“As an educator, I have taught in the Teacher Education Program at the University of Ottawa, teaching courses on History education methods at the Intermediate and Senior levels. Between my undergraduate studies in History, obtaining my own secondary school teaching qualifications, conducting research on postcolonial education on the Caribbean island of Dominica, and now engaging in work on antiracism through informal forms of education, I learned to see history as something that people create through their own knowledges and lived experiences, and I now understand History education to generally be that of teaching and learning about relationships between people, time, place, and space. While this approach might be seen as an interdisciplinary one, branching away from more traditional forms of teaching historical inquiry, I believe it provides students with a stronger sense of why learning about the past matters for understanding themselves in relation to the contexts of the world in which they live. These are the ideas I discuss and try to expand upon in my conversation below.” –Mark Currie

Dr. Samantha Cutrara:        Mark, thank you so much for agreeing to speak with me today. It’s really exciting to blend both your interest in anti-racist history, which is how I know you, as well as your doctoral work on anti-racist geographies, which I’m really excited to talk about. Before we get started, do you want to do a little introduction to your own work before we just jump into the questions?

Mark Currie:        Sure! Thank you so much for having me on. It’s been just an exciting lead up to being your guest here. I’ve seen so many great people speak on your show. And I just think it’s such a privilege to be put in with that list of names. So thank you very much for having me.

SC:        Thank you.

MC:        It’s a great opportunity to talk about some of the work I’ve been doing and some of the thinking that I’ve been working with. As you say, I’ve been working with the idea of anti-racist geographies and anti-racist historical consciousness. I think in a nutshell, what I’ve been looking at is the relationships between the geographies—the spaces that we occupy—the ways that we’ve become positioned in those spaces as racialized beings, and the way that we create those spaces through our understanding of histories and in relationship to the present. So I think there’s a strong role to be played in terms of developing anti-racist historical consciousness, which I can talk a little bit more about later in terms of understanding who we are in the spaces that we occupy on an everyday basis.

SC:        You know, one of the things that has been really awesome about this show that I’m doing is to see all of these different ways that people come to history. I came from a Women’s Studies background, so very interdisciplinary, which really helps me think about both theory as well as subjects. And if I remember correctly, you were also from an interdisciplinary bachelor background, right?

MC:        Not so much the bachelor background. My bachelor background was History and English, but where the interdisciplinary stuff really comes in was perhaps more in my Island Studies work where I focused on post-colonial education in a Caribbean setting. It became a strong working of the relationships between the island setting itself, the education, the history behind the education, and the history behind the colonization of the island. And so a lot of different disciplines at play there, all coming together in the Caribbean doing an ethnography.

SC:        Yeah, it’s so interesting how we come to these different ideas. So I’ll jump into the first question which is about, have you thought of history any differently? And we can expand this to talk about social studies more broadly. But have your ideas about history changed because of this moment at all?

MC:        Well, I think in a lot of ways, yes. First of all, I’ll say that I find it difficult to separate the history and what we’ll call the geography of the spatial elements, because the histories that we learn are always positioned in a context in the space. They take place in a space; they shape that space.

In terms of the context that we’re in now, looking at history in terms of how it relates to our everyday experiences, it’s just interesting to see how the way that we’ve always understood our spaces—the way that we’ve been taught to understand them from the past—is shifting, and we’re seeing that shift with the way that we use spaces and are perhaps recognizing that more. What we’re experiencing now becomes like a history of tomorrow, and that’s just really interesting to think about in terms of historicizing ourselves, I think, and recognizing that yeah, what we’re doing, the way that we’re experiencing this pandemic, for example, is very much going to shape the world of tomorrow. So it’s definitely something where history has to be considered.

I think in another way though, it’s also interesting to think about the histories that we are taught, that we do learn. When we think of, say, secondary school history, for example, I think about learning about World War I, the Depression, World War II that type of thing, and little do we hear about the idea that right around the tail end of World War I was a pandemic; the Spanish flu there. And that’s interesting to think about which history has become prominent, which history becomes prioritized in different times. Since this pandemic started, I’ve heard more about Spanish flu than I have in my entire life before this.

