 Hey everyone. Just a quick reminder before we get started today, we have a survey to find out more about you. We want to hear what you like and what you might want to hear more about on Don't Call Me Resilient. The survey takes only 10 minutes to fill out and we actually plan to use it to help us shape the podcast next season. So if you're into this podcast, this is a great place to make your thoughts known. You can find the survey at Don'tCallMeResilient.com. From the conversation, this is Don't Call Me Resilient. I'm Venita Srivastava. We are not just preparing students for jobs or to do better on tests. We have a larger role to provide an education that fosters them being good human beings, equity-minded people that are not built on maintaining a kind of domination based on race, based on gender expression, based on class, based on being able-bodied. I feel like that's the role of schools too. That's the role of us as educators. That's what we're striving to do. This conversation today is a little personal. In a way, it's about how we talk to boys about misogyny. But in another way, it's also about the rise of white supremacy and how that rise has filtered down into the attitudes of school-aged boys. My exploration into this started when my kid and their friends across the city were telling me that they've been experiencing sexist, homophobic, and racist attitudes, mostly from the boys in their classrooms. So I started doing a little research. I started talking to scholars. And what the research says is the rise in far-right ideologies globally has impacted school-age students. Many experts point to Andrew Tate, the far-right social media influencer, as one of the culprits. Teachers say he has a big presence in the classroom. On top of that, there's been an exponential rise in antisemitism and Islamophobia in Canada that have also impacted the classroom. We're coming up to White Ribbon Day, also known as the National Day of Remembrance and Action on Violence Against Women on December 6th. And we thought this was a good time to have this conversation. It may be a conversation you're already starting to have in your own households. With me today is Teresa Fowler, who's an assistant professor in the Faculty of Education at Concordia University of Edmonton. Her research focuses on critical white masculinities. Lance McCready is also here. He's an associate professor in the Department of Leadership, Higher and Adult Education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto. His research explores education, health, and the well-being of Black men, boys, and queer youth, especially in urban communities and schools. He's also the interim director of the Transitional Year Program, which is for students who did not finish or succeed in high school and who need a little support to apply to university. I'm really excited and honored to be having this conversation with both of you. Let's just jump right in. So you both work in education research and as educators yourself, can you tell me what you're seeing or hearing about when it comes to the behavior and attitudes of school-aged boys? And I'm going to start with you, Teresa. If you could just give us a little picture of what you think is happening. I'm not physically in schools anymore, but I work with teachers who, honestly, they're at a loss as to how they can best serve young boys in their care. When I go to teachers' conventions, the room's packed. There's something happening. And the questions are the same, is that educators are really struggling with young boys. If we look historically, schools are not set up for boys, pedagogically and curriculum-wise. And boys are disengaging. You look at the statistics, how many boys are in special education, how many boys, and from my personal experience as an educator, don't even make it to those supports because when boys are exhibiting behaviors, they are often aggressive. That's the only language our boys know. And so what happens is they get in the discipline cycle. And it's, hey, go and man up. And that was something that happened a lot in Alberta up to about 10 years ago where the oil and gas companies were hiring kids without high school diplomas. It made sense for educators to say, go get a job, go figure it out, and then come back. But unfortunately, educators just are at a loss because these narratives of boys will be boys take hold. And we don't know how to do anything else. And boys are really denied that nurturing that caring because they're pushed out of classrooms. Go for a walk, get rid of that steam, go lift some things. And those are the stereotypes of what it means to be a man in this country. And that's a certain breed of masculinity. And we adultify young boys and men, especially racialized boys. So you mean like adultify, like we expect them to be men before they're men. We don't allow them to be children. Yeah. Yeah. And you're saying boys will be boys. And I've been hearing that forever. So I'm just wondering what's changed now when the teacher and the principal just in my little world are saying they've never seen anything like this. And the research also shows this other teachers are saying similar things. What's different about now? Some of these conversations have been around for a while. But what's changed or what's different? The obvious elephant in the room is the pandemic. It's one of the things that changed dramatically. It just accelerated many people's use of resources and education through sort of YouTube, Discord, Tumblr, TikTok, especially when they are topics that are difficult to learn about or to get resources