“I celebrate teaching that enables transgressions — a movement against and beyond boundaries.”

- bell hooks

On a cold February day, groups of teachers huddled into different sessions at the TDSB Beginning Teacher Equity Conference in downtown Toronto.

They were warming up with topics such as “Anti-bias education in early years” and “Questioning school dress codes” and “Culturally relevant teaching in early years.”

In one session, Sharla Falodi and Farah Rahemtula, both learning coaches at the Toronto District School Board, were speaking on “Microaggressions in Schools: Making the Invisible Visible.”

“The micro refers to the everyday regular mundane reactions, not its severity,” said Rahemtula. “The severity comes … in its cumulative effect. It can really impact the quality of life over time as it’s happening again and again and again and again.”

An example she cited is of a teacher who says, “Your name is too difficult. Can I say it this way instead?” Or asks the class, “What did you do with your mom and dad over the weekend?” (thereby not considering the nuances of sexuality and different family structures).

An introductory video on microaggressions within the context of K-12 education.

The first thing teachers are asked to do after bias-awareness training is to self-reflect. Learning about microaggressions and the difference between intention and impact helps in the mental investigation of those unthinking assumptions and biases. They also help teachers identify and unearth what is known as the hidden curriculum at their schools.

An explicit curriculum is the formal framework of content teachers are expected to impart. Then there is the hidden or invisible curriculum.

This curriculum operates through verbal and non-verbal microaggressions, such as a teacher’s tone or even gaze, or what cultural values are held as the norm — for instance, are prejudicial behaviours tolerated.

These unarticulated values are unofficial, unacknowledged and sometimes even unintended, but they influence student perceptions and affect their performances.

The teachers at the TDSB conference discussed how in some classes, students were allowed to fidget during land acknowledgments but were asked to stand to attention for the national anthem.

“It’s not written in policy,” says Falodi, “but by me valuing the (national) anthem over the land acknowledgement I’m communicating something.”

One teacher said in the session that she asks her students to stand during the acknowledgment. “I know that in some Indigenous communities, standing is a form of colonization as well, so we can sit or stand. But we talk about it.”

Falodi said that “bringing the subtleties to the explicit and challenging the dominant narrative is exactly what we need to do.”

The hidden curriculum can show up in cultural perspectives.

A York Region District School Board teacher who worked with English Language Learners said in an interview that new Canadians end up at the extremes of being either overidentified for special education support or underidentified.

For example, she said, a teacher might consider assessing a student without English-language skills for autism.

At other times, a teacher thinks such a student needs time to adjust because they are homesick, but there is a cognitive need that’s not being met.

“And it’s a very valid point, right?

“Just talking to the parents makes a huge difference,” said the teacher, who wanted anonymity for fear that any media mentions would obstruct her work.

“I’ve talked with the parents, and if the parents are telling me, yes, back home, my child also had difficulties in these areas … now there’s an indication that maybe there is a cognitive challenge.

She advocates for academic tests in the students’ first language.

Sometimes the hidden curriculum shows up in omissions.

“A specific example,” Falodi said in an interview before the conference, is the book The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas, “which is so provocative. Adolescent children absolutely love it.” The New York Times bestseller, which was made into a film, is about anti-Black racism, political activism, police brutality and white privilege.

It has caused tensions between librarians and principals, Falodi said, because school staff can act as gatekeepers of what adolescents should be exposed to based on their own belief systems.

“Vetoing a book on anti-Black racism to send a message that swearing is bad … is incomparable to the impact exposing students to the text can have on developing their critical consciousness, self-advocacy skills and political engagement,” Falodi said.

The York school board teacher said some schools might engage with The Hate U Give, which is an important book, but not Saints and Misfits by S.K. Ali, a story of an adolescent Muslim girl navigating her high school years and dealing with sexually inappropriate behaviour by an adult.

“They say ‘I don’t want to teach religion’ or say ‘But I didn’t know if that would be appropriate’ without having read the book.

“Or there is pushback from families on ‘Why is this content being shared with my child?’

“But the book doesn’t deal with religion. The character is Muslim. There’s real difficulty in understanding the difference between teaching religion and learning about it or being exposed to it.”

A school’s hidden curriculum is influenced by where its teachers’ knowledge on anti-oppression stands, ranging from those who do anti-racism work to those who are resistant to the idea of bias-awareness training.

Early in 2018, a Scarborough schoolteacher became upset after doing a workshop on white privilege, during which teachers are asked to stand in a circle and reflect on their identities. There, based on each identity being called out, the participants were asked to take a step forward or backward. In her case, being white meant take a step forward. Being female, a step back. Being university-educated, a step forward, able-bodied, forward, heterosexual, forward, cisgender, forward and so on.

“I’m not walking that circle, because what’s the point?” the teacher, who did not want to be named, told this reporter. “I can tell where this is going. It’s like the walk of shame. It’s like a perp walk.

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“And what are we doing with this knowledge of privilege? How do I apply it in class?”

