Teacher Responsibility in Causing and Ameliorating School-Based Stress In Students

Introduction

Why is it that North American schools are such effective incubators for anxiety, depression, and a variety of other mental health issues? Outliers aside, the basic concepts of high school education have not changed that much over the past half-century or so. Yet in 2018 we find ourselves immersed in research and reporting that highlights all the now-familiar concepts: adolescents are more prone to stress, anxiety, and depression now than ever before, and our education system seems to be one of the chief causes of these conditions. In particular, I am interested in how teachers respond to the challenge of mental health issues in students, and how those responses ameliorate or exacerbate the conditions around the academic, emotional, and social well-being of that student.

Section 23

My interest in school-based stress began when I worked with a hospital-based school, with children and adolescents hospitalized for a variety of mental health concerns. I was warned off by family members and colleagues before accepting this position. They all warned me that these kinds of programs were were all the “psychopaths” were placed - which only served to pique my interest further. My work entailed creating literacy and numeracy programming for students who were housed in both the In-Patient and Out-Patient units, helping them earn high school credits, and managing the academic portion of their reintegration into life outside the hospital. This involved many meetings with principals, guidance counsellors, student success teams, parents, superintendents, mental health nurses, psychologists, psychiatrists, social workers, child and youth workers, patients’ rights advocates, police, and more.  

In my four years in the program, I worked with hundreds of students whose mental health issues ran the gamut of suicidal ideation, self-harm, eating disorders, overdosing, schizophrenia, psychosis, OCD, PTSD; their social issues included expulsion, physical and sexual abuse, incest, homelessness, criminal charges, police brutality, and in one case, being put on a terrorist watch list by the RCMP. However, despite the aforementioned list, what I always found most fascinating was the commonalities between these students - the vast majority of them found school to be extremely stressful. Their reasons varied but generally centered around heightened expectations from family, teachers, administrators, or even themselves, and their perceived inability to meet those expectations. They regularly told me how their school simply did not understand their mental health needs; for many students, the most effective part of being hospitalized was simply two or three days away from school. The other half of my job was working with the school community to reintegrate these students after whatever incident brought them into the hospital. In many cases, the school was unwilling to accept these “dangerous psychos” back even though it was their legal responsibility to do so. I found the disconnect between what the student was asking for - support and acceptance - and the school’s reaction - rejection and intolerance - to be both personally and professionally frustrating.

In-School Mental Health Support

After four years I transferred into a quote-unquote “regular” high school which also has a highly stressed student population. One colleague and myself put together a “mental health club” which sought to bring the conversation around mental health to the forefront of the school community. We conducted an online survey of approximately 200 students; some of the more interesting data points were:

•  65% of respondents said that being at school made them “rarely” or “never” happy

•  45% of respondents said their current level of stress is “high” or “very high” - and this survey was given at the beginning of a new semester

• 30% of students reported that they slept 6 or fewer hours a night, which is generally unhealthy for a developing adolescent brain

• 82% said the majority of their stress was caused by homework

• 80% said they put “high” or “very high” amounts of pressure on themselves to succeed

• 90% of respondents said that they either were unsure or had no concept of  where to access mental health supports at school

This data points to a school community and culture where high levels of stress are not only endemic, but expected and normalized. I am curious to see what research has been done in this area, to try and develop a data-driven approach that will help teachers craft different perspectives on their roles in causing and preventing negative mental health in students.