with in the context of schools. We know that sort of queer youth, that the image used to be sneaking into the library to find that book that you can learn about things. There's no sneaking in libraries anymore. It's all online. I think our use of those resources in the face of schools being closed, like all of the sort of challenges that teachers were experiencing, I think the use of those sort of increased even more. People like Jordan Peterson and Andrew Tate were around before that. But through the pandemic, there's been greater reliance or turn to these sort of folks. I think another thing that has changed. I think the hashtag need to all of the high profile sexual assault cases and the discourse around that, and that's more readily available for folks to see and watch sometimes even look sort of court proceedings. I think that has made a lot of young men feel like they are being blamed. Now they're being blamed and being told that they're bad and they are looking for ways to respond to that. You mentioned Andrew Tate. For those people who don't know Andrew Tate, he's like a massive influencer. He's a misogynist. He's a racist. He's far right. You mentioned Jordan Peterson. From what I read when my research, like the survey that the Girl Guides of Canada did, for example, they said post me to many of the boys that they spoke to were all for that. They all agreed with the message of me too. But who doesn't agree with that message? I think are people like Andrew Tate. So what I'm wondering is it the boys that originally felt that way or is it that they're being influenced? Because these teachers are basically saying Andrew Tate is in my classroom. Andrew Tate is in my essays. He's in the hallways. What do you attribute this to? Can we attribute it to somebody like Andrew Tate? And how is this trickling down to the children? Why do you think this is happening? When I think about what Lance said, especially during COVID that schools are closed, I think that's the issue that schools are closed not physically, but they're closed to dialogue. They're closed to having conversations about critical race theory. They're closed to having conversations about gender, sexuality, white supremacy. So that's why folks like Andrew Tate then are in our classrooms because there's no room for educators to have a conversation about his influence. Because really, since me too, since Black Lives Matter, the general narrative is changing. But unfortunately, no one's talking to our young boys about what to do. And instead, schools are still set up to protect the female. Don't show your shoulder because we know our boys can't handle that. And that really devalues what we think boys can do, right? When there isn't a language for boys to walk in this sort of new world where women have a voice, where people have phones, where they're documenting issues of racial injustice, right? There isn't a language for boys. And when we can't talk about it, what do they do? They do exactly what Lance mentioned. They turn to social media, right? Because there's an audience. However, I think it was Joseph Derek Nielsen in the Boyhood Report Card. Even though social media has this idea that everyone's connecting, boys are lonely. They're reporting epidemic levels of loneliness. During COVID in British Columbia and Alberta, there was a rise in excess deaths. And I think it was 81% of those deaths were boys and men. And that was exasperated by loneliness, by being shut up, right? So social media is not the space that brings everyone together, but is the space where boys are learning? Where can I have that narrative that teachers are used to? Boys will be boys because when things are going awry, what do we do as educators? We go where we're comfortable, right? We have so many decisions that we make in a day that you just can't fight every battle. So you stay where you're comfortable. And boys will be boys has been the narrative in schools. So then we let the boys then get away with these things. Oh, it's okay, Sally. He really likes you when he hits you. These are the conversations we need to unpack with boys. But we can't as teachers. I hate that one. He hits you because he likes you. I don't like that. How does that make any sense? What I think is the really common dynamic I'd say across our schools. I don't think that teachers feel trained and I don't feel like they either feel comfortable with having critical conversation about a number of social issues or inequalities. They don't feel comfortable talking about sexism, sexual assault. They just don't feel comfortable talking really about gender relations except in the most conventional way. I used to teach at OISI when they had a Bachelor of Education. I taught the school and society class. I enjoyed teaching that sort of class. I thought, now I'm going to get to all the media issues and talk about the history, the sociology, the philosophy of education and our sort of beliefs and values that really undergird our teaching. There was not widespread belief that we should be teaching teachers how to have conversations about controversial issues in the classroom. Our approaches to classroom management did not include how to navigate and facilitate challenging conversations. It was more like, just don't talk about religion. Just don't talk about sort of sexual assault. Just don't talk about anti-black racism. Don't talk about anti-Asian racism. Just don't talk about it. Your classroom will get out of control. There might even be some sort of physical altercation. You don't want to be in the middle of that. You don't want to be on