SC:        Me too.

MC:        So I thought, well, why am I just hearing about it now? Well, I think its history becomes important in relation to the context that we’re in perhaps. Yeah, so it’s a changing perspective, I think.

SC:        Well, I think too about what you said, you can’t just separate history and geography, history and space, because I think about the Spanish flu and I think of Neil Orford’s talk that he did, the very first “Pandemic Pedagogy” talk, when he said, “A lot of women were turning their porches and their church basement into these makeshift hospitals.” And those types of use of spaces also get lost in our cultural amnesia of particular histories.

So when you’re saying we learn to use spaces because of how they’ve been used in the past, it’s not often conscious as much as in the historical legacy. I think that’s a really powerful way to put those things together.

MC:        Absolutely. What I try to bring into this conversation with that idea of historicizing the ways that we come to understand the way we use spaces, is also the added idea of who gets to use those spaces. Who gets to claim belonging to those spaces or ownership of those spaces? And in a lot of cases, what we find is if we look at the history and even the present, what we find is that the spaces are often marked in ways that are in racialized terms. Whether intentionally or not, they become marked in ways that we understand them as certain official spaces, and when we say official, that means it’s who gets to claim that as their official past, as their official present.

MC:        And in doing so, it excludes a lot of people, particularly racialized people and Indigenous people. So that’s the kind of work that I’m trying to understand, how in shaping those spaces we enact exclusions and inclusions along various lines. Whether we intentionally do so or not, the effects are exclusions. So that’s something to consider, I think.

SC:        Yeah, I think of a really big example is when Trump was trying to demonize Nancy Pelosi, saying, “Oh, Nancy Pelosi wants us dancing in the streets of Chinatown.” And like that is such an evocation of racialized discourse that you point to that and use that as an example of racializing a particular phenomenon in very explicitly racist ways.

Do you have any examples that teachers might be able to think about or use that aren’t quite as explicit? I know I’m putting you on the spot with that, but I wonder if —

MC:        That’s okay, because I think what teachers might be able to emphasize more is the local; is the looking at where they and their students are, just looking around the spaces that they occupy on an everyday basis. Not anything that we determine as particularly historically significant. You know, yes, you need to look around. I’m in Ottawa right now and I could go to Parliament Hill and there are statues of former prime ministers and statues dedicated to the War of 1812 and all these types of monuments and such, and we can analyze those, and I do, I do think those warrant some analysis, but it doesn’t even need to go to just those specific historical markers in that way; rather, just the everyday. Look at the street signs that we have on our streets. Look at the structures that we live in.

If teachers ask their students to look at the spaces that they occupy on an everyday basis, considering ideas of which languages are being represented, considering the ideas of just even the design of their town, of their street, what is their function and who gets to decide how that function is perpetuated or not, I think in a lot of cases, you’ll find that cultural representation, for example, you can point to—say you’re talking about the Chinatown. For people in Toronto or Ottawa or in a lot of major cities, they will have a Chinatown and you can say, “Well, there’s representation.” But at the same time, you have to ask, “Why is it there? Why is there only representation—why is it the main representation of Chinese culture and history and anything like that, why is it isolated to that spot? And who got to decide that?”

Because if you look at the surrounding, the dominant area surrounding that becomes, well, it’s not Chinese. Typically it’s taken over by the same signs and designs and such that were put in place by British colonial bodies and then continued on as Canada became its own country, but hanging on to those colonial roots, those colonial structures, that kind of thing.

So I know I’m kind of going on a roundabout way of what can teachers do, but I think coming back to that, it’s the idea of looking at the history of the space that you’re in and seeing who gets represented and who doesn’t get represented and why. And has it always been the case? I think in a lot of cases, you’ll find that there’s maybe those— now, I don’t want to say token necessarily, but usually token examples of racialized representations, but for the most part, the dominant representation is still that underlying structure of colonialism that is maintained.

