Dr. Samantha Cutrara:        I’m so glad to talk with you today, Neil. I’ve been thinking about you so much because of the resources that you’ve created regarding the Spanish Flu, and so I was hoping we could talk about the Defining Moments project today. But before that, do you want to introduce yourself to everyone?

Neil Orford:        Sure. It’s great to see you, Samantha. I’ve been wanting to talk to you for a long time. I love the videos, and thank you for producing them, especially at this time when a lot of teachers are thinking about getting back to the classroom, and considering what they’re going to do, and how they’re going to approach their subject and approach their classes, because it is not just catching up, but reframing what classroom practice looks like when everybody gets back together.

NO:        The most important thing about me is that I was a history teacher for 31.5 in the Ontario system teaching high school in a small town. Over the course of those years, I spent a lot of time developing practices that I thought were going to be needed for the future. As much as I was in the present, I was always trying to look for what the next wave was. Towards the end of my career, I started a project called The Digital Historian Project, which was a blended learning experience for history students to actually take them out of the school and put them in the environment of a museum and practice digital curation around important points in Canadian history.

SC:        And that’s where we met. The beginning part of that project.

NO:        That’s where we met.

SC:        Yeah, because I was at the Archives of Ontario when you were starting that.

NO:        That’s right, you were right there at the ground floor of everything we were doing and, of course, the Archives of Ontario became a really important inspiration for the work we were doing. That project lasted for about four years and it became the genesis for Defining Moments Canada when I retired and the work that we’re now doing under contract with the Federal Government of Canada.

SC:        And you have been awarded for this work, right? Don’t miss that part! You won the Governor General Award for history teaching for that, right?

NO:        Thank you, that was very nice. At the time that that award found me, it was largely because of a project that we were doing with digital history to honor veterans. And we were using the first roll-out of robust data from Library and Archives Canada and from other sources to put in front of students. We utilized a lot of existing databases that were at University of Guelph and a couple of other universities where a lot of historians had been working on ways to isolate subsets of [data] about First World War soldiers to develop inferences and understandings based on the data and making as many conclusions from this data that was increasingly available online.

That project really became an important backdrop for what we were doing in the digital historian course. In that course, we ended up utilizing a lot of that data for the work and actually turn it into really cool data management projects for grade 12 data management students. And that was a neat little marriage of history and math that we were doing in the digital historian course for about four years.

SC:        I always thought that was really cool. I loved that part of your project: the integration of different subjects, different disciplines, because we so often keep things separate. One of the things I talk about in a lot of the videos in the Imagining a New ‘We’ video series is that ways to have increasing circles of inclusion in our study of history, and I think part of that is to increase the inclusion of different subjects as well.

One of the videos I was going to post during March Break, which then became a “pandemic pause,” was about digital history (Note: Videos are up!) because I was working with York University on the digital humanities book for teaching and learning, and you can do a lot of that new integration with digital humanities. We should talk about that more. That might be a really interesting conversation for us to continue, Neil.

Right now, let’s switch over to the Spanish Flu, shall we?

NO:       Yeah, it’s very timely, isn’t it?

SC:        Yeah, it is. So I’m going to make a confession: I only heard about the Spanish Flu when you started talking about it around the World War I commemoration. I don’t think I ever really learned about it, and so when the discussion about pandemic started and the word “pandemic” was being used, I immediately thought of your project and I immediately thought of linking people to it. So there’s another video that has resources related to the Spanish Flu and your resources are very prominent.

Because you know the topic so intimately, how can we use the knowledge we have about the Spanish Flu to help students understand this current pandemic moment we’re in?

NO:        Well, thanks, Samantha. I would say that you’re in the 99% of Canadians, maybe 99.5% of Canadians, who, if they were asked, would confess the same thing about not knowing about the Spanish Flu pandemic before the last three weeks.

I think it would be difficult to argue now that the Spanish Flu is not a defining moment in Canadian history. It always has been, but one of the great lessons for teachers in working with students in this moment, is this notion of amnesia, of a cultural amnesia, that show us that, for one reason or another, we find it very convenient to forget these moments in history.

The Spanish Flu is perhaps, in the 20th century, one of the most prominent defining moments, not just in Canada, but around the world, that suffered from that public amnesia. There’s been all kinds of scholarship that has written about that sense of amnesia, and I think that’s really poignant now in 2020 to reflect upon.

Most of those scholars would argue that there was a tremendous amount of shame that Canadians felt after the Spanish Flu pandemic because of their inability to manage it. Their inability to deal with it. Their inability to have predicted it. To have managed it. Their inability to have come through it without the kinds of tragic consequences and tragic statistics that we experienced.

For teachers, I would encourage them to approach a topic like the Spanish Flu using the historical thinking concepts, especially continuity and change, with the Spanish Flu pandemic. There are lots of things that are similar that we can draw parallels to with COVID-19. It was also a tremendous amount that’s different. The context of 1918-1919 was wartime and a post-war disillusionment that a lot of Canadians were experiencing, whereas today we’re largely at peace in Canada. So there are differences there. And of course, the world of 1918, people were transporting themselves by train, there wasn’t the kind of social media that there is today. So there are tremendous differences.

