Leading From The Heart

by Tracy Rosen, teaching & consulting since 1996, blogging about it here since 2007. All views are my own and you should take them with a grain of salt, I do.

Category: News

Someone has to say it.

I became a teacher because I wanted to make sure as many children as possible could learn to read. And Elise Gravel’s books helped me in that mission. I relied on her books to support the learning in my French classroom. And whenever anyone asked me about what materials to use for French language learning in Quebec, I’d shout her name from the rooftops. But I can’t trust her stories anymore.

I wasn’t alone in trusting my child’s and my students’ learning to Elise Gravel’s storytelling. Parents and teachers around Quebec, and likely around the world, did the same. Children love her characters and the way she tells her stories. And that is what makes this blog post all the more important for me to write. Because the stories she is telling have changed.

I’ve been thinking about this post since sometime in October. I didn’t write it then because I was still reeling and in shock about some of the things people I admired were saying, and not saying, about the events of October 7 and everything that has been happening over the past 88 days since.

This post has been written in spurts, mostly dictated, over the past few weeks in an attempt to get the words out yet keep them straight as I do so. My brain is recovering from a concussion after a fall on December 7 (since when is 7 a lucky number? That has been forever changed.) My mind is filled with words that need to get out.

For the past 70 (now 88) days, I have heard people repeat information that has been designed specifically to turn others against Jews. You know we’ve seen this before. It’s nothing new but it’s new for us because it always existed in history. Kind of. I say kind of because in my lifetime I’ve been called a dirty Jew when someone didn’t like that I wasn’t playing with them when I was a child. I’ve been referred to as a Jew when it has to do with money. I’ve been in conversations where people use the term Jew as a, well, not as a compliment (I will always remember the look on my boss’ face when he realized what he said and that I was at the table.) But as I grew up, those kinds of things were somewhat rare. Not as bad as when my parents were growing up, and certainly not as bad as when their parents and all of our ancestors in a long line across millennia were.

But now it’s become the norm. It’s like it’s okay. It’s just okay to say things against Jews against Israelis against Zionism (in quotes) because we’re now being painted as the bad guys and it’s hilarious almost, if it weren’t so horribly sad and scary. Hilarious because we’ve seen this happen before and those who are doing it now, don’t realize that they aren’t doing anything new.

So. What’s going on with Elise Gravel? I used to love everything she did, everything she wrote. My son and I would read as many of her books as we could together. That’s how he learned how to read in French, through her books. But now I am seeing a new kind of storytelling that she is doing about an area of the world to which she has no connection (as far as I know,) to which she has no blood memory. She seems to be using this area of the world as a place around which to organize her thoughts, her very specific and hateful thoughts that are laced with antisemitic imagery. And before you start saying oh those Jews anytime you criticize them they start to cry antisemitism…

“2300 Dead children (and counting.) Do you feel safer now, Israel?” (Elise Gravel on Instagram, October 2023)

If she were only criticizing decisions of the Israeli government and not also invoking blood libel imagery then there would be no need to use the word antisemitism.

If she were only criticising the Israeli government and not also invoking images of manipulation and power and money, then there would be no need to use the word antisemitism. (This is in reference to a comic she wrote that portrays Israel justifying itself as a big bully and when Palestine kicks it in the shins, it cries for help and the US and EU come running with weapons and money. You can see it here in English and here in French. And you can visit her Instagram and Facebook accounts for more examples of what I describe here.)