SC:        Well, I mean, like I think of street signs just like you said, right? Are we naming these particular streets after key people in the settling of a city or a town? And that settlement is settler colonialism. And often we can incorporate gender into these conversations. Are we renaming women? No, probably not. And often in houses, they’ll be like “so and so lived here with his wife and his children.” And I think that’s a really powerful way to be able to think about the incorporation of history and geography, especially as we’re moving into the summer and teachers might be thinking of the ways that their classrooms are going to be shifting in September, and thinking of ways to do some outreach to community, but also in a way that’s—what’s the word I’m looking for? That’s very tangible, right?—

MC:        Sure.

SC:        —for students and teachers, if it does go back to remote teaching, and I think looking at your local neighborhood I think is a great suggestion, as well as like the larger municipalities around you.

I think of Casey Burkholder’s talk that I did where she was saying she was getting her teacher candidates to also just map their own quarantine spaces.

MC:        Yeah.

SC:        That can also highlight things that you don’t even necessarily think are racialized or gendered or classed and then they become this, or you see them becoming this, because they were always there, but you hadn’t really seen it that way. So yeah, those are some really powerful connections. Thank you.

MC:        I’m happy to talk about it because this is something I think about basically on a daily basis right now.

SC:        Yeah, I live in a very Greek neighborhood, and it’s interesting that a lot of people will speak Greek to me and I am not Greek. And I’m just like, “Oh, no.” And then I recognize the ways that my neighborhood excludes me from a lot of things because it was designed to be this kind of Greek community. It’s been a really interesting element to be living in this community to think about, well, “why did this Greek neighborhood have to pop up in a way that there are just all these businesses that only speak Greek?” And I’m going to be more thoughtful about it because of the suggestion. So thank you.

MC:        My pleasure. I think that’s what I’ve learned so much through my own research, but also in talking to people about my research: it’s always interesting and wonderful to see that click of beginning to think about the simple things that we take for granted every day in terms of how we do and don’t ‘fit’ with the space that we’re in.

So what my work does a lot of is looking at the spaces of Toronto and historicizing those. And for the city that is said to be—I think it is said to be the most multicultural place on the Earth, perhaps.

SC:        One of them. I think it’s like one of them. Yeah.

MC:        One of them. Okay, thank you. I think my stats are dated, perhaps. But yeah, one of the most multicultural places, it’s always interesting to see how the English language, for example, becomes the constant, where, well, yes, you see the restaurants and the shops and such that speak other languages other than English, and they have the signs that are other than English, but if you look at the majority of them, and I don’t know about your experience of where you are, but the majority of them that I’ve looked at, they can be in a variety of different languages, but there’s always an English representation.

MC:        There’s always that English as the constant and that these representations other than English become added on, as opposed to being there just in their own right.

SC:        Mm-hmm. This came up in Marie-Hélène’s talk as well, that we have to—if we want to leave the pandemic fighting for greater equity or engaging in activism for a greater equity, we have to recognize the ways that a lot of minorities get marginalized, which include like Franco linguistic minorities in—

MC:        Sure.

SC:        —in Canada, which is a bilingual country. So yeah, those are interesting elements to bring up.

I want to switch to our second question right now, which is about teaching history after this. Do you think that because people are in their homes right now, they feel like they aren’t able to utilize the spaces that they normally use, so they might be thinking about them differently? Do you think any of that is going to change the way we teach history after this moment?

MC:        Well, I’ll start by saying, I hope so.

SC:        Okay.

MC:        Because I think now we’re seeing an opportunity. Whether we take it or not, we’re seeing that opportunity to go back to that idea of thinking about history in the place that we’re in. And I think that if we take that opportunity to promote that, to emphasize that history that we are in, and see things not as just some story in a textbook that is taken for granted and taken as it is, but as something that we have, we come out with our own experiences and with our own knowledges and we shape it ourselves and we create histories ourselves. So I hope that there’s an opportunity taken to make use of this changed environment of learning that we have here and bring about this idea of it’s not just a story in a book of the past; it’s something that we’re living.