the receiving end of that. So just don't talk about it. Keep your classes and keep the topics and everything you discuss as neutral as possible. So what that becomes is schools where they don't become really the spaces where sort of children and youth can really hash out and have controversial conversations about things that are happening really in the world, in their families, difficult to talk about issues. This is why there's so much controversy around even sex education. Anything that seems controversial or fraught that's linked to some sort of larger societal issue or social inequality were either really explicitly or implicitly taught to avoid. We still have a Bachelor of Education program in Alberta and I teach the science methods course. Science, I feel, is a good place where we can open up because we have the idea of critical literacy with respect to science and we see the lack of it especially during the pandemic, right? And one of the things we talk about with respect to controversial topics is what has the law decided? The law has decided in Canada that same-sex marriage is okay. So therefore that should not be a controversial topic. In my work with teachers, it's not that they're uneducated on these topics. It's that they're afraid they're going to have the mob at their classroom door when they open up the conversation, right? I think for the most part they might not be comfortable with the topic but the comfortableness is because of those outside narratives and that pressure to keep things the way they are. Don't talk about any of these things. Just do your curriculum and that's it. I guess that's part of the issue. You both mentioned these massive world changes. Black Lives Matter, the killing of George Floyd, the current war in the Middle East, the convoy protest in Canada. These are things that do influence children and they do hear about and I'm wondering how does this impact the classroom? We are seeing right now the antisemitism, Islamophobia and that's you can draw a direct line between that and the current war in the Middle East. I guess my question is don't these major events impact the classroom? If anyone denies that they do impact the classroom, they are in classrooms. The other line you can draw is the refusal of professional hockey players wearing pride jerseys and then the rise of anti-pride movements in our school. Everything is connected. We used to think colonization tells us that everything needs to be siloed, categorized. We need to talk about these issues and it can't just be delegated to the social studies teacher, right? We need all educators. It needs to be across our schools. I imagine that as a teacher you have to be very flexible because things change so fast. I'm just putting up the empathy there for the teacher that there's a lot of stuff happening in our world. It's constantly changing. And becoming more generally educated about a lot of things that are going on in the world and this is where it gets the philosophy or values to like do you see your role as educator really to facilitate conversations with children and youth about things that are going on in the world because not every teacher does see that as their, they might say, no, if I'm their language arts teachers, my job is to teach them about grammar and the construction of the sentence. And my primary role isn't discuss whether or not the professional hockey players decide to put a pride flag on their jersey. That's not related to my job. I shouldn't have to facilitate a conversation. Or as one's teachers, they told me in terms of whether or not they should be discussing issues of homophobia and gender relations in class, they said, I'm a music teacher. I teach music. That's what I was trained to do was to teach music education. I am not a feminist. I am not a gender study scholar. I was not trained in that. From their perspective, it's as simple as that. You're asking me to teach about something I don't know about. My response is always, what if this is what your students are drawing a connection in music? What if they're asking a question, like, why don't we really study any sort of women composers? Why are all the composers that we sort of document? Do you feel like you have to have an answer to that? Or do you feel like Beethoven is the curriculum? Your focus should be on Beethoven. But I think that's the attitude of many educators is that they're trained in particular areas. They teach in those areas. Maybe they do a good job. They follow the curriculum and they try to stay in their lane. Somebody might say, I'm an organic chemistry teacher. What does conflict in the Middle East have to do with me teaching organic chemistry? I'm teaching a periodic table. Why do I have to know about George Floyd? I think these are important questions. I think what you're asking is really important. Whose responsibility is that then? If there is a very specific curriculum that needs to be taught and teachers feel responsible to parents or to their employers to get through the curriculum. And they've got these, as Theresa mentioned at the beginning, very disruptive kids in their class and they're just trying to get through the day. So you push maybe somebody out of the classroom so you can get through the day. I don't know if you're going to have any space to do that. I don't know. That's the problem, right? Like you said it yourself, we have to get through the curriculum. I have to get through the day. I have to grind it out. And that's what has unfortunately become our education system because of neoliberalism, because of capitalism, right? Because our