If she were to take into account the publicized videos of Hamas saying that their goal is to recreate October 7, over and over again until the Jews are gone, then there would be no need to use the word antisemitism. (In fact, she refers to what happened on October 7 as a kick in the shins in the comic I linked to above… )

But she isn’t commenting on any of that. She is solely focused on amplifying the idea that Israel is bad, that Israel is a bully, and that anyone who doesn’t believe so is responsible for the deaths of children. She is manipulating people’s emotions around the safety of children and because she is such an influential storyteller, she is manipulating people against Israel (in fact, she’s collecting stories about how and why people turned against Israel) and we have seen what that kind of manipulation does when it happens in the media. Even here in Montreal, Jewish schools and community organizations have been targets of hate crimes. People targeted Jewish institutions and their menorahs on Chanukah. People were told oh you can’t wish others a happy Hanukkah because that’s too political. People have been targeted, maimed, and killed around the world, outside of the war zone – Jews and Palestinians alike (you can find those references on your own, there are so many). The victims of those crimes don’t care if they were being done in the name of antisemitism or antizionism. The result is the same. Don’t insult us with trying to explain there is a difference.

Posted on Instagram by @yiddishfeminist on December 13, 2023

Elise Gravel isn’t fighting for Palestinian rights in the way she may think she is. Instead, she is repeating very classic tropes about evil, manipulative, powerful Jews (today’s keywords are evil Israel, evil Zionist, evil colonizer) that have been constructed throughout history as a way to blame us for the world’s problems. But…”When everything is a construct, nothing is a fact.” (Eve Barlow, December 17, 2023) so Elise Gravel isn’t shedding light on any new facts, she isn’t doing anything special besides falling into one of the world’s oldest hatreds. Bravo.

BUT when it comes down to it, It is seriously messed up to tell these limiting, very small piece of the puzzle kinds of stories to children. And as a children’s author, you can guarantee they are listening to you tell these stories about a war in an area of the world to which you have no connection. You are manipulating them into believing along the lines of your own limiting beliefs, rife with antisemitism, and that is terrifying for me as a mother and as a teacher.

And I will say once again and forever – yes, it is antisemitism when you call upon centuries old tropes like blaming Jews for the deaths of children and painting Israel, and Jews by association (close to half of the world’s 15 or so million Jews live there,) as having more power than they do. It’s classic antisemitism – The same tropes were used by the Romans, they were used in Spain during the inquisition, and they were used by that man with the miniscule mustache. And more recently they are being used again by so many, including Elise Gravel.

Postscript.

And we are now starting to see some consequences of spreading this kind of hatred. It really isn’t cool. I learned about this lawsuit last night:

“The victory underscores that there will be legal repercussions for those who defame Jewish people, under the guise of ‘Palestinian advocacy,’” said Brooke Goldstein, founder and Executive Director of The Lawfare Project. “We are proud to have facilitated the legal representation of Shai DeLuca, who bravely stood up against bigotry and hatred, and who won a significant victory in court against Jew-hatred. The defendant in this case spread an intentional and vicious blood libel against the Jewish state, and against Mr. DeLuca because he is Jewish. With our legal victory we have set an important precedent in Canada that such falsities have no place in our democracy, and anyone who likewise disseminates Jew-hatred will be held accountable.”
The Lawfare Project Announces Significant Victory In Defamation Lawsuit Before Ontario Superior Court Of Justice

If you want some guidance in how to navigate this mess of a situation without falling into age old Jew hatred or Islamophobia, here are some resources you can look at.

Israel-Palestine: Sharing Mindfully by @tzipporahmusic on Instagram, December 23, 2023. These are part of a longer post that I encourage you to read.

Instagram post by @mizrashki.jewess from January 2, 2024

This guide was created by the Tel Aviv Institute, available on Instagram.

If you’d like to explore this mess without falling into a sports match kind of binary, Unapologetic: the Third Narrative is an excellent place to start.

And finally –> The truth about stories is that’s all we are (Thomas King.) What kinds of stories do you share during difficult times?

January 3, 2024
Best PD ever?

Visiting each others classrooms.

(Really, it’s that simple.)

Quote from: Building Better Teachers by Sara Mosle, The Atlantic, 2014.

I’ve written about this a few times, so some of what I have written in the past will show up again here. It’s not a new concept and it is still as true!

