Educators have a superficial understanding of multiculturalism: expert Anna Kirova

2016/01/26 Leave a comment

I expect this varies depending on the community and school board. Toronto District School Board, for example, seems to have a good integration track record, and readers will undoubtedly have other examples, either good or less so:

Soon, thousands of Syrian refugees will call Canada home. Along with frigid winters, and a lack of knowledge in the English language, they will also face a cultural shift. So how do we make children refugees more comfortable in our classrooms?

“It’s an interesting question how we, after more than 40 years of multiculturalism, all of a sudden now begin to talk about these issues,” said Kirova, whose research has focused on developing an inter-cultural early learning  program for immigrant and refugee children, including understanding how newcomer children experience loneliness and isolation in school. “It’s overdue.”

“We have, what we call in our field in education, a very superficial understanding of multiculturalism,” Kirova said, as she commented on the multiculturalism policies that are currently in place in Canadian classrooms.

Kirova’s research has been highly critical of the interpretation of multicultural policies in classrooms, and that the idea that multiculturalism is about much more than having a couple of books in a variety of languages, a doll of a different race, or hosting days focused on the food and entertainment of a culture, it’s about making children feel more comfortable, and tapping into the vast knowledge from their past.

“We’ve been very good in identifying what they can not do. What we haven’t really been good about is to identify what they can do.”

Kirova suggests focusing on their resourcefulness, strength and resiliency, as opposed to their lack of communication skills, knowledge of school routines and ability to pay attention in class.

“Many children have never held a pen or a pencil and this is one of the ways we assess children’s knowledge and skills,” Kirova said. “We need people from the communities to help us understand what is best for children when they come to the class.”

Source: Educators have a superficial understanding of multiculturalism: expert | Globalnews.ca

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Ontario lauded for high school history curriculum

2016/01/25 Leave a comment

While I expect the debate over the teaching of history, and which histories and interpretations, will continue, this improvement over the past five years is noteworthy.

I can only wonder, given Alberta’s poor score, whether it had some influence on the increased emphasis on history in Discover Canada (which was needed), the citizenship guide introduced by former minister Jason Kenney, and the requirement, for teenagers, to take the citizenship knowledge test (not needed):

Ontario stands at the top of the class for its strong Canadian history curriculum in the latest ratings by this country’s history education watchdog — and we trounced Alberta, whose fuzzy timelines and lack of compulsory high school history credit landed it dead last.

Ontario’s rich Grade 10 history credit course — so jam-packed the report suggests it be spread over two years — plus its mandatory half-course in citizenship helped earn it a mark of 82 per cent on the Canadian History Report Card, to be released Monday by Historica Canada, a group that promotes awareness of Canadian history.

Also strong were British Columbia (81 per cent), Quebec (80) and Manitoba (80). However Alberta scored just 62 per cent, and Saskatchewan 69 per cent, in a report that calls for schools to work harder to help students understand their country.

“We tend to be lacking at either the front end — recent history — or the back end before 1867, but we’re getting better, which is important because understanding history helps you understand why we are the way we are,” said Historica president Anthony Wilson-Smith.

If anything, Ontario’s Grade 10 history course tries to cover too much, he said; “from the early 1900s to now — both world wars, the great influenza epidemic, the injustices done to immigrants like the Chinese who didn’t get the vote till 1947… let’s think of that scope! It would be better spread over two years.”

Canadian schools have pulled up their educational socks since 2009, when Historica’s last report card handed out failing grades to five provinces and territories, with two more squeaking by with only 50s.

This report card looked at history curriculum from Grades 4 to 12 to see how well it balances the teaching of timelines with deeper themes like diversity, gender, aboriginal peoples and national identity — and from a range of perspectives, from global to local, social to national.

It also measures how well each province teaches students to think about history using the six “historical thinking concepts” that have to do with historical significance, considering evidence, examining continuity and change, cause and consequence, looking at broader historical perspectives and the ethical dimension.

Wilson-Smith said Canadian schools are moving beyond the perspective of European settlers to include First Nations, women and non-European immigrants’ perspectives, and consider more than just military and economic milestones by discussing ethics and social responsibility.

Historica also consulted classroom teachers, and some in Ontario expressed their frustration at having little time for a deep look at events such as the FLQ crisis, the Cold War, the Korean War, the Indian Act, residential schools, the Montreal Massacre, the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, OPEC crisis, the Oka crisis and the Meech Lake Accord, said Historica’s program manager, Bronwyn Graves.