One interesting examination by Pope (2010) looked at the reaction of a high school to the death by suicide of one of its students, as a result of academic stress. “The Jared Project”, named after that student, used a multifaceted approach to reducing stress in the school. The one approach I found particularly interesting involved asking all staff to create a schedule where they input the amount of hours they expected students to give to that course, team, club, band, or other co-curricular area. Then, when students signed up for courses, they had to calculate how many hours per day they were signing up for and include eight hours of sleep. If they signed up for more than twenty-four hours of work in a day, or if their eight hours of sleep were reduced by more than one hour, they were not allowed to have that schedule (p. 7). This is contrasted with the other end of the self-care spectrum, which is self-harm, as detailed by Dimmock, Grieves, and Place (2008). Without the support of a school network, students who lapse into self-harm as a coping mechanism are “coping with a sense of being overburdened with insoluble problems” (p.42). The researchers held interviews with adolescents who were at the end of their psychiatric treatment for self-harm, specifically cutting; through these interviews, their respondents noted that the physical pain of self-harm was easier to deal with than the socio-emotional distress brought on by school (p.44) and that they would rather cut or speak to a teen they had never met than speak to an adult in a school setting (p.45). This suggests severely maladaptive coping strategies that are exacerbated by perceived intolerance or lack of understanding from adults within a school.

Teacher Mental Health

Another Australian study by Trudgen and Lawn (2011) examines how teachers deal with mental health issues in their classrooms, specifically depression and anxiety. Of note is the stress experienced by teachers themselves. According to the study, 40% of teachers feel their career has a large amount of stress, which is twice the national average of most professions; 71% say their stress has a deleterious impact on the quality of their teaching; 57% say they have a poor work-life balance (p.128). This study tried to find a common threshold at which teachers began to intervene in their students’ mental health, usually by making a recommendation to someone else in the school that the child receive some kind of psychiatric treatment. Trudgen and Lawn found that the majority of teachers they interviewed, regardless of years of experience, were able to easily identify behavioural signs in students that would suggest some form of mental health-related distress - however, these same teachers could not act on those signs in the moment because the rest of the class was simply too busy (p.132). Another result that I found particularly interesting was that the teachers in this study believed that teens interact differently in their social spheres now than they did ten or fifteen years ago (p.133). One possible effect of this is that the instincts or “gut feelings” that a veteran educator has honed over their career vis-a-vis rationale for student behaviour may no longer be applicable, leaving educators without a framework with which to confidently make decisions. The pervasiveness of an online life - i.e. social media - realistically leaves educators dealing with a whole other level of reality that their students occupy, which the educator may know nothing about, and where their instincts are compromised with the changing of the medium. One can understand why, later in the study, the teachers say they feel an “overwhelming sense of powerlessness” to help their students (p.134).

Trugden and Lawn conclude with an observation that I feel has become commonplace with many educators - that teachers need more training in establishing their “mental health literacy” (p.138). Yet the specifics of this training and establishing the parameters of “mental health literacy” for educators remains elusive. In my practice I have sought to include “mental health advocate” as part of my role, for both staff and students. Part of this has involved training for staff around mental health vocabulary, stigma, and understanding its relevance to their own lives and the ecosystem of the classroom; a student who is experiencing stress is more likely to cause stress for an educator, which can create something of a feedback loop of stress and anxiety between teacher and pupil. I have facilitated several workshops for staff around mental health and the ministry of care, by which I mean ministry in the ecclesiastical sense, not the governmental sense. We also brought in several guest speakers into our community for staff and students. These included Canadian Olympian athlete Sarah Wells, who speaks about resilience and endurance, and Gillian White, a Ph.D. candidate at the Human Physiology Lab at UofT who specializes in the physiological effects of stress on the human brain. Our group also organizes visits to the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) for staff and students to help them understand the environment a student is placed in when they are admitted to hospital for psychiatric concerns. Our hope was that these shared conversations would bridge the gap between teacher and student, adult and child, and allow both parties to understand how the other experiences stress. Once that groundwork is laid and a shared vocabulary can be used, we further hoped that we can address how staff can be complicit, explicitly or not, in the engendering of conditions ripe for poor mental health in students. This will be a difficult conversation to have as it directly addresses an educator’s pedagogy, which, in some cases, may have been established for decades. The goal of is to help staff and students understand the connection they have to one another, and how improving that connection will improve the mental health and performance of our community.