PD (Professional Development) can invoke strong reactions. How often have you been made to ‘do PD’ that is of no relevance to you? And all the while you are thinking about what it is you could be doing with that time (marking, planning, meeting colleagues or with a student, calling a parent, reorganizing desks, reading that new program I am expected to teach…) I remember being forced to sit in a workshop on how to start a twitter account and who to follow and why it was so awesome. This was about 5+ years AFTER I had started using twitter on a regular basis. While it may have been a great workshop for someone wanting to start a new twitter account… It was a waste of time for me.

Sometimes we’re lucky and we attend a workshop that really hits home. It makes us feel good about teaching and sometimes may even impact what happens in our classrooms. Unfortunately, the majority of the PD we are expected to do doesn’t have this impact.

That’s likely because we aren’t usually involved in determining the content of our PD. Someone, somewhere, has guessed at what would be best for all of us at the same time.

To counterbalance this, we can all try to get as much of the best PD ever – visiting each others classrooms.

I remember many years ago, our school district had a big push for differentiation in the classroom. Teachers participated in PD sessions where they were told why to differentiate their lessons and how they might differentiate a lesson (with examples from elementary classrooms in the United States. Not very helpful for the teachers who taught high school… )

One day, a group of teachers at a PD session (at 4pm, after their school day) rebelled a bit. They were tired and frustrated and finally one of the teachers said, listen, I can listen to this theory forever and I still won’t grasp what this can look like in my classroom.

So I found a classroom they could visit to see it in action. About 5 of us travelled to Burlington, Vermont and spent the day in a grade 8 classroom with a teacher who differentiated her lessons. At one point, I looked over at the teachers I brought on the field trip and I tried to figure out what they were thinking. Were they thinking about how far they just travelled? How much work they had to do to prep for the substitute teacher? Were they thinking this was a waste of time?

As the children went out for their first break of the day, one of the teachers turned to me and breathed out, “I feel like I learned more this morning than I ever did at McGill,” (McGill University is where most English speaking teachers in the Montreal area do their education degree.)

When we are in someone else’s classroom, we aren’t only observing what they do but we also reflect on how we would do it. We look at the walls, the classroom setup, how the teacher manages the class, how they introduce a topic and wrap it up at the end. It’s a bit of a gift, to be able to reflect on teaching in a classroom that is not yours, where you aren’t on call every moment. In this case, the teachers were looking to learn about something specific – differentiation in action. But I remember that one of the biggest takeaways that we spoke about on the way home was how one student had two desks. The teacher had explained it was a student who needed to move and used to wander around the classroom, sometimes disrupting others, sometimes missing information they needed. So she got him a second desk and when he needed to move, he could just switch desks. It worked for them.

You don’t need to travel to Burlington to experience this kind of PD. You can travel down the hall. It’s PD that is tailor made for each person who does it because we can reflect on whatever we see and connect it to our own teaching.

It’s really the best PD ever.

I wrote this article for the First Nations Adult Education School Council. It is cross-posted here.

November 22, 2022
Checking ourselves. When good teachers are racist.

Close to 15 years ago, I became friends with a teacher in South Burlington, Vermont. She was a master at differentiation and I met her first through a webinar and then in person. She graciously allowed me to bring a group of teachers from Montreal to spend the day in her classroom. It was a great day that I still use as a spring board when talking about classroom visits as professional development. We have kept in touch ever since and I considered her as a sister-teacher.

But earlier this week, she broke ties with me on Facebook, which is how we have been keeping in touch for the past almost decade. She posted a meme equating rap music with hate and violence. I questioned it and was first made fun of for questioning it and then told she wouldn’t be answering any more questions about it. And then, rather than talking about it, she unfriended me.

I hope I hit a nerve.

But this situation hasn’t been sitting well with me. This is a teacher I admired because of her openness and care for the children she teaches and her colleagues.

How many of us seem to be wonderful teachers yet hold racist beliefs?

How many children are silently (and not so silently) determined to be a certain way because of wonderful teachers who hold these beliefs?

