History in the Making

By

 This week, Halton opened the doors on its newest elementary school, named after a Canadian civil rights leader, Viola Desmond.  Up until the Christmas Break, students who were to attend Viola Desmond Public School had been split between several other area schools while construction on their building was finished.  This splitting of the new school community made building relationships between the new staff and students challenging.  However, with the unveiling of the new Canadian Ten Dollar Bill, featuring a portrait of Viola Desmond, staff and students were given an opportunity to gather in November to celebrate.

Bijan Nagji and Sarah Patterson, two teachers at Viola Desmond, spoke to their students about the importance of this event and how they felt having their school named after such a leader.

“When I first heard about the event, I felt like a leader, like I’m representing our class and school and representing Viola Desmond in a way that everyone can remember her action and her name”  ~Navnoor, Grade 7

“The speech from the Bank of Canada really stood out for me, because the passion of Viola Desmond came across.  It was really inspiring from the words that were said, from the artwork on the 10 bill. I like the design. I also love the poem that Nadine (Williams) made.  She inspired me to create my own piece”  ~Yusur, Grade 6

“I was very excited to be one of the very first people to get the new $10” ~Jyoshika, Grade 5

Students feel a sense of pride by attending a school named after someone who stood up for their own rights and the rights of others.  They recognize that she was different and that there are many visible and invisible differences among the students at Viola Desmond Public School.  Students are excited to be learning in a community that embraces these differences, where students are comfortable talking openly about these difference and respecting everyone's diverse backgrounds.  Students realize the legacy of Viola Desmond and are happy to represent her in their own community.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

What Are We Reading?

By
Image
Let’s put all the cards on the table before we get into our book list. When we say “reading”, what we really mean is “what pages do we look at after putting the kids to bed”. It’s hard to fit in reading, for professional growth or for fun into a day that is full of work and family. And yet, we try, as we imagine most of you do to. Given the nature of this project, reading for professional growth has become more important to us. For sure we still try to find the time to read for pleasure but that time is shrinking as we get closer to launching The Shift. Certainly, if we are going to be the conduit through which innovative teaching practices are shared we better have some evidence to fall back on. We both started by reading Most Likely to Succeed: Preparing Our Kids for the Innovation Era . This book was the basis for the companion documentary Most Likely to Succeed, which was screened twice last semester in our board. The documentary itself was attended by over 500 Hal...
Read more

What is a Pro-Pro Chart?

By
Image
  If you have been following along on with Shift twitter , you may have witnessed educators getting excited about something called a pro-pro chart.  You may also be wondering what on Earth the excitement is for this tool? A group of HDSB science teachers, led by the Instructional Program Leaders for Science in both elementary and secondary panels, teaching grades 7 to 10 from eight different schools are participating in a series of workshops to learn about Integrative Thinking, which is a creative way to problem solving. It was developed by Roger Martin at Rotman School of Management as tools for businesses to make important management decisions, it quickly became apparent that these tools were enormously useful in education as a way for students to think more deeply about problems in the world around them.   Rotman I-THINK tools are accessible to students in elementary and secondary and be can used to build empathy through tackling some really tricky problems and a...
Read more

Asking Questions

By
Image
“What do you want to learn?” “How do you want to show me what you’ve learned?” These are the questions we hear being asked on our visit to Aldershot High School.  We are sitting in Sarah Spencer's’ Grade Nine Applied Science class.  The students have just returned from a scavenger hunt in a nearby ravine and  they’ve been asked to record some of the things they’ve noticed on the blackboard.  From here, the teacher hands out the Overall Expectations for the course and ask the students to pay attention specifically to the Biology portion of the document.   This is the student's introduction to the Biology unit of the class, and it isn’t going the way we would usually expect.  Rather than the teacher guiding the students from topic to topic, the students are being allowed to find their own path.  Each student is identifying their own interests from the Biology curriculum and, presumably, their paths will diverge from here. But we won’t get to ...
Read more