And so when we think back to that Spanish Flu idea, and thinking, “how did that shape and reshape the ways that we engage with our society?” and then to bring that to our present and say, “okay, now, let’s look at our own lives and how is the pandemic shaping and reshaping the way that we take for granted every day the way that we operate in our spaces and which spaces we take for granted as having access to.” A major place in this pandemic is grocery stores. Prior to this, we’re very used to—so long as the store is open—we’re very used to having the ability to walk in and out of those places, and that’s not the case anymore. There are rules, and regulations, and lineups and this is also changing the way that we operate with our spaces around.

So moving forward in terms of teaching history, I think there’s an opportunity to kind of put history in relation to the present in a much different way. In a much more personal and connected way than perhaps it has been in previous educational efforts.

SC:        You know, one of the things that I’m a little worried about in going back, whatever that looks like, is the desire for teachers to want to connect with student’s experiences. So well, really, foreground student’s reflections of this moment. And I talked about this with Kristina Llewellyn, that students might not be ready to do that. They might not be comfortable doing that. Their quarantine experience might have felt really unsafe or uncomfortable, or maybe it would just feel fine, like, “fine, let me just play my video games by myself.”

But what I’m hearing from something that you’re saying is that this could be a really interesting way for students to connect to the pandemic, but in a way that doesn’t self-divulge in the same way; to get teachers to invite students to think about the spaces around them as a form of reflection about their own personal experience, but more about the society around them.

So what I heard from what you were saying about teaching history is that we can use space as a way to get into students connecting with this experience in historical ways, but, and again—this draws on my fear—without them having to self-divulge in ways that they might not be familiar with. So I think that’s a really powerful element to going back to really connect with the geography, to connect with spaces as a way for students to think through this moment and then, therefore, think through other moments in history.

MC:        Yeah, I think that element of how comfortable and safe students might feel to divulge, I think that’s something that we perhaps can put it into context of the pandemic, but it has been the case even before the pandemic, of course. And so I think because we can use this as a more connected and personal way of engaging with the experiences, but without divulging, we come to see perhaps what we were overlooking before. What we were taking for granted as something to just assume, “Well, students are all in this classroom together. They’re all in the same boat. They should all be able to talk about it the same way,” and that was never the case.

MC:        So now I think, leaning on what you’re talking about there in the comfort and safety of being able to divulge, that’s something where we might, ourselves as educators, reflect back and say, “What was I doing before? What was I asking students to do before and was that a comfortable and safe thing for me to do?” Because now we have much more—I think you used the word tangible before—a tangible context that we say, “Oh, this is not being experienced the same way by every student, and so I need to be more conscious of that,” in the same way that with or without pandemic, life is not being experienced the same way by every student. So we need to be conscious of that, cognizant of that, and promote ways of investigation, ways of thinking perhaps that allow students to make those connections personally, but don’t require them to say, “Here’s me”, if they’re not comfortable to do so.

SC:        Right. And also the student might not feel—the student might feel comfortable doing so, but they might not be comfortable in that space doing so, right? Again, this is where the space dynamics come in. Like maybe a classroom setting is really a comfortable space. Maybe it’s the teacher. Maybe it’s the other students in the classroom.

So to ensure that there is that space metaphorically for students to explore different elements and bring what they want to or need to into the classroom when they can. And this idea of allowing student’s multifaceted experiences and multifaceted elements of their lives and their histories into the classroom is a key element of my own work, as you know, about imagining a new ‘we’; that it’s, you know, it’s really easy to think, okay, the students as this monolith, but these students are these young humans with all these experiences, and how can we ensure that they are seen, they are heard, they’re able to speak, and in a way that allows them to bring those full selves without this compromise or a ‘subtractive’ sense of self?

