In the past few posts where I’ve explored my sense of what should be part of each school day I’ve looked at the value of hands-on, hearts-on learning, and of being outdoors, physical and creative. This time I want to look a little bit more at the content of the learning, or rather a lens through which to look at much of the content of learning.

It always seems such a shame, when I chat with so many other teachers, to hear how little they valued their teacher’s education program. I can say without a shred of doubt that the program I attended was very different from the norm. For one, I think I went to the university campus once to buy some textbooks. But just once. Other than that, my classes were held in the community centre of Toronto’s Regent Park neighbourhood.

The uniform brick buildings of Regent Park, lying under the highrises of Toronto’s business district.

If you ask any Torontonian about Regent Park you’ll likely hear about it’s bad reputation. It’s poor. It’s home to a disproportionate amount of violence, drugs and gangs. It’s home to a thick mix of recently arrived Canadians from all corners of the world, trying to find their feet in new surroundings and families who’ve been in Canada for a long time, often in circumstances of cyclical poverty. It’s also home to an impressive number of individuals, community leaders, social justice organizations, community environmental groups, education innovators and others trying to build capacity in the neighbourhood and to recognize the notable assets that already exist.

Wandering the Regent Park streets with a group of students, surveying the neighbourhood for its assets to build an asset-map of the community.

The notion of the education program I attended, was that education is also something at its best when it’s aware of and sensitive to the particularities of the community it serves. Community-based education. The basic idea is that to best teach students you need to know about their world.

So, our annual cohort of 40ish aspiring educators studied in the community centre. We did our practicum teaching in neighbourhood schools. We volunteered for local organizations. We spent so much time in the community, at all hours of day and every day of the week, that we began to understand our students in a more holistic way. We saw them after school. We saw them with their families. We saw them buying a week’s groceries and carting it all home on their bikes, and we chatted with them when we noticed them hanging out around the centre, well after dark.

A grade five student participates in my after school digital photography club, run in partnership with a local youth media centre.

When we were planning lessons for our practicum teaching there was a box in our planner that doesn’t exist on most. It was titled something like the “Social Justice element”. For some, it was doubtless the most difficult box to complete. What it demanded was that the teacher consider, when planning a unit of work, what possibilities there were in the learning for insights, actions and empowerment along lines of equity, environment and the social challenges of the community. Our professors modeled this extensively and across the curriculum. We explored using particular kinds of data sets in math, considered reading materials for literacy, varied perspectives for social studies and more.

An asset-map of their community, created with first and second grade students.

Certainly, the focuses we chose were those relevant to that community, and transferring this lens to a wealthy international school setting requires a similarly holistic understanding of the very different communities and circumstances of our students here. But I would offer that a focus on the social justice element is no less relevant.

A push towards integrated service learning is a clear starting point. And there can be no more effective way to promote environmental consciousness than by making time for exploration and relationship-building with the natural environment. The PYP proposes Action as a key element and though this can take a wide range of forms, ethically-driven social justice actions are surely a major category. Through the books we keep on our shelves, to the ways we celebrate (or don’t celebrate) holidays and festivals and certainly to the extent that we encourage self-awareness of privilege and societal influence we can make a wide variety of tweaks to our effort to encourage these practices.

If we hope for our students to view the world through a lens which identifies injustices and seeks for greater equity, it is incumbent on us to position the content of our lessons in the same way.

The makeover of Regent Park begins.

Note: The Regent Park that I describe above is no longer quite the same. A major urban redevelopment program has been ushered in over the past 5 or so years and while the supported housing numbers were meant to remain constant, the urban density was doubled to include an equal number of market-price homes. This is intended to add more class-diversity to the neighbourhood. For more on this project, click here.

All photos in this post are my own.