Montreal Teachers 4 Change.org

Casting educators as saviors undermines the teaching profession—and our students.

By Allison Ricket | Published Dec 23, 2013 by Teaching Tolerance

Political sound bytes about classroom incompetence and the crisis in education frighten me far less than the rhetoric of those looking to defend teachers by calling us “heroes.” The myth of the teacher as hero is a damaging one—and one we need to examine closely in these turbulent political and economic times. Deconstructing this myth reveals negative implications for students and for colleagues at a time when teachers need support—not labels that undermine our profession. 

As an educator for social justice, I want my students in the hero role, not myself.

First of all, to call teachers “heroes” implies that they must be “saving” someone. It follows that, in this metaphor, students play the role of the anonymous civilians in peril. To conceptualize students—even nominally—as people in need of saving strips them of their agency and goes against the very meaning of the word education. The Latin root of this word—educere—means “to lead forth.” In light of this etymology, the heroes live inside our students, who need orchestrated stimuli, love and attention to lead them toward their potential. 

Second, the myth of the teacher as hero places inherent judgment on any cultural, socioeconomic or familial status that might alter a student’s learning or educational needs. According to the hero narrative, students need to be saved from something. So what is it we’re saving students from, and who decides? No one would dispute that learning disabilities or family poverty can pose significant obstacles to learning and that students who grow and learn despite these difficulties have developed great coping mechanisms. But I think it’s egotistical to pin this “triumph” on a single teacher rather than on students’ own efforts and inherent capabilities. It also demeans students’ identities to cast the realities of their lives as circumstances from which they must be saved.

Read more: http://www.tolerance.org/blog/myth-hero-teacher

By Susan FitzGerald | Published July 22, 2013 by The Philadelphia Inquirer

Excerpt:

The team has kept tabs on 110 of the 224 children originally in the study. Of the 110, two are dead – one shot in a bar and another in a drive-by shooting – three are in prison, six graduated from college, and six more are on track to graduate. There have been 60 children born to the 110 participants.

The years of tracking kids have led Hurt to a conclusion she didn’t see coming.

“Poverty is a more powerful influence on the outcome of inner-city children than gestational exposure to cocaine,” Hurt said at her May lecture.

Read more: http://articles.philly.com/2013-07-22/news/40709969_1_hallam-hurt-so-called-crack-babies-funded-study

Published Apr 10, 2013 by The CBC

A new report from UNICEF suggests the well-being of children living in Canada is lower than those growing up in many other wealthy countries.

Canada ranked 17th of 29 countries in an overall ranking compiled by the child-focused international humanitarian organization.

The report shows Canada’s standing hasn’t improved since a prior report in 2007. The first report was based on data from 2001-03, while the current one contains data from 2009-10.

“As a Canadian, I’m ashamed,” says David Morley, president of UNICEF Canada. He says Canada is “stuck in the middle of the pack against other wealthy countries, and that’s just not good enough.”

The overall ranking was based on five broad categories:

• Material well-being.
• Health and safety.
• Education.
• Behaviours and risk.
• Housing and environment.

Each broad category includes data on detailed subcategories that measure specific areas.

Read more: http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/story/2013/04/09/unicef-children-well-being-report.html

By IVAN SEMENIUK | Published  Jan. 25 2013 by the Globe & Mail

At first impression, the two groups of children were hard to tell apart: just regular kindergarten kids from different neighbourhoods in Kamloops, B.C. Yet, when they visited a mobile lab as part of population study he collaborated on, Clyde Hertzman remembers how their young brains revealed a striking contrast.

Both groups were asked to focus their attention on a series of sounds while researchers monitored their neural activity. Not only did one group tend to have a harder time with the task, Dr. Hertzman recalls, it “ had a systematically different pattern of brain responses to the test.”

How could children drawn from a city of just 85,000 people end up with wiring that was essentially different? They had grown up with any number of genetic and environmental influences affecting their brain development and behaviour, but one variable stood out: affluence. Those who did not perform as well tended to be from the poorer of the two neighbourhoods. Somehow their socio-economic status was showing up in the architecture of their thoughts.

The result was a particularly vivid example of something scientists who specialize in early childhood development have seen again and again. Kids from communities that are underresourced and subject to economic stress think differently than their wealthier counterparts in ways that can ultimately affect behaviour.

Five years later, Dr. Hertzman – who teaches at the University of British Columbia’s School of Population and Public Health and was Canada’s health researcher of the year in 2010 – is part of a rapid evolution of the field that has grown from merely recording the demographics of cognitive disparities to building a bottom-up understanding of the molecular changes that cause them.

The change has gathered momentum in recent months, fuelled by a bounty of new findings that bolster the long-observed link between social environment and development with a newly emerging biological perspective.

It also underscores the stunning human cost of what is called the “socio-economic gradient.” Only 3 to 4 per cent of Canadian children are born with inherited differences that will limit their physical, emotional or intellectual growth, yet an average of 25 to 30 per cent exhibit some level of developmental vulnerability that could include a cognitive “deficit.”

Read more: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/technology/science/brain/how-poverty-influences-a-childs-brain-development/article7882957/?page=all