And I think of—there is this theorist that talks about the ethics of care, Nel Noddings, and one of the critiques that she’s had from a lot of critical race theorists is that she puts too much of a pressure on the student to show up the way the teacher envisions. And instead, critical race theorists say that education should not be ‘subtractive’ to students’ sense of selves, and that’s a key-key element of imagining a new ‘we’.

Do you have thoughts about the ways that we can imagine a new ‘we’ during this time after this time? Do you think that’s possible? Do you think that is a worthwhile thing to think about? Do you have thoughts?

MC:        Yeah. That’s obviously a big question, hence, something that warrants some great conversation. I don’t know that there is a set new ‘we’ in the same way that as much as some people would like to believe it, we didn’t necessarily have a set ‘we’ before this. Who represents ‘we’? Who can say that we are included in a space changes in context, in time and space and so, I think it’s not so much that there is a new ‘we’, but perhaps that there will be new ‘we’s, plural, to consider in terms of how we’ve experienced this whole pandemic and how we’ve made it to the other side, so to speak.

SC:        Once we get to the other side.

MC:        Yes, exactly. And that’s something to be seen, what ‘we’ will look like once this is, so to speak, all over.

So I think when you talk about the imagining a new ‘we’, I think a ‘we’ is always an element—there’s always an element of imagining a ‘we,’ with or without pandemic, because ‘we’ insinuates the idea of the categories, the lines to say I am part of ‘we’, and therefore, somebody else is not. We’ve always done this. And I use the ‘we’ in general terms there.

It’s just a matter of what are the parameters, what will the new parameters be for who’s included and not included in the ‘we’? I think there’ll be new lines set, I think, in different ways. Some will be just reconstructed as they’ve been on national lines and racialized lines and gendered lines. But there’s also a matter of the ‘we’ in terms of shared experience and certain different collective memories that I think that’s where we’ll see new categories being created.

SC:        Well, to pick up on an element to that in kind of an active way, I think that it allows us, too, to recognize how we have the agency to define and push and set those parameters ourselves and to really challenge ourselves to look at who the ‘we’s are that we are surrounded by and to recognize the absences and to recognize what it would look like to re-engage with a community of ‘we’.

One of my favorite answers to “do you think we’re going to teach history different after this” was the teacher Ian Duncan, because he said, “I don’t know because I don’t know who my students are going to be when they’re back in the classroom.” And I love that answer because to me, it actually brings in all three of the questions. It demonstrates the shifting subjectivities because of history with historical actors, but it also—and this is why I’m saying it—because it picks up on what you said: there are these different ‘we’s and the ‘we’ for young people has yet to be created because we don’t have an endpoint; we don’t even know if we’re in the middle of it.

So to me, your answer helps bring up the fact that we can’t just assume that any sort of ‘we’ is going to be the same after this moment. And we have to continuously challenge ourselves to recognize that.

MC:        And I think—just playing off something you just said there with the idea of agency—I think the idea of putting together with how we teach history and how we see ourselves as agents of history and helping students to understand themselves as not only products of history, but also producers of history, in terms of the products of history as far as the way that history has positioned them in particular ways, but also the possibility for reimagining various histories in ways that reshape the way that people become positioned in the future.

MC:        And I think that’s an opportunity just to—I guess I’m trying to put things altogether here into one nice little package, but this—

SC:        It’ll be a messy package, right? So don’t—

MC:        Yeah, it’s always a messy package. But this idea of the agency to produce histories is the agency to produce what ‘we’s are created. And who has the ability to do that? Well, everyone has the ability, but whose productions of history become dominant and not dominant is something that might—I mean, I think it’s something to be recognized, but it’s also something that we can perhaps see changing as we look at history differently through our current context and the spaces that we are now learning history in.

