What if we are the villains?

 This is an unusual reflection on the Labour Day weekend, just before we return to another year of unusual teaching. Some may say it's an insensitive post, considering how hard many educators have been working this week and next to prepare for their students in this uncertain time. However, one of the criteria for including something in my Monday Molly Musings is if it is a topic that keeps "tickling my brain". 

I belong to a Cross Fit gym that has a lot of educators in the membership. One day, as we were working out, the topic of residential schools came up and someone said that they wished they weren't called schools because it gives schools a bad name. I disagreed. I was too busy gasping for breath as I exercised to provide an eloquent explanation, but I thought I should articulate it somewhere, at some time.

Schools are established institutions, where parents are often required to send their children and "rules rule" in schools. For the longest time, corporal punishment was allowed because of the "in loco parentis" concept. Schools also used (and still use) the suggestion that teachers, due to their training and experience, sometimes "know better" than the parents. You can see this still reflected in comments directed to educators like "remember you may be the best part of a child's day", insinuating that home life is terrible and that school is a sanctuary (and the teachers, the saviors). Parents send their children to schools, trusting them to do their best to help the children learn and develop. In residential schools, there wasn't even the pretense of trust - families were forced to hand over their children. 

Schools have power. Our current schools aren't murdering children and burying them on the property, like the residential schools did to First Nations, Metis, and Inuit children, but sometimes educators do things to students that hurt them. This was my biggest fear when entering teachers' college - that I would discover that, either through ignorance or due to some other reason, I had harmed a student in my class. I wish I could find the tweet I saw that said something like "we see ourselves as the heroes in a story, but what if we are the villains?" However, I did find this tweet I saved.

This 🎯
Sometimes we [teachers] make bad choices, perpetuate harmful practices or miss the mark.
Being called out/in is a gift. https://t.co/U4ShsmgL6q

— Kristen Bynoe (she/her) (@KristenBynoe) August 11, 2021

This idea of bad choices or harmful practices could be large-scale or small-scale. A few days ago, Matthew Morris tweeted this interaction:

Not even an hour at school and was already asked if I was the caretaker. His excuse: “I saw you walking around and thought you were out of uniform.”

Really?!? Is this what we’re STILL doing?!?

— Matthew R. Morris (@callmemrmorris) September 2, 2021

People mostly responded with messages of dismay and support - but have we ever done something similar and just not realized the harm? What if we weren't called in or out and merrily continued on with our day, not understanding how our words or actions impacted others? One of the biggest regrets of my career was when I was facilitating a Tribes training, and we used an energizer, called "Tribal Dances" to have people learn what their "tribes" were. (Yes, I know already by this description that there are several levels of "wrong" already present in this recount.) The facilitators set up the groups, based on several factors we were told to use. My racial bias was revealed with the song choices I made for each group as well as the groups my co-facilitator and I formed. A couple of participants pointed this out to the facilitators privately at the end of that session. We, the facilitators, were ashamed and embarrassed. We wanted to mention the error we made to the whole group but the individuals that pointed it out asked us not to, because they didn't want to draw further attention to this injustice perpetrated against them even more. We respected their wishes, but I wish there was another option, because it might have been a learning moment for more than just the facilitators. This happened over twenty years ago, but I still feel ashamed by my actions and I want to know better and do better.

It's that whole intent vs impact thing, isn't it? It doesn't matter if an educator's intention is good, if the impact is negative, then things need to change. As we begin a new school year, may we see ourselves and our practices more clearly so we don't accidentally become a villain in a student's (or fellow teacher's) story. 

ETA - I forgot to include this link from the Globe and Mail about Black students showing greater gains in reading during the pandemic, and that a potential explanation being less exposure to racism. https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-tdsb-data-show-rapid-reading-improvement-in-black-elementary-students/