Capstone Reflection

Welcoming MLL Students, Newcomers, and Indigenous Students with Culturally-Responsive Teaching

I noticed significant differences across provinces in the language used to describe student populations. Whereas the Toronto District School Board and the Halton District School Board in Ontario have adapted the assets-focused language of “multilingual learners” (nomenclature also becoming increasingly popular in New York and Texas) and “newcomers”, Quebec designates an “immigrant” population more in keeping with the province-wide focus on assimilating students into the French-speaking world. As the only majority French-speaking society in North America, Quebec struck me as fiercely protective of its linguistic and cultural identity: some of Quebec’s incoming students are from Francophone countries, including France, Algeria, Haiti, Morocco, Cameroon, and the Côte d'Ivoire, but other students are placed in a special education track until they are academically competent in French. Entry to a bilingual school is restricted to those who have at least one parent who speaks the language of instruction at home.

The use of the terms “multilingual learner" and "newcomer” in Toronto were a subtle signal that the focus in Ontario was on integration as opposed to assimilation. Toronto’s schools seem to afford more space for students to bring their whole selves into the classroom, and as one of the most diverse cities in North America, with only a fifth of students in the district having been born in Canada themselves, it makes sense that the district is more identity-affirming. The structure of the administration reflects this commitment, with System Principals devoted solely to the role of facilitating “Welcome Centers”. These centers bridge the gap between schools and communities by assessing student needs and recommending a school of best fit depending on the language supports available and student interests. The movement to “destream” in Toronto is in part a push towards equity for all students, including those from historically underserved communities, so that they are not excluded from academic opportunities because they are preoccupied with cultural or linguistic adaptation. Interestingly, language instruction in students' native languages is often only available on weekends: world languages are not included in school programming unless students are on a bilingual track from the start. I’m curious as to why Canada doesn’t have more world language offerings during the school day, as research demonstrates that literacy development in a new target language is heavily influenced by language acquisition in a primary language.

At the Oodenawi Public School, a thorough effort has been made to find diverse books that reflect the backgrounds of the students. Tanesha Forbes-Bunsie’s first-grade classroom, which we visited virtually, exemplified this commitment: her students this year were majority Muslim, so she found books like Malala's Magic Pencil by Malala Yousafzai to use as mentor texts for their original writing about their own identities. The administrators we spoke to mentioned that they were involved in an ongoing effort to remove books that reflected harmful stereotypes from the school's shelves. (I'm going to inquire further about what this looks like in practice.) On a related note, I was surprised to learn that Halton was phasing out school-based librarians. My own school’s librarian plays a critical role in supporting teachers in classrooms and serving as a resource for student research projects; I can’t imagine not having the library staff present in the building to encourage a school-wide culture of reading, and I would be interested to learn more about the rationale behind Halton's choice.

I also saw examples of Halton's district-wide commitment to continuous reflection and improvement. For instance, the school wanted to make a good-faith effort to honor indigenous education practices by partnering with the local Mississauga tribe. The school begins each day with a Land Acknowledgement as a visible effort to reckon with a complicated history of colonization. At one point, they created a character-education curriculum based on tribal teachings, but found through conversations with tribal elders that their adaptation risked tokenizing and over-simplifying the Mississauga culture, and so revised their approach. The district takes this part of its strategic plan for improvement very seriously, and in fact, Oodenawi’s current principal is leaving next school year to assume a newly-created position as the System Principal for Indigenous Learners. 

In the words of Candace Wasacase-Lafferty, the Senior Director of Indigenous Engagement at the University of Saskatchewan and a Saulteaux and Cree citizen of the Kahkewistahaw First Nation, “reconciliation is for Canada, and reclamation is for indigenous people.” Many of the schools we visited were trying to include indigenous voices in their conversations about difficult national history, but reclamation of culture is something else entirely, and there is still a lot of work to be done in that quarter. 

Recruiting, Training, and Retaining a Diverse Workforce of Educators

I’ve been seeing and reading more and more about educators in the US deciding to leave their classrooms as the pandemic rages on, and I was curious to learn about how Canada is recruiting, training, and retaining teachers in trying times. 

Teaching north of our borders seems to be more highly regarded as a choice of profession. While salary schedule varies a bit by province, likely based on cost of living adjustments, Ontario's teachers are particularly well-compensated. When members of our cohort were out at dinner one night, their server revealed that that he was also an educator, but he was emphatic about clarifying that he had no need for a "side hustle". Domestic teaching jobs in Canada are competitive to the point where in normal times, teachers often begin their careers by teaching abroad in countries like Korea to gain experience in order to become more attractive applicants for teaching posts at home. 

In terms of teacher training, certification requirements are concentrated at the beginning of a teaching career. While 700 student-teaching hours (or four “internships”) are required to obtain the professional certificate, which is more than double the standard requirement to become initially certified in the US, American teachers must continually renew their certificates and document many more annual Professional Development hours than their Canadian counterparts (NB: this varies by state). In Canada, once you’ve obtained initial teacher certification, you are certified for life. Continuing education for teachers in Quebec is currently focused on Social Emotional Learning and enhancing teacher digital competency, both trends that are echoed in the US, especially as schools and students recover from pandemic-era remote learning.

At the Université Laval in Quebec City, I asked about whether Quebec was facing pandemic-era teacher shortages and whether teacher diversity reflected the diversity of the student body, and here we seem to share challenges: Quebec's schools are also facing a dearth of teachers (especially in STEM subjects) and the teacher workforce is still predominantly made up of white women. During the pandemic, emergency teaching certificates were issued to students studying to be educators, but certification requirements were not permanently relaxed. It seems to be more difficult to move from working in one province in Canada to working in a different one (especially if you're moving to or from Quebec, because of the CGEP year required between high school and university studies). The commitment to “Francisation” in Quebec has an isolating effect. Professors in the teacher education department also talked about how teacher shortages are worse in the northern provinces, because many teacher candidates originally from the northernmost parts of Canada come south for teacher training and then stay because the quality of life is higher. (It’s worth noting that 75 percent of Canada’s population is concentrated within 100 miles of the US border.)

As for Toronto’s teacher workforce, I was able to find statistics from 2014 that suggested that the teacher diversity gap is wide. 

In Ontario, racial minorities represent 26% of the population, yet make up only 10% of the 70,520 secondary school teachers and 9% of the 117,905 elementary school and kindergarten teachers. In the Toronto CMA, racial minorities represent 47% of the population, yet make up 20% of secondary school teachers and 18% of elementary school and kindergarten teachers.

While the Turner Consulting Group that collected this data was careful to note that Canada doesn’t collect student demographic data the same way that the US does and that therefore student numbers are estimates based on the total population, I found it interesting that Toronto’s issues with recruiting a diverse teacher workforce mirror challenges in the United States. I’d be interested to learn more about what Canada is doing to address the disparity on a provincial level, and I hope that narrowing the teacher diversity gap is a part of Canada's strategic plan to advance equity in schools. Research shows that students need to see both "mirrors" and "windows" in the adults who mentor them, too.