(Imagine the numbers, over an average 25 – 30 year career teaching groups of 25-30 kids a year. Or 2 groups, or 4)

We need to check ourselves every day. As teachers, we model belief and values through our behaviour whether we want to or not. And I think we need to check ourselves more than others because we have littles (and bigs) in front of us who just soak that up as truth.

How do we check ourselves?

Environment: We can start by checking what we have in our class libraries and on our walls. Who is represented in our rooms?

Culture: We can start by making sure racist tropes don’t end up in our yearbooks.

Self: We can start by asking ourselves these questions every single day after (or during) our work with our kids: Who am I paying more attention to in my groups? Am I seeing everyone in my classroom (or online) with potential and what am I doing to make sure I do?

And that is just where we start.

June 28, 2020
English Sector Exclusion: A story in 3 parts.

Part 3

Yesterday afternoon I was forwarded this questionnaire by a colleague in another province.

English translation of headline: Teachers’ experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic at the heart of research

I was attracted by the headline because I thought it was important to gather this kind of data. But when I went to fill out the questionnaire, I realized that, though I teach in the public system in Quebec, my experience didn’t matter.

The questionnaire was developed by Catherine Beaudry, a researcher from UQAR who is doing a province-wide poll of teachers to find out the impacts of the coronavirus and subsequent government management of it on their practice. But the province-wide poll is limited to teachers in the French sector (Quebec’s public education system is divided along linguistic lines – French and English). So I wrote to her and asked why. I also asked if she was worried about painting an incomplete picture by excluding the anglo system. Her response? They wanted to do this quickly and did not have time to translate the questionnaire into English. But a part 2 will likely happen and we may be included then. (So, it was easier to just exclude the whole community rather than allow the majority of us who can fill out a French questionnaire participate. Or to ask someone in the English community to help out and provide an unofficial translation until an official one could be validated by the University…)

Part 2

In 2017, I went to a presentation by the Université TÉLUQ Canada Research Chair in Media Literacy and Human Rights, Normand Landry. He presented a meta-analysis he conducted on media education across every single program of study in the Quebec youth sector. His conclusion was that there was little to no mention of media education within the Quebec education system. My colleagues and I were a little confused because the English Language Arts program is based on media literacy. So we asked Normand Landry about it. He answered that he did not include the English programs in his meta-analysis because he assumed they were translations of the French language programs. (And no one on his team questioned the absence of the English system programs.) (So, essentially his results were flawed.)

Part 1

In the Spring of 2017, I was working as an education consultant with the RECIT for Adult Education and learned that a group in my office was going to launch a redesigned website for the Adult Education community at the beginning of the next school year. But only the French site. The English version would follow at a later date. I expressed my concerns and the initial response was a frustration about the English community – that even when we are included, we aren’t happy. That even when we are included, we often decide to create our own resources anyways. But my boss was a good one. He has strong beliefs about education and is open to listening to other beliefs. And is open to change when change is needed. We had a series of conversations that came down to this: when communities are excluded in order to push up an agenda, you are saying that those communities do not matter in the grand scheme of things. When we are added on after the fact, we still realize that we weren’t important enough to include from the beginning. When we don’t see ourselves represented in major research studies or on educational councils or in educational resources, we get the message that we are not part of the community. And that is why we forge on and create our own resources.

As a result of our conversation, the site was launched in both languages at the same time. And both versions had their own official launch events within each community. There was a sense of equity across the two sectors.

The English and French systems are two parts of a whole. When we speak with each other, we can create a community based in equity that responds to all of our needs.

Essentially, we are not something to be added on once everything has been decided upon and developed. That is not inclusion, that is annexation. And that is how people in the English education community feel each time resources – from Ministerial course evaluations to teaching or professional development materials – are created months to years after the French ones are made available.

And each time we are excluded from research studies about education experiences in Quebec.

