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A Year Long Inquiry - The Basis of My Teaching Framework

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When beginning my inquiry process this fall, I asked myself what I do and do not already know about representation in classrooms. The question that I based my research and reflection on was 'What are some effective ways to ensure all students feel represented and respected in the classroom community?' taking into account that tokenism is a real possibility and is not a true representation.  As a Chinese Canadian woman, I did not often find myself feeling represented in schools. This meant that did not feel represented by the content that we were studying or the staff who surrounded me as I was growing up. I had a strong community outside of schools, where my aunties and cousins were the strong Asian role models that I needed to have. This past year, one of my professors told my class that the majority of students enrolled in education are middle-class white women. I would say this is accurate according to my experiences growing up in south-end Winnipeg. It took a while for this...
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Reimagining the Inner City

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For the last three years, I have been working in Winnipeg's inner city as a youth programmer or building monitor. My role has included keeping an eye on the door and providing resources to community members, dealing with medical and violence-related emergencies, and providing a program for youth aged 6 to 18, depending on the shift I work and the location. In my time, I have also gotten to know the community and the other workers in the building. I am now familiar with the different supports and organizations in the community.  Whenever people learn about where I work, they always make a comment about how dangerous it is or they do not like that I work there. While there is more violence in inner-city communities, I know that some of the reasons are systemic. Indigenous and newcomer populations are more dominantly populating Winnipeg's inner-city. This is because of the cheaper rates of housing and the proximity of social support. These supports have come up as a result of soci...
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Levels of Integration of Multicultural Content

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As a social studies teacher, the integration of social justice into my methodology is not only a goal of mine but an expectation I am held to by myself and the Manitoba curriculum. Including social justice within my methodology means the integration of themes and histories that have to do with the social issues that are affecting Canadian and global populations historically and contemporarily. Within the grade 9 Manitoba social studies curriculum , a conceptual model by James Banks is provided for reference. This model was made to analyze the levels of integration of multicultural content into the curriculum. But first, what is multicultural content? To me, multicultural content means that the understandings, histories, and perspectives that I am including in my classroom come from a variety of different sources that find value in the varied voices and experiences. My understanding of multicultural content is currently informed by bell hooks and my own lived experiences as someone who ...
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Difficult Topics

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Learning how to teach difficult topics seems to be a difficult topic in itself. Everyone always says to stay in the middle of the debate, but then sway in whichever direction is personally their favourite to back. So what are difficult topics? When I think about difficult topics, what comes to my mind are the divisible topics where we see more anger or hatred on any side of a conflict or topic. Politics, war, identity. These are things that are ingrained into the way people conceptualize themselves and the people around them. I understand that people come from many different walks of life, and no one experiences the world in the same way. Conversations around validity say that everyone's feelings and opinions are valid, and I have no desire to dispute that. What I think needs to be focused on is having compassion and understanding.  Everyone knows how they feel, they have an understanding as to the reasons why they feel the way they do--to an extent. What they may not know is how a...
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Pachinko

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Pachinko  by Min Jin Lee is a story of a Korean family spanning over the 20th century as they grow through different world events, including The Depression Era, Imperial Japan, and the World Wars. This epic follows Sunja as she grows from a toddler into an old woman, focusing on her story and how her life influences that of her family.  This story begins before the birth of the main character, we meet Sunja’s parents as they begin their family, Sunja is born and we watch her grow up in the early-mid 1900s. We see the impacts of the depression era that followed the First World War on their family-run business. The character Koh Hansu is introduced as an older man who begins to fall for young Sunja, they have a brief affair and she becomes pregnant. Passing minister Baek Isak marries Sunja and brings her to live with him, his brother Yoseb and his wife Kyunghee in Japan. Sunja and Isak eventually come to love one another and have a son of their own following Sunja’s firstborn. ...
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