                                      

University of Ottawa B.Ed - Comprehensive School Health Cohort

My experience in my B.Ed program, at the University of Ottawa, involved mental health in my own life but not in a curricular sense. My own mental health suffered during that time; I struggled with loneliness, since I knew no one in the Ottawa area and spoke virtually no French; my grandfather and cousin both died that year; and I was acclaimed as President of the Student Federation but inherited an organization mired in debt and poor management. Yet in my classes there was no mention of mental health - nothing about teacher burnout, student anxiety, or accommodations based on mental health. Curious to see how that program had evolved since I left it ten years ago, I perused their website to see if any mental health programming had been integrated into their offerings. 

Thankfully, the University of Ottawa now offers a mental health cohort in their B.Ed program. This cohort, titled Comprehensive School Health, is offered at the both the B.Ed and M.Ed levels. Its programming is based on a Ministry of Education resource titled Foundations for a Healthy School (2016), which is itself a companion to the K-12 School Effectiveness Framework document. The cohort offers an Educational Research Unit, a list of peer-reviewed mental health resources for educators, published papers by cohort members, inclusion conferences, alternative assessment databases, and more. Examining the Foundations for a Healthy School document, upon which this cohort is based, reveals only three pages related to mental health out of thirty-seven. The document suggests accessing the Ministry’s Supporting Minds (2013) document for more intensive support around mental health strategies in the classroom. Yet in the five years since the publication of Supporting Minds, I have found that it is only familiar to teachers who make mental health a priority. My hospital school mentor was one of the consultants on Supporting Minds so I was fortunate to learn of it early on; I regularly direct teachers and students to it, and have been doing so for years, but still find that a good deal of adults in my workplace - administrators, guidance, resource workers, and teachers - remain unaware of it. 

This brings up another inherent tension in schools, being that of the new teacher and the established teacher. New teachers, coming from B.Ed programs with mental health-focused cohorts such as U of O’s Comprehensive School Health cohort, can graduate with pedagogy and a view of the profession that has mental health as its foundation, supported by government documents. These teachers ostensibly will approach mental health as their responsibility, equally as important as literacy and numeracy. Teachers who did not have this focus in their pre-service program could potentially be subdivided into two categories: those for whom mental health is not an issue connected to education; and those for whom it is. The former group could present as resistant to accepting their role in promoting positive mental health in the school community; the latter could be more active in promoting positive mental health, but may or may not have the resources, skills, or vocabulary to do so, depending on what resources and training they are able to access. This hypothetical latter group may also take a “scattershot” approach to integrated mental health, since they will have gleaned their philosophy from a variety of other sources as opposed to having it delivered in a standardized format through a post-secondary cohort. This approach could potentially make creating a school-wide shared vocabulary around mental health a more complicated task, since the concept of “mental health” can mean myriad things to different people. However, having a variety of mentalities and approaches could also be beneficial as it provides flexibility, diversity, and adaptability to approach a panoply of potential mental health scenarios.

                                    

Ego Formation and Teacher Identity

Examining the mental health connections in pre-service programs led me to consider teacher ego formation and how it relates to my subject. Many times I have been told that once a teacher is placed within a staff environment, it takes an average of three years for them to acclimatize that that environment and cast off whatever their previous concepts of education were. Thus, to create a climate where staff acknowledge and work through their role in student mental health, it is vital that the majority of that staff have enough similarities in their self-concepts as educators that they can bridge the gap between other differences that may impede progress in this area. Clarke, et al. (2018), draw on Lacan to discuss the formation of teacher identity as a dialectic between the ideal ego, or hypothetical perfect self, and the ego ideal, or practical required self (p. 116). This “lack of fit” between the two Lacanian concepts results in cognitive dissonance, which is exacerbated by “conflict arising from the space between the psyche and the social (...) becoming a teacher requires openness to knowledge of the self and to knowledge originating in the other.” (p. 116) It could be argued that for educators, students are often this “other” - a vast unknown, safely homogenized into broad stereotypes that fit our preconceived notions. The authors also connect this conflict between ego ideal and ideal ego to the use of an inside out model of ego formation as opposed to an outside in model. They postulate than an outside in model uses extrinsic factors to shape a teacher’s identity, namely: curricular documents; ministerial publications, “best practices” courses, and universal standards. The inside out model, conversely, begins with the identity of the teacher at the core and creates the teaching model built around that unique identity (p. 117). Rather than positioning one or the other of these modes of ego formation as ideal, Clarke, et al., reflect the Lacanian postmodern approach by positioning the genesis of teacher ego as an ongoing process that exists in flux between these two poles; here, the teacher-as-subject is eximate, or existing neither inside nor outside, but in both simultaneously (p. 119). 