I would always try to emphasize a topic like the Spanish Flu refracted through the lens of continuity and change. (Editor’s note: Also see Jan Hasking-Winner’s video regarding continuity and change)

SC: Along with the the historical thinking concepts of continuity and change, what are some some key lessons from the Spanish Flu that teachers can share with their students to understand this COVID moment in time?

NO:        Sure. We want everybody to understand the Spanish Flu refracted through an interdisciplinary lens, and that we can approach it from multiple perspectives. The Spanish Flu is not just a historical experience, it’s also an experience of scientific achievement and medical breakthroughs. It’s an experience of reconsidering food and nutrition. There’s no question that people who were physically healthier had a better chance of survival from the Spanish Flu.

If I was coming back to the class with students, I probably would bring in Alice Munro’s short story about the Spanish Flu “——-“ or Albert Camus’ play about the Spanish Flu “——–“ and bring in some literary experiences.

And of course, from an artistic standpoint, that great iconic painting by Edvard Munch of The Scream was set in the context of how the pandemic was ravaging Scandinavia at the time. Munch himself was afflicted by the Flu, although did not perish from it.

(Actually, Edvard Munch “The Scream of Nature” was painted in 1893. “Self Portrait with the Spanish Flu” painted by Edvard Munch in 1919 and “Self Portrait after the Spanish Flu” was also painted in 1919.)

(Inspired by these paintings, ask your students to create a COVID-19 self-portrait. The “portrait” can be traditional art, but also an Instagram Story or Tiktok )

I think there’s a lot of angles that we can come to for understanding the flu. That’s the first thing. I would also say to teachers that a lot of our lessons on the website are about the successful management of coming through the flu.

Another aspect of teaching about the Flu, is that one of the ways that Canadians were so successful at managing and surviving the Spanish Flu pandemic over the course of its three successive waves, was that we had been on a wartime footing for five years. What we’re experiencing today with legislating us into quarantine, Canadians were already very familiar with this in 1918 and 1919 because the whole country had been living under the government’s controls and severe regulation for four or five years. So when health care professionals, and hospitals and nurses, and the early forms of public health institutions in 1918-19 came to dealing with the flu, they were very well-prepared to tackle it because of that war footing that Canada had been on. When it comes to understanding the pandemic that we’re in right now, it’s really important to go back to moments in our history such as the First World War, where Canadians did survive. To a certain extent, they thrived, and they came through the experience of the other end perhaps the better because of the kind of regulation and restrictions that they were experiencing at the time.

Now, there’s a big downside to things like the War Measures Act, and we certainly don’t want to forget the implications of wartime restrictions. , and those are very important lessons for what we’re living through right now, because or many communities in Canada, they experienced the blunt edge of the force that came through governmental restrictions. Our hope is that this isn’t going to be the case today, but it is within the realm of possibility. So if I was teaching right now, I would certainly be talking about that with my students when we get back into the classroom.

I would also encourage teachers to pay attention to the remarkable stories that we have on our website of the women who were asked, in many cases, by their communities to volunteer to step up and become nurses. Although many of them had no formal training whatsoever, some of them had done that role informally through activities involved in the war. Through the IODE or the Women’s Institute. When it came to the pandemic in communities across Canada, a lot of women were called upon to step into the breach and become volunteer nurses, and triage people on their front porches, in church basements, in community halls. All across the country, there are stories of women really taking leadership roles. Men are still off at the front and they’re slowly starting to come back, but the men were in really no position to perform the duties that women were asked to perform in helping Canadians get through the pandemic.

SC:        I really appreciate you bringing that up because I don’t think it’s just because men were away at war, which is often how we include women in narratives related to war and homestead. But that this was care work, and women have always been at the front lines of care work, and this was a way to expand the care work that they were already doing in a more structured way.

I’ve done another video asking ‘how do we bring in more women?‘ Well, we talk about experiences and we acknowledge women’s work as central to the functioning of society. So, I appreciate you bringing in this example of ad hoc nurses because it is a way to really acknowledge women’s work at this time.

Right now, there are so many articles going around online about women who work full-time and who are mothers, who are now doing more care work and facing extra stress, as a parent. I think that a lot of people watching this video can appreciate how, all of a sudden, all this new care work gets brought to women, and this is another interesting topic to think through the continuity and change between 1918 and now.

(Editor’s note: See Marie-Helen (JOHN USE HER PROPER NAME WITH THE ACCENTS) talk from DATE where we talk about gender, nursing, and care work during COVID)

NO:        Yes, that’s very important.

And one more thing I’ll emphasize, because the inclusiveness element that you speak about so often is so important here, we spent time doing the best we could with Defining Moments Canada to identify a strong indigenous narrative for how the pandemic played out in communities that live very precarious lives across the country.

And, this was really tough. It was difficult for us to establish those narratives because the data is so fractious. The data is so flawed. The data is so absent in many cases. We have a lot of great historians, sociologists, epidemiologists, in the country who have written about the impact of the flu pandemic on indigenous communities across Canada, when good data is absent. We’re doing the best we can.

