Field Experience Blog

5/30: As I prepare to leave for my TGC field experience in Canada next Monday, I find myself thinking back to other teaching experiences I’ve had abroad. I taught English to middle schoolers in Hangzhou, China for a summer as a junior in college (where instead of an apple, the classic fruit to offer teachers is a watermelon), and spent the year after I graduated teaching at the University of Burgundy in Dijon, France (land of mustard!). I was also a student in both countries, studying the language and culture.

I have since accumulated almost a decade (I can hardly believe it!) of teaching experience in middle and high schools in the US. I’ve taught in diverse contexts: I’ve been a teacher in urban middle and high schools, charter schools, and in a private school. Before moving to Austin, I taught in New York City, and it has been fascinating for me to see the cultural distinctions between different regions of the US.

I’m excited to get a chance to travel again as a teacher-researcher, particularly in this moment of upheaval in education when schools around the world are grappling with how to establish a post-COVID sense of normalcy. After the painful upending of school routines, how is the Canadian education system helping its students to feel connected to each other and to the rest of the world? What challenges and opportunities do the US and Canada have in common?

Thank you for following my “blog” as I begin my travels :)

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6/7: We landed in Canada yesterday, and while some people in our group had a tough time getting through customs (it's not a good time to have a Russian visa in your passport, apparently), the flight from Newark was very fast!

This morning, we were visited by representatives of the US Embassy in Ottawa and the US Consulate in Toronto. Among the fun facts that I learned, I was most surprised by the statistic that 1 in 5 Canadians are new immigrants. In the city of Toronto, over half of the population of 3 million people was born outside of the country! Toronto is one of the most diverse cities in the world: 20 percent of students in Toronto's schools speak a language other than English at home.

The emphasis today was on our cultural affinities and shared challenges. Like the US, Canada is also reckoning with a history of institutionalized racism and is working on diversity and equity initiatives to improve its educational system. Members of the Toronto District School Board told us about their successful efforts to end "streaming" (the equivalent of "tracking" in American education circles) so that students aren't locked into only one type of career path starting in ninth grade. It was fascinating to see all of the statistical and sociological analysis that formed the board's rationale for pursuing de-streaming, and the progress they have made over the last few years in terms of student graduation rates and increased access to learning opportunities was inspiring to hear about.

We were quizzed about the history of American-Canadian relations, and one quote the presenters shared came from an address President Kennedy made in 1961 to the Canadian Congress.

"Geography has made us neighbors. History has made us friends. Economics has made us partners. And necessity has made us allies."

I'm looking forward to meeting more Canadian educators tomorrow to learn more about how schools work here. I'm excited to get to go into classrooms in a school district outside of the city.

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6/9: Yesterday's school visit began in Oakville, a city to the southwest of Toronto in the Halton Independent School District. My group traveled to Oodenawi Public School, a K-8 community (and in fact, "Oodenawi" means "Community" in Ojibwe, the indigenous language of the region). Every morning, the school announcements begin with what is called a "land acknowledgement", which is part of Canada's effort to reconcile its colonial history with its pursuit of equity for all students. The land acknowledgement is an integral part of Canada's curriculum revisions under the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which was established in 2008 following the discovery of mass graves at indigenous schools. The school has also made a thorough effort to find diverse books that reflect the backgrounds of its students and to (in their words) "purge" its library of books that reflect harmful stereotypes. I'm curious and am going to inquire further about what this looks like.

I was particularly impressed by a Life Skills class. Many students with severe disabilities and physical impairments are served by the school in Oodenawi, and the district has invested in the specialist equipment and the pedagogical resources and expertise to make sure that those students are integrated into the community and are learning skills that will serve them well in their lives outside of the building. The fact that property taxes are not tied to local public school funding likely contributes to the ability of neighborhood schools to meet these needs.

My hypothesis right now is that because Canada has many political parties (instead of our two-party system), there is more of an incentive to unite around shared policy initiatives: attempting to "go it alone" or take an extremist position on an issue that impacts the whole country would be politically impractical. At our dinner last night marking the end of the Toronto leg of the trip, the CEO of Fulbright Canada spoke about Canada's communitarian values as they are enshrined in the Canadian Constitution.