The eximate model works well in helping me understand how teachers process new information and responsibilities, such as that of mental health advocacy. If mental health is not personally important to you - if it is not part of your inside out model - and it is not theoretically or professionally relevant to you - if it is also not part of your outside in model - then you could struggle to integrate it into both your ego ideal and ideal ego. The relatively recent emphasis on mental health in education could clash with what many educators have “learned”, “known”, and “felt” their entire careers. This new emphasis could cause these teachers to question both their ego ideal and ideal ego as teachers, particularly if mental health in schools fits into neither the inside out or outside in models of ego formation. Thus, one potential solution for them to avoid this cognitive dissonance is to avoid the concept of mental health in education all together. This allows them to still feel like competent, caring teachers, in the same way that they have expressed this for years prior to the emphasis on mental health in education, and prevents them from feeling as though they are unprofessional. Once the mentality of avoidance has taken hold writ large amongst a staff, any new staff coming in will struggle to implement their own ideation around mental health, since they too will experience this same eximatic conflict and potentially choose to go with the path of least resistance to maintain their ego ideal and ideal ego. If the phrases “I am a good teacher” and “I am a teacher who cares about mental health” do not overlap for an educator, then it is easiest to eliminate the latter in favour of maintaining one’s self-perception of the former. Perhaps this is why, in part, some teachers find it difficult to integrate concepts of mental health into their pedagogy - particularly if they cannot recognize that they themselves can be the source of poor mental health in their students. 

REFERENCE LIST

Andrews, J. and Feurer, D. (2009). School-Related Stress and Depression in Adolescents With and Without Learning Disabilities: An Exploratory Study. Alberta Journal of Educational Research, v. 55, n. 1, pp. 92-108.

Clarke, M., Michell, M., and Neville, J. (2017). Dialectics of development: teacher identity formation in the interplay of ideal ego and ego ideal. Teaching Education, v. 28, n. 2, pp. 115-130.

Dimmock, M., Grieves, S. and Place, M. (2008). Young people who cut themselves - a growing challenge for educational settings. British Journal of Special Education, v. 5, n. 1, pp. 42 - 28.

Ontario Ministry of Education. (2014) Foundations for a healthy school. Ottawa, ON: Queen’s Printer for Ontario.

Pope, D. (2010). Beyond “Doing School”: From “Stressed-Out” to “Engaged in Learning”. Canadian Education Association, v. 50, n. 1, pp. 4-8

Trudgen, M. and Lawn, S. (2011) What is the Threshold of Teachers’ Recognition and Report of Concerns About Anxiety and Depression in Students?: An Exploratory Study With Teachers of Adolescents in Regional Australia. Australian Journal of Guidance and Counselling, v. 21, n. 2, pp. 126 - 141.

University of Ottawa, Bachelor of Education Program. Comprehensive School Health. Retrieved from http://uottawa-comprehensive-school-health.ca/. Accessed Monday, April 23rd, 2017.