Asked about those comments, Falodi said there are a few steps to applying the knowledge. “First, understand the concept, then self-reflect. Then actually learn how it plays out in society … So, like, how do you identify it when it’s happening in the moment?”

The next step is how to call it out “either as an ally or someone directly impacted by it. Then finally, it’s facilitating learning” with that knowledge.

Microaggressions have impacts that are anything but micro: loss of drive or motivation, sleep difficulties, isolation, academic performance, diminished confidence, anxiety disorders, hypervigilance, challenges with cognitive functioning.

For people that still don't think microaggresions are a problem: just imagine that instead of being a stupid comment, a microaggression is a mosquito bite.

During the Toronto session, one teacher said when he asks students how to say their names correctly, “some of them don’t even care to say ‘Say it this way,’ because they’re so washed out because teachers have forever called them this wrong name. But I’ve had to say ‘This is your name, what do you want me to call you?’ ”

Falodi told him: “Your awareness of the impact, of how students feel defeated because of this repeated encounter, but you asking the students, ‘No, really, tell me’ — (that’s) you interrupting that process” of microaggression.

About a year after she first railed against the white privilege workshop, the Scarborough teacher began reading up on anti-oppression. Then she read White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo.

DiAngelo defines white fragility as “a state in which even a minimum amount of racial stress becomes intolerable, triggering a range of defensive moves … (that) function to reinstate white racial equilibrium.”

“It is a difficult read,” the teacher said. She read a little, reflected, spoke to others about it, and came back to it. She also politely asked a teacher who made blatant anti-Black statements to reconsider what she said, and she saw other teachers nodding. “In the past I would have just rolled my eyes in my head. Now I feel I have to speak up.”

GOING BEYOND ‘SARIS AND SAMOSAS’

As part of Ontario’s Equity and Inclusive Education Strategy in 2009, teachers are asked to be “responsive to culture.”

That responsiveness and relevance, which is about using culture as a basis for learning, sometimes ends up tokenized, with what is derisively called a “saris and samosas” approach; a homogenized interpretation of culture that results in surface appreciation of clothes and cuisines from non-white cultures.

As a result, the province’s elementary teachers union released a resource guide called Respond + Rebuild to help teachers use culture as a vehicle for learning.

Teacher attitudes towards student cultures also constitute the school’s hidden curriculum. Cultural awareness, say the experts, is not the outcome of a one-day workshop but a continuous process.

“Are we giving them (teachers) the skills to understand culture and community as this dynamic force that’s constantly being negotiated, constantly being shifted and worked?” asked Carl James of York University, whose authorship of several studies has helped to quantify race-based discrimination in education in Ontario.

Because cultures are constantly evolving, a teaching approach that is culturally responsive is by definition not formulaic.

“What teachers also need is to be able to live with confusion and constantly working through that,” said James.

Teachers in Ontario don’t mirror their communities. One report by the Ontario Alliance of Black School Educators shows that while racialized people represented 26 per cent of the province’s population in 2011, they made up only 13 per cent of the province’s teachers.

One way to close that gap is to get teachers into the neighbourhoods they teach.

“Do teachers walk around and talk to the shopkeepers if the school is in a business area?” James asked. “Do they look at where the bus stop is? Do they pay attention to who uses a bus stop, who does not use the bus stop? Who walks at lunchtime?”

In his pointedly titled book For White Folks Who Teach in the Hood … And the Rest of Y’all Too, Christopher Emdin writes: “The place for teachers to start is in businesses (such as convenience stores, grocery stores) that are in close proximity to school and are patronized by students.” These are public spaces where a teacher’s presence would not be unusual or unwelcome.

The next step is to walk further afield and observe “not as if they (the students) are zoo animals, but as an opportunity to learn with, and from students,” he writes in the New York Times bestseller. “This includes places of worship, housing projects and other local gathering points.”

The third step is making the connections from the context the teacher gathers and the content, he writes. “When a teacher makes connections between context and content, innovative lessons that connect things like graffiti and mathematics or hip-hop music and science being to emerge.”

Education Without Oppression — the 2018-19 Atkinson series — examines the continuing marginalization of Black and Indigenous students in Canada. It analyzes the challenges and breakthroughs nationally and in the cities of Baltimore, Md.; Lucknow, India; and Napier, New Zealand.

Shree Paradkar , a columnist covering issues around race and gender, is the 2018-2019 recipient of the Atkinson Fellowship in Public Policy. She is based in Toronto. Follow her on Twitter: @ShreeParadkar

Education Without Oppression — the 2018-19 Atkinson series — examines the continuing marginalization of Black and Indigenous students in Canada. It analyzes the challenges and breakthroughs nationally and in the cities of Baltimore, Md.; Lucknow, India; and Napier, New Zealand.

The Atkinson Fellowship in Public Policy awards a seasoned Canadian journalist the opportunity to pursue a yearlong investigation into a current policy issue. The project is funded by the Atkinson Foundation, the Honderich family and the Toronto Star.