we
  were told that the Indian religion was
  superstitious and pagan. It made you feel
  inferior to whites ...We all felt lost and wanted
  to go home ...Today I think back on the hostel
  life and I feel furious. (p. 90)

14
American Sign Language and Cochlear Implants
Evidence and Ideology

• Hard-of-hearing children and deaf children with
  cochlear implants also benefit from exposure to a
  signed language (Preisler, 1999 Preisler
  Ahlstrom, 1997 Spencer, 2002). Perhaps,
  especially for this group of children with some
  hearing abilities, acquiring a signed language
  early in childhood can assist spoken language
  development in significant ways.
• Yoshinaga-Itano (2006) cites three case studies
  of infants, involved with the Colorado Home
  Intervention Program, who acquired ASL and
  simultaneously received cochlear implants and
  auditory-oral stimulation. These young childrens
  broad ASL vocabularies became a foundation for
  developing spoken English word perception and
  production skills.
• (Kristin Snoddon, Canadian Modern Language
  Review, 2008, 644, p. 594)

15
Two Scenarios
Diversity as a problem Diversity as a resource
16
Diversity as Problem
In recent years, increasing numbers of ESL
students have come into my science classes.
This year, one of my classes contains almost as
many non-English speaking students as there are
English speaking ones. Most of the ESL students
have very limited English skills, and as a result
are not involved in class discussions and cannot
complete assignments or pass tests.
17
Diversity as Problem (cont.)
I respect these students as I recognize that
often they have a superior prior education in
their own language. They are well-mannered,
hard-working and respectful of others. I enjoy
having a multiracial society in my classroom,
because I like these students for themselves and
their high motivational level. However, I am
troubled by my incompetence in adequately helping
many individual students of that society.
Because of language difficulties, they often
cannot understand me, nor can they read the text
or board notes. Each of these students needs my
personal attention, and I do not have that extra
time to give.
18
Diversity as Problem (cont.)
As well, I have to evaluate their ability to
understand science. They cannot show me their
comprehension. I have to give them a failing
mark! I question the educational decisions made
to assimilate ESL students into academic subject
classes before they have minimal skills in
English (extracted from "A teacher's daily
struggle in multi-racial classroom", Letter of
the Week, Toronto Star, 1994, April 2, p. B3).
19
Whats Wrong with this Scenario?

• Isolation no evidence of any communication with
  ESL teachers or other content teachers
• Leadership vacuum why is this issue not being
  discussed at school level?
• No awareness of relevant research at least 5
  years is typically required for ELL students to
  catch up academically cant be fixed in 1-2
  years of ESL
• No awareness of scaffolding strategies to make
  content comprehensible for ELL students
• No conception of possible alternative assessment
  strategies.

20
Uncomfortable Questions

• This classroom reality can be understood only at
  the institutional level. It reflects the
  curricular and organizational choices made at
  multiple levels of the educational hierarchy.
  These choices reflect the priorities and values
  of our society in other words, they reflect the
  power relations in our society.
• In a context where half the students in the
  school system have learned or are learning
  English as an additional language, how do we
  explain the fact that many teachers may still
  lack the knowledge base to teach these students
  effectively?
• How do we explain the fact that there is
  typically very little attention paid to issues of
  linguistic diversity in Principals courses? If
  principals are unaware of what constitutes
  effective content teaching to ELL students, how
  can they evaluate whether teachers are
  instructing these students effectively?
• To what extent are Faculties of Education
  preparing new teachers to teach our current
  student body rather than an imagined generic
  student who is white, middle-class, monolingual,
  monocultural and heterosexual?