This Land Is Our Land:
Using Treaty Education To Reconceptualize Provincial and Municipal Curricular Language

Conceptual Framework

This re-envisioning of the Ontario Grade 10 Civics curriculum, and the Toronto Municipal Elections Grade 10 Civics Supplementary Activities, is primarily centered around critical education. The disenfranchisement of the Indigenous perspective in curriculum documents ties directly to the critique of individual freedom and its inability to contribute towards equality. The critical lens questions the concept of political equality when pervasive economic redistribution and widespread cultural recognition are not enshrined within institutions or public life. Without equal distribution of power, equal opportunity cannot be achieved (Sant, 2019). Thus, is the purview of the critical educator to identify, critique, and speak back to those cultural and institutional apparatuses that implicitly or explicitly silence marginalized communities.

Within this context of critical education, this reframing uses the lens of treaty education to integrate the perspective of FNMI peoples into the Ontario Grade 10 Civics curriculum in a meaningful way. Tupper (2012) establishes treaty education as a framework that “requires all students to consider how their own lives and privileges are connected to and may be traced through, treaties and the treaty relationship”. Further, she identifies the structural and symbolic forms of violence inherent in the colonial discourses from which the curriculum is based. Structural violence “exists when unequal power is built into social structures, resulting in differential harm to some people’s life chances”; symbolic violence is the result of “the harmful consequences of social hierarchies, which require that some groups be marginalized while others maintain dominance” (Tupper, 2014). Structural violence against FNMI peoples is built in to the Civics curriculum, as there is no visible evidence of FNMI consultation, input, or writing of the document, thereby denying FNMI peoples the ability to construct their own narrative in education. Symbolic violence is evident when examining how FNMI peoples are addressed in the curriculum. The reader is warned that FNMI students may have had limited opportunities for formal schooling, therefore requiring special accommodations (Ontario Ministry of Education, 44), and that their parents may need special encouragement to feel more comfortable in schools (Ontario Ministry of Education, 48). Using treaty education to re-examine education policy will work towards students and teachers “engaging with the traumatic content that constitutes historical and contemporary relationships with First Nations people”, by “doing the difficult and uncomfortable work of coming to understand the significance of being a treaty person” (Tupper, 2014).

Treaty education will be used to compare and contrast FNMI protests about land use with municipal protests against unwanted facilities in local neighbourhoods, known as NIMBYism, or “not in my backyard”-ism. Wolsink (2006) defines NIMBYism as “an attitude ascribed to persons who object to the siting of something they regard as detrimental or hazardous in their own neighbourhood, while by implication raising no such objections to similar developments elsewhere.” Referring specifically to large projects that have deleterious environmental effects – also known as locally unwanted land use, or LULUs – the authors note that NIMBYism results in “peripheralization […] in which pollution-intensive activities might end up in areas populated by social groups that lack the economic and political resources to resist such activities” (Wolsink, 2006). NIMBY activities can take the form of participatory politics, defined by Khane, et al. (2016) as people trying to exert influence on issues of public concern by working outside the system of institutional politics and traditional gatekeepers. People who engage in participatory politics are those who are frustrated with what they perceive to be the inefficiency and lack of results from the electoral process, and prefer to engage in “lifestyle politics” such as protesting, blogging, reposting politicized social media content, and more. An example of this is No Jets T.O., an organization devoted to preventing the expansion of the runway at Toronto’s Billy Bishop airport through petitions, social media posts, media campaigns, and public awareness events. 

Context

As my area of collaborative specialization at OISE is in Educational Policy, this critical reimagining will address two policy documents - the Ontario Grade 10 Civics curriculum, and the Toronto Municipal Elections Grade 10 Civics Supplementary Activities document, specifically Activity 4: Controversial Issues – Not In My Backyard. With regards to the curriculum document, the focus will be on the following expectations:

By the end of this course, students will…

• B1.1 - Describe some civic issues of local, national, and/or global significance

• B1.2 – Describe fundamental beliefs and values associated with democratic citizenship in Canada

• B1.4 – Communicate their own position on some issues of civic importance at the local, national, and/or global level