SC:        Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. I think that’s something that Sean Carlton said and he said it really great. And I know I’m going to not say it as well as he did, but he said something like, “We are historical agents with—we have agency, but not in conditions of our own choosing.” And that to me is saying we have space to maneuver in this pandemic world that we’re trying to figure out, and we have space to maneuver what it will look like when we move forward into the future, but we also have to be active in prompting that. And both history and geography is a really good way to start thinking about that. So thanks so much for bringing all those perspectives to this conversation.

MC:        Oh, it’s been a pleasure. And I hope that it helps to carry on more conversations and people—between all those other episodes that you’ve mentioned there—putting pieces together and try to move forward in different ways and new ways that maybe creates not necessarily a singular ‘we’, but ‘we’s that are better.

SC:        Well, you know, one of the things that I’m really picking up from in having all of these conversations—because you’re like number 30 of the conversations I’ve had—

SC:        One of the things is that people recognize and are hopeful for different things. And they also recognize the inequities. And what I’m looking to hear right now and thinking about so much in relationship to these conversations are the ways for us to mobilize this: How to make action; how to use our classrooms to do that; how to use ourselves; how to demonstrate to students how they can make change. And that’s why drawing on history is such a powerful way because—I’ll just use the example of how often women’s suffrage is talked about as, okay, women fought for the right to vote. They were allowed to vote or they got the right to vote, but there isn’t really that larger context of activism and looking at what that activism looked like.

And I think if we engage more of those types of narratives in our classrooms, as well as to recognize the ways that our spaces do shape a lot of these ideas—like I think about Christie Pits in Toronto that had the Nazi—what’s the word I’m looking for? Do you know what I’m talking about?

MC:        The riot. I think, if I’m correct, the Christie Pits riots?

SC:        Yes, thank you. So if I think about the Christie Pits riots and we can really recognize the ways that these spaces have been used in the past and, therefore, the ways that we can use our own spaces I think is really powerful. So yeah, I love the way the conversations are coming together.

MC:        Well, I think just to touch on your example of the women’s right to vote and how we hear about the fact that it came about, the date that it came about, but that we don’t hear a lot about the activism that led up to it. I think on top of that is, we also don’t hear a lot about how the activism continued beyond that—

MC:        —because the initial right to vote came in, but it was the right to vote if you fit into a very particular box as a woman, and the fact that that right to vote came in is fantastic, but the work had to continue on. There was no once-and-done thing. The work had to continue on to allow for women, Black women and Indigenous women, to get the right to vote much later.

SC:        Quebecois women.

MC:        Quebecois women. Yes, thank you. Yeah. And omitting these perpetuates this idea of history being a single moment and being done—it changed, it’s done, moving on—that’s where I think we need to perhaps revamp the ways that we understand the histories, because I think if we talk about actions of breaking down sexism, breaking down racism, it’s never going to be a once-and-done thing. It’s never going to be a one-size-fits-all. It’s a matter of, it has to be active, as you say. It has to be ongoing and it has to be continued over and over. Because as we’ve seen in history, racism, sexism, homophobia: all these discriminations become recreated if they’re allowed to grow.

And I think that’s something that we have the agency, too, to carry forward, to carry on over and over if we are aware of how it’s working. And that takes an understanding of where it came from. The understanding of the history behind it. And that’s where I think perhaps an element of history education could come into play.

SC:        Yes, definitely. And I’m hoping that this series can spark some ideas in people’s classrooms, whether it’s K-12, whether it’s university, whether it’s college, whether it’s in continuing ed, whether it’s a public history project, about how that can be done both during and after this time in ways that also really address the connections and complexities of this time.

So thanks so much for bringing all this to the table. This was a really great talk. Thank you.

MC:        Well, thank you very much for having me.

SC:        And we’ll stay connected. We’ll see what comes of this series because, you know, why stop with one thing when you could do like a half a dozen?

MC:        Of course. Well, as you say, it’s a conversation that needs to be ongoing.

SC:        Yeah, it does though. Okay, we’ll see you later. Bye.

MC:        Take care. Thanks.