(And this is just along linguistic lines…)

June 24, 2020
Well-being of children and opening schools

Yesterday afternoon, the Quebec government announced the reopening of schools during this current worldwide pandemic.

Last week, they suggested as much, citing herd immunity as a main reason. But over the weekend, perhaps in response to Dr. Theresa Tam’s statement about the practice, they changed their reason why. In fact, they replaced it with 5 reasons why and made sure to underline that herd immunity was no longer the driving force behind the reopening of schools.

Here are the 5 reasons why, as presented by Premier Legault (these are notes I took during the press conference on April 27. Here is Legault’s Facebook post, in French, that outlines the same points)

1 – Well-being of children. Especially for those with learning disabilities. (Asking teachers to pay special attention to children who are having difficulties).
2- The risk is limited for children. Children with health problems or who have parents with health problems, parents should keep them home.
3 – The situation is under control in hospitals so if children and teachers get sick we can treat them.
4 – We have the go ahead from public health (earlier I had read that M. Arruda, the director general of public health had wanted to wait another week but I can no longer find that reference)
5 – Life has to continue, children should see their friends and teachers again. I don’t see children staying at home until a vaccine is ready in 12 or 18 months

Calls herd immunity a secondary benefit.
We are reopening our schools for social reasons and because the situation is under control in hospitals. (Legault)

School is to be optional and teachers are expected to teach those who choose to be in school and follow up with those at home. (Roberge)

For the past 3 weeks of the 5 weeks we have been out of school, we have sent links to activities that could be completed at home at a family’s discretion. We will continue to do so until we return on the 19th (in Montréal, still considered the epicenter in Quebec as of last week, and if the situation in the hospitals does not change), all the while preparing our classrooms for face to face teaching in a pandemic. Some teachers have also connected with their students in other ways, through Google Classroom, Microsoft Teams, Zoom, or other platforms.

If schools do reopen on the 19th, we will still be asked to connect in those ways all the while caring for the children who come to school in very unusual circumstances – 2 metre distancing in classes, recess, etc… and with no protective gear provided or mandated for staff or children. Some students and teachers won’t be present because of age or underlying health issues. This is not a return to school as it was nor is it a return to school for everyone.

Premier Legault said that we are reopening our schools for social reasons and that the number one reason is for the well-being of children.

There are vast options for nurturing our students, for providing for their well-being, that lie between the sending home of un-monitored schoolwork and the opening up of classrooms. Online learning can be a safe, caring space if we plan for it.

We can work with small groups, in a stations approach. Colleagues can manage these small groups together, sharing the load and learning together. A group can work with the French teacher while the other works with the English teacher and then they switch. A resource teacher can also be at another group, to keep the groups as small as possible because we know that the smaller the group, the more opportunities each group member has to ask questions and express themselves. Resource or technology teachers and consultants can accompany teachers as we experiment with new solutions. As I wrote the other day, this is possible with tools that are made available to us by our government and our school boards.

Yesterday, our Education Minister, Jean-François Roberge, promised LTE equipped tablets for students and families in need for distance learning. This begins to address the issues of equity and accessibility that worry me and can help to make this kind of online work accessible to more learners.

I can already imagine all of the arguments against this kind of thing – in my previous career as a technology consultant for the Province, I heard them all! The reality is, if we put the arguments aside and try, we will find that it works.

I am not suggesting that this can replace the kind of learning environments we had in our classrooms before we shut down but we won’t be returning to those spaces if we return on the 19th anyways. It won’t be business as usual. It won’t be equitable with some students and teachers in the buildings, some at home. I am scared and worried. Others are scared and worried. How will our children react? My son wants to return to school so he can play with his friends … But he won’t be able to play with them unless they are 2 metres apart so he is scared and worried. We can create safe, nurturing, closer to equitable learning environments online if we all stay home, like our Federal (and Provincial!) government suggests.

(Of course, today Legault will be announcing the plan to reopen businesses… Was the well-being of children really the driving force?)

April 28, 2020