• B2.4 – Explain, with reference to issues of civic importance, how various groups and institutions can influence government

• B3.3 – Explain how the judicial system and other institutions and/or organizations help protect the rights of individuals and the public good in Canada

• C1.2 – Describe a variety of ways in which they could make civic contribution at the local, national, and/or global level

• C2.1 – Analyze ways in which various beliefs, values, and perspectives are represented in their communities 

I remain keenly aware that, as a heterosexual white male settler, it is not my voice that needs to take precedence in this examination. Any actualized changes to policy must be made for, with, and by FNMI peoples. My goal is to begin a conversation that can lead towards Tupper’s concept of “curriculum as intervention”, as made evident in the “foundational entrenchment of First Nations and Metis ways of knowing, content and perspectives” found in the educational policy of Saskatchewan since 2008 (Tupper, 2014).

Learning Goals and Approach

The goal is to critically examine and reimagine the language used in curriculum expectations, and supplementary activities, through the lens of treaty education, and suggest alternatives that move toward “curriculum as intervention”.  McAvoy and Hess (2013), in their work on deliberative discussions, suggest that harmony between disparate groups is achieved when working with authentic and powerful issues, of which controversial land use is certainly one. They further suggest that groups should engage in conversations about ideological diversity; thus, the reframed curriculum expectations should include prompts to engage in the “difficult knowledge” of teachers and students recognizing their settlerhood where applicable. Sabzalian’s (2019) framework for anticolonial civic education will also be of use here. Ontario schools have begun to address the issue of place with the land acknowledgements read during morning announcements; presence and perspectives can be addressed with field trips, guest speakers, and the like. Reframing curriculum expectations, and supplementary materials, will move towards integrating political nationhood, by teaching about treaties; power, by explicitly challenging structures of colonialism within the curriculum; and, ideally, partnerships by having FNMI peoples actively involved in rewriting Civics curricula.

Reimagining - Toronto Municipal Elections Grade 10 Civics Supplementary Activities

In this supplementary package, developed by the Toronto District School Board, OISE, and the City of Toronto, Activity #4 is titled Controversial City Issues: “Not In My Backyard!” (NIMBY). The official literature here defines NIMBYism as “controversial situations where local citizens are opposed to government proposals to place new developments or services in their communities.” Further, it establishes a pro-government narrative by describing LULUs as means to help government operate more efficiently, provide needed services, create more jobs and a larger tax base, and to “run smoothly” (Livsey and Paglia, 2010). By positioning themselves as fundamentally beneficial to citizens, the government conversely frames any anti-government activity as anti-citizen; this showcases the technocratic position that NIMBY activity “reflect[s] irrational and narrow-minded, stubbornly hostile attitudes towards national progress and modernization” (Wolsink, 2006). While the municipal government and the NIMBYs may argue over whether or not the “backyard” should be developed, however, a treaty education framework must call attention to whose “backyard” it is. Tupper (2014) suggests that the underlying “myth of the empty wilderness”, upon which settler Canada is conceptualized, “is produced by agents of the state as a means of commemoration the arrival of early explorers […] Such discovery narratives underlie presumed property rights in settler colonial societies.” Any teacher or student using this package to supplement their Civics education must be aware that the conversation around land use is not a NIMBY-government diode; that the relationships they are being asked to learn about and critique have been brought about because of the “myth of the empty wilderness”, and that FNMI treaty rights must also be considered.