Source: Ontario lauded for high school history curriculum | Toronto Star

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#OscarsSoWhite controversy prompts changes to film academy

2016/01/25 Leave a comment

Hopefully, someone who knows Hollywood and the Academy well will do a detailed analysis of the impact of these changes on the current composition of Academy members (currently 94 percent white, 76 percent male, and an average of 63 years old):

The changes come after an unanimous vote of the academy’s board of governors Thursday night, with the goal of making “the academy’s membership, its governing bodies, and its voting members significantly more diverse.”

The changes include:

  • Beginning later this year, each new member’s voting status will last 10 years, and will be renewed if that new member has been active in motion pictures during that decade.
  • In addition, members will receive lifetime voting rights after three 10-year terms; or if they have won or been nominated for an Academy Award.
  • The above will be applied retroactively to current members.
  • Those who do not qualify for active status will be moved to emeritus status. Emeritus members do not pay dues but enjoy all the privileges of membership, except voting.
  • Three new seats will immediately be added to the ruling board of governors, to be nominated by the president and confirmed by the board, for three-year terms.
  • New members will be immediately added to the academy executive and board committees deciding on matters of membership and governance.

The new changes will not affect voting for the Oscars in February.

The academy also plans to launch a global campaign to identify and recruit new, more diverse members.

The sweeping new measures were prompted by an uproar over the fact that, for a second consecutive year, only white actors were nominated for Oscars — which many have blamed on a larger problem of systemic racism in the Hollywood studio system.

Source: #OscarsSoWhite controversy prompts changes to film academy – Arts & Entertainment – CBC News

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Douglas Todd: Movie shines a ‘Spotlight’ on corruption

2016/01/25 Leave a comment

Douglas Todd’s reflections on why the Catholic Church’s pedophilia scandal and cover-up was challenged earlier and more effectively in Canada:

People have to be ready for the truth before it can be revealed.

That’s a theme of the riveting, award-winning movie, Spotlight, which recounts how the Boston Globe newspaper laid bare an ecclesiastical and political coverup of rampant pedophilia by more than 87 Roman Catholic priests and brothers.

After years of Boston Globe staff ignoring clergy abuse cases, the newspaper’s investigative team, called Spotlight, broke its explosive story in 2002. It led to the resignation of Cardinal Bernard Law and helped elevate clergy abuse into an international issue, which continues to reverberate.

The Canadian media, however, produced many stories about widespread sexual abuse by Catholic priests and brothers much earlier than the Boston Globe. The spate of Canadian articles began in 1989 with Newfoundland’s Mount Cashel Orphanage scandal, first reported by The Sunday Express under publisher Michael Harris.

That was 12 years before the Boston exposé. Nevertheless, the historical timeline of 20th-century Catholic abuse that is on the Spotlight film’s website contains no mention of the mass abuse of Mount Cashel orphans (which powerfully impacted two Metro Vancouver Catholic schools) or scores of other Canadian cases.

It appears most Canadians were ready, before most Americans, to admit to the horrible truth of Catholic clergy pedophilia. By the time the Boston exposé was published, the Canadian media had run thousands of articles about molesting clergy.

The Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops, under the direction of retired Vancouver archbishop Adam Exner, had also responded to the debacle as early as the mid-1990s — by creating a complaints process that supported abuse victims in going to police.

That kind of protocol was not in place in 2002 in the U.S., and especially in Boston, where Catholics dominated culture, politics, business, philanthropy, high society, the police and even the judiciary.

Almost every city has a powerful elite that operates behind the scenes to sway regional affairs. In Boston, it was the Catholic establishment, which did everything it could to keep a lid on decades of the clergy’s destructive behaviour.

At one point in Spotlight the Boston Globe’s publisher cautions his staff against running the clergy abuse investigation by warning that 53 per cent of the newspaper’s readers are Catholic.

Such pervasive resistance to the Catholic Church exposé leads one of Spotlight’s investigative reporters (played by Mark Ruffalo) to finally burst: “They control everything! Everything!”

Even though the Canadian census says 43 per cent of Canadians have an affiliation with the Catholic Church, Canadian courts, governments and journalists have been less hesitant than most Americans to wade assertively into church sex-abuse cases.

I wrote a story in 1993 that calculated the Canadian media had by then reported on more than 100 Canadian Catholic priests and brothers who had been charged or convicted of sex crimes.

It’s hard to know why Canadians were more ready to recognize the appalling truth.

It may have grown out of the way Canadians are, in some ways, less deferential than Americans to Catholic leaders, more questioning of authority in general, more frank about homosexuality and more willing to deal with the shame associated with sexual abuse.

Source: Douglas Todd: Movie shines a ‘Spotlight’ on corruption

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Men-only Ontario college campuses in Saudi Arabia unacceptable: Wynne

2016/01/25 Leave a comment

Not exactly news that Saudi Arabia has gender-segregated campuses, workplaces etc so why waking up now? While I have no sympathy with the Saudi regime, I think focusing only on Ontario colleges is shallow and parochial.