economic drivers need certain workers. So we have to push kids through. And you hear that especially in Alberta when we have our provincial achievement exams, teachers have to focus to the test because there's questions about my performance if my class doesn't do well. So these are things we also need to talk about is how the system has really burdened our educators. So that way they cannot say like Lance was talking about maybe as a music educator, I want to step back and look at some different musicians, but I can't, right? So therefore, I just need to stay in my lane. I just need to do my job so I get paid because I have a family too. But that's where we need to call into question the systems. And then it comes back to why we're here when we talk about the rise of white supremacy in Alberta, the Take Back Alberta movement. Some of those folks populated our school boards as trustees. Monique LaGrange was recently removed from her post for her homophobic comments. So we have those folks who are in charge of our system, which adds to the fear of our educators being able to have these conversations and step outside of their lanes. It's not just the educators here we need to implicate. It's the government, it's the systems, it's the ways in which education has been designed in our country. And we need to recognize that we got inclusion wrong, right? And we need to change. We really need to open things up and perhaps use this time. I remember when we came out of COVID, when I was teaching in the graduate programs, I had some principles for the people who can actually make decisions. I said, when we came out of COVID, you have the real benefit of changing the way you do things, right? Focus on mental health, focus on wellness, focus on the human. Instead, what did we do? We focused on this mythical thing called learning laws. We focused again on literacy and numeracy. That was the moment we really could have shifted our system because nobody would have disagreed with you that focusing on mental health and wellness in our education system is not a bad thing. Yeah, yeah. We've been talking about the values of the far right. We are talking about white supremacy. And I think that in some ways you'd think that we're talking about white boys, for example. But the examples I think Lance, when I was speaking to you earlier, they also involved brown boys. Maybe you can tell us a little bit about those examples from the transitional year program. Just white supremacy or patriarchy or normativity reside just in North America. They're all around the world, often a part of the dominant ideologies of many societies. And we need to understand that. It's a transitional year program. I've been here six years. Every year of the last four years we've had some incident of usually a sister, male student having some sort of conflict related to you can't speak to women that way or you can't be physically intimidating. You can't do a glare and look like you're going to assault someone. That's scary for a lot of people. You can't ask somebody about their sex life. That sort of thing makes a lot of people feel unsafe. So we've had a lot of like gender relations issues that I feel committed to as a sort of pro-feminist educator, opening the floor and having a space to have a conversation. I do want to hear what they're thinking. I want to know like why or even this flirting and the way you were doing it. I know you were like you were just being friendly, but it's actually inappropriate. And it would be considered a form of unwanted attention and therefore harassment. But I feel like we have to have these really explicit conversations in part because no one's necessarily having them. And then in the absence of that, you get the tates, the rogans or there are other black hip-hop artists that have put out pretty misogynist views around women or it being okay to assault gay, lesbian, gender and sexual minorities in our community. Just this semester, someone cited Andrutate as like a source of like authority on the issue that we were having. And I was surprised about that. I didn't assign that. I've never spoken about that. Part of me wants to just shut it down. We didn't read or we're not talking about Andrutate, but actually try not to do that. I try to more just engage with the ideas like why this person spoke to them, like what is it they're trying to get across in a way that is as safe or mindful as possible. Does this exist for girls too? Like is there something happening with girls with the swing to the right as well? Or is it mostly we're talking about boys? I do not think there is general agreement that we should blow up our existing patriarchal gender system. For young women, I was like make way for the femme boys and men. Are you ready for that? And a lot of them are like, no, I don't want that. Or make way for a different way of thinking about marriage. And I think one of the big ones that we'll struggle with today is a whole even idea of sort of men as the provider period. We're not beyond the idea that sort of women should give up their careers and just be stay-at-home mom. And I think girls coming up are continue to struggle with those. I don't think any of those issues are over. And I think those are apart or intersect with a lot of these far right ideologies. This very narrow definition of what it means to be a man is basically what you're saying. Girls too, or what it means to be a wife. I think that's also the conversation. And that's perhaps why we aren't necessarily having these conversations. Because education in the classroom is still a female dominated