The pedagogical approach in this section of the supplementary activity is a placemat activity. It begins with the framing question -“How do I feel about the City of Toronto’s proposal to develop a new __________ in my neighbourhood?” - then provides a list of eight LULUs: casino and hotel development; incinerator; group home for youth with addictions; rail transit extension; landfill site; homeless shelter; new jail; and bicycle lanes. Each LULU is given four roles with ostensibly different viewpoints. Generally, they include some variation on the following: “local citizen”; “local business”; “person or group employed by, or requiring the services of, this LULU”; and “advocate connected to this LULU” (Livsey and Paglia, 2010). It is immediately evident that none of the placemat activities have even a cursory FNMI presence, nor do they acknowledge that the land being developed is subject to a treaty. One example is that of the homeless shelter. In the middle of the placemat, the reader finds a description of the issue as follows: “The City of Toronto proposes to place a homeless shelter in your neighbourhood that will provide housing for 120 men.” The four corners represented in the placemat are: “Local Resident”; “Social Worker”; “Local Business Owner”; and “Homeless Family”. While a teacher or student could extend any of these roles to have an FNMI component, the visible exclusion of explicit FNMI voices is problematic. Thus, a reimagining of the placemat activity is proposed. An additional fifth quadrant is added to the original four, changing the shape from a rectangle to a pentagon. This visually disrupts the “for/against” dialectic of the original placemat and suggests more conversational space than simply “right” or “wrong”. The tile previously titled Local Resident is reimagined as Settler Resident. This shift attempts a critical peacebuilding approach to agitate the foundations of presumed knowledge, hopefully creating chances to find connections in intersubjectivity (Tupper, 2014). The new fifth quadrant is titled Indigenous Community to have teachers and students meaningfully confront their own relationships with, and perspectives of, that community in the context of civic education. Finally, the explanatory centre tile is reworded to included the phrasing of Toronto’s land acknowledgement, as well as statistics on the percentage of Ingenious peoples who make up the homeless population in Canada. In this way, students no longer view the land as my community but as hereditary land of local FNMI peoples, that is occupied by their settler selves. The concept of NIMBYism is thus challenged as students and educators rethink the entire concept of the “backyard”. This reworking could be applied to any of the eight placemat activities in this resource, as none of them explicitly incorporate FNMI perspectives.

Reimagining – Ontario Grade 10 Civics Curriculum Expectations

A cursory search of the Ontario Grade 10 Civics Curriculum for key words and terms such as First Nations, Metis, Inuit, Indigenous, FNMI, or treaty provide scant representation. The phrase First Nations, Metis, and Inuit is used once in specific expectation C2.1: “analyse ways in which various beliefs, values, and perspectives are represented in their communities”; in the teacher prompts, it is suggested as an example alongside LGBTQ+ politics, environmentalism, disability rights, and other standards of identity politics. The word Indigenous is used only twice – once in the glossary reference to “indigenous species” of plants or animals. (ONTARIO) Suffice it to say that as it is currently written, the Ontario Civics curriculum does not adequately represent FNMI peoples or treaty rights.

In order for treaty education to be made visible in the curriculum, and for it then to be transmitted to schools, teachers, and students, it must be concretized in language. As such, a reconceptualizing of the language in the specific curriculum expectations is required. Below are some suggestions for how to proceed with selected expectations:

Current Curriculum Language By the end of this course, students will…	Revised Curriculum Language By the end of this course, students will…
B1.1 – Describe some civic issues of local, national, and/or global significance	B.1. - Describe some civic issues of local, national, and/or global significance, including treaty obligations in Ontario
B1.2 – Describe fundamental beliefs and values associated with democratic citizenship in Canada	B1.2 - Describe fundamental beliefs and values associated with democratic citizenship in Canada, including how the Canadian government and First Nations meet their respective treaty obligations
B1.4 – Communicate their own position on some issues of civic importance at the local, national, and/or global level	B.14 – Communicate their own position on self-governance and its relation to treaty obligations
B2.4 – Explain, with reference to issues of civic importance, how various groups and institutions can influence government	B2.4 – Explain the role of the Indian Act of 1876, the Ministry of Indigenous Affairs, and one or more local tribal bands in advocating government
B3.3 – Explain how the judicial system and other institutions and/or organizations help protect the rights of individuals and the public good in Canada	B3.3 – Explain how the judicial system protects the rights of individuals and the public good, and what structures have been developed for treaty implementation
C1.2 – Describe a variety of ways in which they could make civic contribution at the local, national, and/or global level	C1.2 – Understand their position as settlers or settled peoples in the local history of colonization and decolonization, and how that impacts their civic contributions
C2.1 – Analyze ways in which various beliefs, values, and perspectives are represented in their communities	C2.1 – Analyze ways in which treaty making recognizes the rights and responsibilities of all peoples