But what is really instructive, especially given COVID-19, is that Canadians need to appreciate how the pandemic devastated indigenous communities 100 years ago. Like just devastated the communities. I think we’re hearing a lot today about the potential impact on indigenous communities across Canada if COVID-19 was to make its way into indigenous communities. We’ve seen some nations essentially close its borders to outsiders, for a very good reason. If we go back 100 years, there’s a lot of evidence as to why that’s a very wise idea.

SC:        That’s so important to bring in. I think of this article I read in [2015] around the federal election in Macleans that said, we’re not really a nation unless we care about the fact that so many first nations don’t have running water. And I think that so many of us who have a enough privilege that we can hoard toilet paper, if that is how we’re choosing to deal with our COVID anxiety, need to be thinking about people who don’t have the structural resources to be able to fight COVID in the ways that our own communities may be gravitating toward. So thank you for that.

Before we wrap up, maybe you could talk a little bit just really quickly about Defining Moments Canada and its approach to history teaching.

I really advocate for emotional, affective teaching and learning: connection, complexity, and care. So, when I see your Seven Sentence Story Structure, for example, I find a lot of resonance in that. I really like this idea about story. Maybe you can talk a little bit more about Defining Moments as a way to conclude our talk.

NO:        Sure. Thank you for concentrating on Seven Sentence Story Structure. We designed that actually at the very start with ESL students in mind.

SC:        Interesting! That’s really interesting.

NO:        Yes. Story is so important to everything that we do in history, but we also felt that if we were going to approach these moments in Canadian history that largely have gone unnoticed or overlooked or suffered from public or cultural amnesia, and spend time with our students on it, we needed to make sure that every one of the students in our classrooms, regardless of whether they were in urban settings or rural settings, had a model or a methodology or pathway to approach good storytelling.

So the Seven Sentence Story Structure came out of that. And we felt very strongly that if we could work with teachers to develop this as a protocol, as a habit of mind, a good metacognitive strategy for students to really concentrate on building story around seven building blocks, then any topic that a student approached, whether it was in history or language arts or in science or in food and nutrition class, it could be approached the same way. So we really saw story as a transferable skill. And story as a habit of mind is foundational to what we do at Defining Moments Canada.

We want to put 21st-century digital learning tools in the hands of teachers so that students become, what we’re calling, the most competent ‘digital curators’ in Canada. We want every one of the students who engages with our projects to become ‘citizen curators.’ We want them to go out into their communities across Canada and find the stories about the topic we’re concentrating on and build a narrative with their teachers about it as a form of commemoration.

So if it’s about our new project on the discovery of insulin, which is coming up next year, we know that across Canada diabetes was ravaging this country 100 years ago. We know that in communities, large and small, from precarious communities right through to the more affluent, middle-class Canadians, we understand that there are stories about diabetes and insulin that need to be retrieved from our archives, from our newspapers, from our libraries, from our knowledge keepers.

SC:        From our memories!

NO:        From our memories!

So we want students to become citizen curators to bring those stories into their classrooms and begin to tell those stories. The Seven Sentence Story Structure becomes the methodology that can structure this, and so we want every student to become comfortable with it.

Defining Moments Canada is an interdisciplinary approach to these historical moments. We want as many science teachers, math teachers, food nutrition teachers to be utilizing our resources as we do have history teachers using these resources. Everything on our website is designed for the intermediate level student right through to the senior student, using curriculum from across the country. As we start to develop our new projects over the next few years, we’re really going to be rolling out a lot of new tools for teachers to use.

Our approach is about taking our historical narrative that has driven the settler culture in Canada, and unpack it, and discover the stories that are shared amongst Canadians that do not get the kind of popular attention.

The Flu was the first example of that, but there are so many more.

SC:        I know you know some of my work, around Historic Space, which is a methodology for exploring history where students map out a historical period through a concept map, they like organize it, they learn about a couple of those things, but then most of the time is spent challenging that narrative through artifacts, oral histories, primary sources.

And so, selfishly, I love the Defining Moments Canada approach because it involves some of that challenge as a key element for approaching history in a way that is manageable for history teachers and  non-threatening for students, but also provides great opportunities to go deeper, because we know that students like to go deeper, but they need to feel safe, and they need to feel supported, and they need to feel like it is meaningful for them.

NO:        You’re so right, Samantha. And working with students around asking some fundamentally simple, but fundamentally important, critical inquiry questions to shape that understanding. If you’re using a concept map, that’s a perfect way of approaching it for kids. Also engaging in conversation. We want kids to be talking about this in class as they challenge the narratives, as they develop new thinking, as they branch out into different realms. We want them to be chatting about this, talking about this, constantly conversing about it.

SC:        Thank you for your work on this. I’m so glad you put so much effort into it two years ago or four years ago. Who knew? I mean, I guess we all just should have known or whatever. But it’s been so great talking with you today. Thank you so much!

NO:       You’re so welcome, Samantha, and keep doing all that you’re doing. It’s so good.

SC:        Thank you. Hopefully, we’ll have more opportunities to collaborate.

NO:       Yes. Thank you.

SC:        Bye!

NO:       Bye!