21
The Collaborative Creation of Power in One
Classroom

• Lisa Leoni Year 1 Grade 7/8 mainstream class
  Year 2 Grades 4-6 ESL
• Large Muslim student population from Pakistan
• Lisa explored implementation of bilingual
  instructional strategies as a way of enabling
  literacy engagement from a very early stage of
  students learning of English
• Video clips are from a presentation at the
  Ontario TESL conference in November 2005

22
Identity Negotiation in the Classroom

• The way I see it everything has to relate to the
  identity of the students children have to see
  themselves in every aspect of their work at
  school.
• My overarching goal as a teacher is to uncover
  all that is unknown to me about my
  studentslinguistically and culturally, and
  especially to understand the community they are
  part of (their parents, their friends, their
  faith) and the list goes on. So when a student
  enters my class, I want to discover all that I
  can about that student as a learner and as a
  person.
• For example, when Tomer entered my class last
  year, a lot of the work he produced was in
  Hebrew. Why? Because that is where his knowledge
  was encoded and I wanted to make sure that Tomer
  was an active member and participant in my class.
  It was also a way for me to gain insight into
  his level of literacy and oral language
  development.

23
Tomers Identity Text

• I think using your first language is so helpful
  because when you dont understand something after
  youve just come here it is like beginning as a
  baby. You dont know English and you need to
  learn it all from the beginning but if you
  already have it in another language then it is
  easier, you can translate it, and you can do it
  in your language too, then it is easier to
  understand the second language.
• The first time I couldnt understand what she
  Lisa was saying except the word Hebrew, but I
  think its very smart that she said for us to do
  it in our language because we cant just sit on
  our hands doing nothing.

24
(No Transcript)
25
(No Transcript)
26
Kantas Perspective

• And how it helped me was when I came here in
  grade 4 the teachers didnt know what I was
  capable of.
• I was given a pack of crayons and a coloring book
  and told to get on coloring with it. And after I
  felt so bad about that--Im capable of doing much
  more than just that. I have my own inner skills
  to show the world than just coloring and I felt
  that those skills of mine are important also. So
  when we started writing the book The New
  Country, I could actually show the world that I
  am something instead of just coloring.
• And that's how it helped me and it made me so
  proud of myself that I am actually capable of
  doing something, and here today at the Ontario
  TESL conference I am actually doing something.
  Im not just a coloring personI can show you
  that I am something.

27
Kantas and Tomers Pedagogical Theory

• Effective pedagogy aims explicitly to promote
  cognitive engagement and identity investment on
  the part of students.
• Effective pedagogy constructs an image of the
  student as intelligent, imaginative, and
  linguistically talented. Lack of English does not
  imply less intelligence, imagination, or
  linguistic talent.
• Effective pedagogy acknowledges and builds on the
  cultural and linguistic capital (prior knowledge)
  of students and communities. if students prior
  knowledge is encoded in L1, then L1 should be
  encouraged as a cognitive tool
• Knowledge and skills transfer across languages
  teachers should encourage and enable that
  transfer rather than restricting it
• This orientation to the teaching of
  linguistically diverse students is very different
  from what is being proposed within the discourse
  of evidence-based school effectiveness
  research.

28
Emerging Policy Framework for Educating Immigrant
Children Based on OECD Data
Migration Policy Institute Bertelsmann
Stiftung The Transatlantic Task Force on
Immigration and Integration Language Policies
and Practices for Helping Immigrants and
Second-generation Immigrant Students
Succeed Gayle Christensen and Petra
Stanat September 2007
29
The Construction of Students Home Language as a
Cause of Underachievement
The Transatlantic Task Force on Immigration and
Integration articulated the policy options of
Christensen and Stanats (2007) paper, together
with two others they commissioned (Crul, 2007
Lesemann, 2007), in the following way The
reports recommend that lawmakers focus on
policies that bring children of immigrants into
the education system by the age of three,
immerse them in the language of their host
countries, provide language support through both
primary and secondary school within a clear
framework, and afford more flexibility to move
between academic and vocational education.
(http//www.migrationinformation.org/transatlanti
c/) The unspoken logic here is that total
immersion of immigrant students at a very early
age in the host country language will ensure
cultural and linguistic assimilation and get rid
of the problem of childrens home language.
30
(No Transcript)
31
What Image of the Child Are We Sketching in Our
Instruction?

• Capable of becoming bilingual and biliterate?
• Capable of higher-order thinking and
  intellectual accomplishments?
• Capable of creative and imaginative thinking?
• Capable of creating literature and art?
• Capable of generating new knowledge?
• Capable of thinking about and finding solutions
  to social issues?