 

This new language embeds treaty education into curriculum expectations as opposed to being its own subsection, or an optional activity, thereby reinforcing the idea that Ontario teachers and students are also treaty peoples. By doing so, the curriculum-as-intervention contributes to democratic peacebuilding by “challenging epistemologies of ignorance that deny Aboriginal peoples’ daily experience of colonial oppression” (Tupper, 2014). This, coupled with the challenge to reconceptualize the “backyard” of NIMBYism through the lens of treaty education, reframes official language and, in its own way, works towards acknowledging and making recompense for the structural and symbolic violence perpetuated by the education system against FNMI peoples.

Conclusion – Future Research and its Consequences

Any forecasting on what could or should be done with curriculum revisions in Ontario to include treaty education must, first and foremost, be driven by FNMI communities rather than settlers. In order to frame any next steps for a project such as this, it is helpful to gauge the current climate of civics education in Ontario schools. Llewellyn, et al. (2010) note that “young Canadians are less knowledgeable about politics than any other age group in the country” and that “many young people that they possess neither sufficient knowledge of the political process, nor sufficient political information to be comfortable about voting”. It appears that Ontario educators and students are grappling with a deficit in basic civic competencies. One reason for this may be student disengagement from a curriculum that “only occasionally […] interrogates[s] courses of action that confront complex relationships of power that are fundamental to the democratic process” (Llewellyn et al., 2010). Confronting relationships of power is a ethically fraught task for any educator; many take the less pugilistic route of a pseudo-journalistic approach, covering “both sides” of controversial issues, such as NIMBYism and treaty education, with equal weight and without working through their own biases. Particularly with the Ontario Civics curriculum, engagement with controversial issues is disincentivized in the literature, which instead focuses on objective truths and “accepted” Canadian values. (Llewellyn et al., 2010).

To bridge this divide between the curriculum and the student, policy makers need to grapple with “difficult knowledge” that reconceptualizes commonly-held understandings of Canadian history (Tupper, 2012). One potential course of action is to rewrite all Civics, History, and Social Science curriculum expectations at the secondary level to include, where applicable, elements of treaty education and justice-oriented citizenship. To see if this results in increased student engagement, a longitudinal study would have to be undertaken over a period of several years; student and teacher input over time would be used to make relevant changes to curriculum expectations where needed. To support educators in delivering this curriculum, it would be beneficial to have a database of resources and lessons developed by FNMI stakeholders that teachers could draw from, to both challenge their own place in the settler-settled narrative, and to guide students in doing so as well.

Two challenges come to mind when formulating a long-term implementation of this proposal. First is that of formalizing instruction; whether or not students will be more likely to engage with the material if they pursue it in an independent inquiry model, or if it is part of the prescribed learning goals of a course. It may be difficult for students who do not regularly engage with FNMI peoples to see the relevance of treaty education, NIMBYism, land use, or other subjects that are not immediately evident in their world. Thus, it becomes the challenge of the educator to make evident these connections. Another is the cognitive dissonance of a settler government attempting to teach FNMI treaty rights to First Nations, Metis, or Inuit students, who may have already been traumatized, recently or historically, by their experiences with the colonizing state. Involving FNMI peoples as critical partners in developing treaty education curriculum, and supplementary curriculum documents, will be invaluable in ensuring that policy makers can “reframe citizenship education by developing mandates, teaching strategies, and curriculum materials that go beyond procedural knowledge to the heart of political debate” (Llewellyn et al., 2010).

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