space. Like in Alberta, 70% of our teachers are white and female. Women need to recognize that we need to change our understandings of what it means to be a man and what boys mean. It's not just the boys that need a new language. We also need a new language. We also need to do the work about what it means to be a man and what types of things we value and what types of things we expect. When I talked to you earlier, you both talked about this idea of the male mask. The way that boys feel they need to present themselves in the world. And Teresa, you do a workshop with actual masks. Yeah, I do. Can you tell us about that workshop? Yeah, so I found it from that movie, The Mask You Live In, where they take the mask and on the outside you put what you put out to the world. And then on the inside you put how you really are. And I've done this with hockey teams. I've done this 70-year-old men down to younger men. It's always the same narrative that the mask they're putting on is inhibiting the person who they really are. And some of the masks, when I look especially with the hockey team on the inside, they write that they're bi, that they're queer, but yet you can't still come out because that's not normal. And I think what we need to recognize is the masks that men put on because that's what we expect. And then on the inside, that's where we need to create space for boys and men to have a conversation about how these narratives were actually causing them harm. Lance, when Teresa was talking, you gave such a deep sigh. I feel like there's a story here. We want to focus on schools. I don't think teachers either in their initial teacher training or in their sort of continued professional development are given a lot of tools about how to have these conversations. Like one thing that I used to do with these teacher education workshops or PD days is just the simple act like a man, act like a woman activity, where you basically have two pieces of flip charts or boxes, and you generate a discussion, what does it mean to act like a man? What does that mean? And you write all those things down, then you have a conversation, where did you learn these things? Where did it come from? But what it does is it surfaces or makes more visible some of these dominant gender ideologies that we have. It also allows you to talk about where it comes from. You get to learn implicitly that it's not just born. These are actually things that we learn and these are beliefs and ideas that are created in our interactions and like in our everyday living. Those sorts of approaches to teaching, those sort of resources like training how to do that need to be more prevalent in teacher education. I feel like children and youth are eager to discuss these things and just ready and want to. But we're not providing space to even have the good conversations about it. Instead more focus on like maintaining their innocence or protecting them from particular ideas or even protecting them from some of the nastier things that Donald Trump has said about women. There's just a lot of protecting and shielding. I think we need to foster more sort of critical resources, approaches that really allow young people to have them make their way and make their decision. How are they going to deal with this in the world? Lance, you said educators like yourself, like myself, I think some of my colleagues, the risk is there for us as well, right? In our post-secondary institutions. Sarah Ahmed talked about when you name the problem, you become the problem. There's a risk for us as well. But I think we need to have these conversations. We need to open up these spaces because the risk is boys and men have a higher rate of suicide, gender-based violence, the number of LGBTQ kiddos who are homeless. These are real issues we need to talk about, not whether or not two plus two equals four. Yeah. We're talking about in some ways theoretical solutions, but also practical. And I know that there are so many teachers who might be listening to this conversation who are really struggling in a practical way. Can we spend a few minutes talking about some of those practical solutions? Lance, you want to start? We need to foster a kind of teacher education and ongoing professional development where everything is not handed to our educators, cookie-cutter. But if they are empowered to feel like that they can go out and do more research, like do gather resources that they own of things that are happening in the context of the classroom, their issues their students are facing, and be able to incorporate that or learn how to teach about that in their context. And therefore, we can't look at their success only in terms of the test scores that come out of that. We have to have a broader view of success. Some of this sounds maybe idealistic, but I actually feel like it's incredibly practical. But it's rooted in a particular value and belief about the nature of teaching. We are not just preparing students for jobs or to do better on tests. We have a larger role to provide an education that fosters them to be good human beings, equity-minded people that's not built on maintaining a kind of domination based on race, based on gender expression, based on being able-bodied. I feel like that's the role of schools too. That's the role of us as educators, that's what we're striving to do to be a little bit more anti-oppressive in light of fostering education at that. Maybe that's a little on the philosophy side, but I think it has real practical implications. And I would just add, it almost is simple of just shifting our focus. What does