The dynamics at play were and are complex. Universal education in Saudi Arabia, if memory serves me correctly, dates from the 1970s, and the regime took some chances in ensuring that this applied to both boys and girls:

Premier Kathleen Wynne says it is unacceptable to her that two Ontario colleges are operating campuses in Saudi Arabia that don’t admit women students.

Niagara College and Ottawa-based Algonquin College have been operating men-only campuses for a couple of years in two cities in Saudi Arabia, where Sharia law forbids the education of women and men in the same classes.

Colleges and Universities Minister Reza Moridi, who had earlier said it was up to colleges to determine the student makeup on their campuses, said Thursday he was concerned that women were excluded from the Ontario-run campuses.

Wynne says she told Moridi to meet with the two colleges as soon as she found out about the situation, which she says has “got to change.”

Progressive Conservative critic John Yakabuski calls it a “stretch” for Wynne not to have known Ontario colleges are excluding women from their Saudi campuses, and says she’s only expressing concern because the media picked up the story.

Ontario provides $1.44 billion in funding to its 24 community colleges, with Algonquin getting $103 million for the current fiscal year, while Niagara College received $45 million.

Source: Men-only Ontario college campuses in Saudi Arabia unacceptable: Wynne

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Italy creating ‘Italian Islam’ by making new religion in line with ‘Christian tradition’

2016/01/25 Leave a comment

While the focus on integration is welcome, it appears to be one-way with the obligations only on Italian Muslims and not also on the ‘mainstream’ in facilitating integration, or a more inter-faith or multi-group approach:

Italy is setting up a council of “Italian Islam” that claims to be bringing the religion into compliance with the country’s “Christian and humanist tradition”.

The reason for the controversial creation was not made clear in a statement by interior minister Angelino Alfano, although he did say provinces “concerned with immigration” would be involved.

Announcing the move on Tuesday, he said the Council of Relations with Italian Islam would be an advisory body aiming at furthering integration.

“The Council will be responsible for providing opinions and making proposals on issues concerning the integration of people of Islamic culture and religion in Italy,” Mr Alfano said.

“Respect and co-operation between cultural and religious identities in Italy must constitute the basis for a dialogue that enriches democracy, promoting the aims of peace, social cohesion and unity, and that fosters a community of those who…intend to contribute to the peaceful development and prosperity of our country, in full compliance with our laws and our Christian and humanist tradition.”

The Interior Ministry said Islamic leaders, experts and professors would be working towards “the formation of an Italian Islam”.

Source: Italy creating ‘Italian Islam’ by making new religion in line with ‘Christian tradition’ | Europe | News | The Independent

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Facebook’s Sandberg: Counter Hate Speech With Positivity | Re/code

2016/01/23 Leave a comment

Not sure how realistic and effective a strategy this can be. While better always to be respectful in person and on-line, not sure the degree to which this can be effective with some of the more extreme language and views being expressed.

Presumably, given all the information Facebook collects, there must be some data, rather than anecdotes, on the effectiveness of this approach.

But it is telling that Facebook is not willing to make changes to its NewsFeed algorithm, effectively outsourcing the issue.

My way of handling the few comments on my blog that border on hate speech is either to ignore them or throw back a few questions to the writer, aimed to provoke reflection. Sometimes people engage, sometimes not:

How should you fight back against people spewing hate speech in your Facebook News Feed? Kill ’em with kindness, of course!

That’s according to Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, who spoke on a panel Wednesday at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Sandberg talked about how Facebook tries to combat hate speech on its platform, and part of the strategy is encouraging counter-speech, the usually uplifting messages that provide the opposite viewpoints to degrading or negative language online.

Sandberg told a specific story about users in Germany who “Liked” a neo-Nazi Facebook page and then flooded it with positive messages. She called the effort a “Like attack.”

“The best antidote to bad speech is good speech. The best antidote to hate is tolerance,” she said. “Amplifying … counter-speech to the speech that’s perpetrating hate is, we think, by far the best answer.”

The strategy feels pretty “Kumbaya,” but that’s how Facebook has approached the issue of hate speech on its service, specifically when it comes to religious extremism and terrorism. Facebook will take down hate speech when it is flagged by a user, but it doesn’t go looking for it. That means the company is leaning on its user base to create positive content to fight against extremist material.

It’s making some effort to prod users in the right direction. Facebook is partnering with the U.S. government to encourage college students to launch anti-terrorism campaigns, for example. It is also partnering with the German government to better locate and remove hateful content. In both cases, Facebook is making financial contributions to the cause.