Whereas the United States champions the individual values of "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness", the Canadian Constitution foregrounds "peace, order, and good government."

Dr Hawes noted that this commitment to community makes the work of pursuing equity for students a much more natural extension of the government's existing functions. While we share many of Canada's challenges in the United States, we have a lot to learn when it comes to making equity a lived reality.

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6/13: After a short hiatus... (unfortunately, the inevitable finally happened and I caught covid after years of avoiding it) I'm back in the blogosphere! I'm feeling very grateful to be vaccinated, because my convalescence was a lot less painful than I think it otherwise might have been.

After testing positive on Thursday night, I couldn't go to Quebec City in person and instead Zoomed in for a visit with the Ministry of Education, or as they say in French, the Ministère de l'Education et de l'Enseignement Supérieur. Quebec makes up 22 percent of Canada's total population, and as Canada gives its provinces responsibility for administering the education systems in their respective jurisdictions, Quebec's system looks very different from what we saw in Toronto. Quebec has the distinction of being the only majority French-speaking society in North America, and as such, the school system prioritizes the study of French. Many of the MLL students who immigrate to Quebec are from Francophone countries, including (but not limited to) France, Algeria, Haiti, Morocco, Cameroon, and the Côte d'Ivoire. I've been consistently impressed by Canada's robust systems for welcoming newcomer students and making sure that they have every opportunity to thrive in school.

I was also excited to see their Digital Competency Curriculum, which they had the foresight to roll out pre-pandemic (in 2018). From anecdotal evidence, many students in Quebec already had 1:1 devices before 2020, and many schools have maker spaces, robotics programs, and design-thinking challenge curricula that probably made distance learning much more palatable. I'm excited to investigate how media literacy factors into their curriculum, as that's something I'd love to bring back into my English classroom next year. There are so many opportunities for interdisciplinary study here (see below). On a related note, on November 5th, the Ministry of Education is sponsoring a (free!) digital education hybrid Professional Development day for teachers: dropping the link to their site so that you can sign up here!

One of the unexpected benefits of having to stay in Toronto while the rest of the group traveled on was that I also got to drop in on a school visit that the Saskatoon group was doing at the St Francis Cree Bilingual School. A parent advocate from the school community addressed our group of Fulbright teachers, and explained that the school was a lifeline for her, because when she was growing up, her parents had a deep distrust of the residential school experience (a distrust that was well-founded if you know the history of indigenous education in the Americas). She was emotional when she explained to us that she's simultaneously embarrassed and proud that her children are more fluent in Cree than she is, and she explained that she is so grateful that they have this opportunity now, in part thanks to the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Committee and tribal efforts to create space to educate indigenous children.

6/15: On the final day of programming, we met with administrators from the Université Laval, where many teachers in Quebec pursue degrees in education. Some of the salient differences between Quebecois teacher training programs and American certification procedures included more "student teaching" hours (in the US, two placements are typically required and it's possible to get a Master's in Teaching in one year; in Quebec, you must have four internships at different schools totaling 700 hours). Once you have obtained a teaching certificate, however, it is valid for life and does not need to be renewed every few years, as is typical across the United States.

Our group inquired about teacher shortages and teacher diversity, 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, although they are trying to recruit more diverse candidates. 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 differences in the education system and the CGEP year required between high school and university studies).

Social-emotional learning (SEL) is a focal point in teacher education programs, and the professors from Université Laval talked to us about programming during the school day and after school, in the community, that is intended to engage at-risk students. It made me think about my current school and our efforts to try to find at least one extra-curricular activity for each student to engage in so that they feel more closely connected to each other and our school community, and this objective is more important than ever in the wake of the pandemic. Educators from the Ruche Magog School in Montreal spoke to the same point: whereas at one time, their school was effectively divided into three different schools (a Special Education track, a General Education track, and a Concentration track), they found that students were much more motivated when everyone had a "concentration". I thought about conversations I've had with students about Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, and how passion projects can motivate individuals to pursue excellence across their studies.

6/16: On our last day in Toronto, I was reunited with the group in person in time for a final meeting to debrief the experience. It was great to see everyone again and to hear more stories about the time they spent traveling, and representatives from the US Embassy in Ontario were on hand and eager to learn about what we had observed and what we were taking back to our classrooms.