success look like in our classroom? Is it that everyone gets an A, or is it that everybody comes to the classroom with a full belly? It's just shifting our expectations not only for our students, but for ourselves. And I think the biggest thing educators who are doing the best you can, right? And you need to shift how you approach your students and yourself, and you're not going to tackle poverty, say, in a social studies classroom. But what you are going to do is open up awakenings to different experiences of poverty and shifting, for example, the narrative that being someone who's poor is lazy. But it's really what does success look like? And thinking, when people ask you, what do you do? You say, you teach. What do you teach? I teach science. How about you teach children? Reading Paulo Freire's pedagogy of the oppressed. I think every educator really needs to read that because we're not teaching these vessels that need the curriculum indoctrinated into them. They need to, like Lance was saying, understand critical thinking, understand the ways in which the world is an ecosystem. Because while we're having these conversations about how horrible we are to each other, our planet's on fire. We need to start talking about climate change. And when you want to talk about controversial topics, that's a controversial topic in our province, right? We need to finally get to this point where we respect each other as human beings. And how can we work together to really care for each other and then nurture this planet? But I think as far as practical solutions, it needs to be organic. And teachers need to recognize that they do have the autonomy and control of their own classrooms. And they can respond in ways that perhaps best fit them rather than a canned program. And one thing I just also don't want to leave out here, parents are educators too. Parents don't know everything. Parents don't necessarily understand everything. And they may need assistance and help too. I think we also need to engage more restorative practices in our schools. I think we have to have more ways of using circles, restorative practices to understand what the harm that has been done, have the parties able to communicate. What happened and have us come to some sort of repair or resolution of those relationships? I think we need to focus more on figuring out how to do that and get the skills to do that. There was a story, I can't remember when it was, but it was in Chicago at the height of a lot of the gang violence. And there was a school principal who, that was their response, get the boys out. We don't want violence in the building. We need to keep our school safe. And then one of the boys that was put out ended up getting sucked into a gang and had to do an initiation and ended up dying. And that was when she reflected. She's like, I'm not helping these kids. I'm pushing them out into the places that I'm trying to protect them from. And so they engaged in it with that district, restorative justice, where they weren't putting these kids out onto the street. Instead, they were having conversations and they turned things around for that district. And I think that's like what we need to do. But again, our schools aren't set up to have dialogue. There's not enough time. They're over cramped. They're overburdened. Class sizes are huge. And again, it comes down to how the system is designed. And we need to really look and challenge those politicians and those people who are in positions of power to look at what's happening and say, okay, we need to address class sizes. We need to address the teacher burnout because teacher burnout, it's because they're dealing with all of these topics and they don't have the support they need to do it. Our educators are in those classrooms. And they are, I believe, doing the best that they can. And tomorrow's a new day. There's many of us in higher education that are trying to work to make it better. But you can only do the best that you can really. Yeah, it's hard out there. Yeah. There's power in resistance. And for educators in the classroom, it's time to have these conversations. Thank you so much for being with me today. I really appreciate your time. Thank you. Take care. Thank you for having this conversation. Thank you for listening and thanks to our guests. I feel like I'm walking away with a little more empathy for children after this episode. Teresa and Lance both understand how hard it is to be a teacher. But they're also saying that children are not immune to real world politics, that shielding children from these conversations doesn't help. And teachers can be part of the solution by simply inviting their classrooms to have these difficult conversations. I'd love to hear from you if you've got resources to share or if you've been struggling with the same issue. You can find me on Instagram at Don't Call Me Resilient podcast or email me at dcmr at theconversation.com. Don't Call Me Resilient is a production of The Conversation Canada. It was made possible by a grant for journalism innovation from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada. The series is produced and hosted by me, Venita Srivastava. Our associate producer is Ataka Kaki. Kika Chi Meme is our student producer and she especially helped with the production of this episode. Rematula Shake does our sound design and mixing. Our consulting producer is Jennifer Morose and Scott White is the CEO of The Conversation Canada. And if you're wondering who wrote and performed the music we use on the podcast, that's Zaki Ibrahim. The track is called Something in the Water.