But the company is not using what is perhaps its most valuable asset in this matter: Its News Feed algorithm. Facebook claims that it doesn’t elevate this counter-speech in News Feed; it is instead offering a neutral playing field and hoping that positive speech wins out.

Facebook’s role in all of this has been top of mind for U.S. government officials, especially since a mass shooting took place in San Bernardino, Calif., back in December. Sandberg was part of a meeting between top government officials and Silicon Valley bigwigs earlier this month to discuss this very issue. Sandberg hasn’t spoken publicly about those meetings, so Wednesday’s panel was the first we’ve heard from her on this issue.

If you want to watch the entire panel you can do so here. Sandberg’s comments on counter-speech start right around the 18:00 minute mark.

Source: Facebook’s Sandberg: Counter Hate Speech With Positivity | Re/code

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Wise counsel for first-time refugee sponsors: Goar

2016/01/23 Leave a comment

Carol Goar on the messages coming from a meeting on “Faith Groups and Syrian Refugees” hosted by the Intercultural Dialogue Institute, in partnership with the Canadian Association of Jews and Muslims:

Most of them [attendees] were first-time refugee sponsors. They looked to Mary Jo Leddy, who has been welcoming asylum-seekers at Romero House for 25 years, for guidance, tips and suggestions.

But she surprised them. Instead of providing an inventory of “dos” and “don’ts,” pre-arrival preparations and cultural pointers, she told them not to plan so hard; worry so much; or focus so intently on what lies down the road. “As you take the first step, the second step will become clearer.”

She urged them to celebrate the “remarkable moment we’re living through” and rejoice in the rare willingness of Canadians to make time in their harried lives to care for desperate strangers. “I’ve never experienced anything like this. We’re drowning in a sea of kindness at Romero House.”

She congratulated them on leading by example. “As members of faith communities you can encourage others to act even though they don’t think they’re ready. These refugees are summoning us to act together for the sake of others.”

And she told them not to be cowed by presumed experts. “For many refugees therapy is useless. What they need to heal is an opportunity to contribute, get involved in a parents’ group or play in a band. One day the universe will turn upside down and they’ll say: I could really like it here.”

Source: Wise counsel for first-time refugee sponsors: Goar | Toronto Star

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At Davos and beyond, let’s remind the world why it needs more Canada

2016/01/23 Leave a comment

Tawfik Hammoud, Boston Consulting Group and Michael Sabia, CEO of the Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec on the Canadian advantage of inclusiveness:

Canada remains an open society. Most leaders we meet view us as a gold standard in building a post-globalization society with a multiplicity of identities and a rejection of fear and “otherness.” Our capacity to foster co-existence is rare and increasingly important given both the migrations that are under way and the proximity of once-distant cultures.

We are also world leaders when it comes to opening our doors to qualified immigration candidates – and we do so without exaggerating security concerns. Canadian opinion polls show a majority in public support for the world’s highest immigration levels. No political party advocates cutting immigration. We should be proud that seven million of our 35 million citizens were born outside Canada, that the federal cabinet has as many women as men and that a few cabinet members arrived here not so long ago as virtual refugees.

None of this is to say that Canada is the promised land. There is work to do…

Source: At Davos and beyond, let’s remind the world why it needs more Canada – The Globe and Mail

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Europe’s New Normal – The New York Times

2016/01/23 Leave a comment

Sylvie Kauffmann, the editorial director and a former editor in chief of Le Monde, on the challenges in Europe:

Soul-searching is not the order of the day; liberal intellectuals have been incensed by recent remarks by Prime Minister Manuel Valls, who equals “explaining” jihadism with “wanting to find ways to excuse it.”

The Germans are equally torn. Since the ghastly New Year’s Eve in Cologne, the celebrated Wilkommenskultur toward refugees has given way to serious doubts about how to integrate mass male migration, and to serious accusations against the police and the media. The cultural gap between a liberal, wealthy, secular Europe and a patriarchal, conservative, Muslim society has widened to an ocean. How long will it take to bridge it? How do you ensure that hard-won women’s rights and freedom are not endangered? How do you teach cultural norms?

These are difficult questions — and they are being asked all over Europe. There are no easy answers, only a few predictions: Jihadism will not be defeated in 2016, and war and misery in the Middle East and Africa will send ever more people across the Mediterranean — around 2,000 still arrive in Europe by sea every day.

So we’d better work together, set up common policies to secure our borders, fight terrorism, relocate refugees, and promote daring ideas for integration that will avoid ghettoization. The only response has to be a joint one: working separately would be foolish. If a 28-member European Union can’t do it, then let’s set up smaller groups. There is no more time to waste.

Source: Europe’s New Normal – The New York Times

Filed under Integration, Multiculturalism, Refugees Tagged with ,

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