Dr. Samantha Cutrara:        Hi, Funke. Thank you so much for speaking with me today. I’m so excited to be able to have another historian of education talking on this series, especially because you also have a women’s studies and gender studies background in both what you’re teaching and in your own scholarship. And so thank you so much for speaking with us today.

Funké Aladejebi:        Thanks so much for having me. I’m looking forward to like continuing some of these conversations and contributing to what I think is a series of really awesome dialogues.

SC:        Yeah, thank you. I did a little introduction and I mentioned the manuscript that you’re working on. Do you want to just do another little introduction of yourself before we get started?

FA:        Sure. So I’m Funké Aladejebi, and a lot of my work focuses around Black Canadian history and the intersections of Black Canadian history with gender, and so a lot of my work looks at Black women teachers, their experiences in teachers colleges, teaching institutions, but also their experiences as educators in the classroom. So a lot of this looks at race, the intersections between race and gender, and how these experiences influenced the way we think about history, the way we write history, and the way that educators experience the classroom.

SC:        Yeah, those are such important intersections and I think, especially right now, to be able to think of those intersections in this conversation. So I’ll start with the first question about whether or not you have thought about history any differently from this moment? And it’s interesting because what I found is that people that already have a very intersectional understanding of history, it hasn’t changed their understanding or thoughts of history right now, but it’s really augmented the importance of these intersections. Any thoughts on that? Have your ideas about history changed during this moment?

FA:        Yeah. I think my ideas of history have been magnified in really, really interesting ways. So in thinking about Afro-centric learning and in thinking about Afro-centric teaching, I really am thinking about this moment as a way of going back to this kind of traditional ways of learning and the way that community, for example, is so much connected to individual ideas of self. And so a lot of these kind of conversations have been forcing me to think about how Black racialized communities as people have really had to draw on these kind of traditional mechanisms of learning, traditional mechanisms of teaching, but also of community cohesion in this moment of disruption. And so I think, for me, COVID-19 has forced me to revisit these mechanisms of Afro-centric learning of even indigenous knowledges all the ways that we think in the most abstract sense and the way we [inaudible 0:07:46.7] abstract sense about history is really forcing me to think about the practical elements of that. How do communities of people who rely so much on community connection deal, right, with COVID-19 which forces a sense of individualism that is incredibly difficult for certain communities of people, or how do you grieve the loss of a community member when you can’t be physically present within that, right?

So these are interesting moments that it’s forcing me to think about the historical legacies of these mechanisms and what it means in a practical way to how people live now. I’ve also been thinking a lot about history, and I always think about history in terms of continuity and change. So thinking about the way that the historical past informs how we think about our contemporary circumstances, and this is always been the same, but we can draw on kind of the work of historians to think about how human beings have dealt with pandemics in the past and how this particular pandemic offers a series of different things, right? So what are the changes that have been facilitated by that? And so I think history is kind of getting reinvigorated, right? It’s getting like a new fancy face. A really nice [crosstalk 0:09:02.3] store, right?

And so I think that’s an exciting time, is that so much of the way that people have thought about history and so much of the ways that I often teach history is to try and convince people that history is amazing. It’s like really interesting. But my labor is not as much — it’s not as difficult I should say because people are starting to realize the significance and the importance of looking at these histories for tracking trends, for accessing data, for thinking about what this can tell us about how we move or what our future will look like, right?

So COVID-19 has really created a situation by which people don’t know what the world will look after, and I think history lends itself to that. And so I think, for me, teaching about history or trying to get people to be more engaged in history is getting them to think about what are some of the patterns, what are some of the trends that can help them think about what their future might look like and what are the things that might completely take us on a different path. So that’s the thing that’s kind of exciting to me about this, but I don’t know if it’s necessarily changed my thinking of history. I think it’s just illuminated the tools that I’ve learned from history and has given me a better way for talking about how these historical tools cannot be applied to what we are experiencing now.

SC:        Mm. Yeah, that’s really interesting. And, of course, the idea of continuity and change has come up in other videos. I’m thinking of Orford and Jan Haskings-Winner who are like a history teachers or former history teachers that have brought that up as an important element to be able to talk with K-12 students, for example. But I want to think about like the first part of your answer about this notion of kind of traditional community Afro-centric indigenous knowledges or epistemologies because I think there’s this moment that can — this interesting balance because on one hand, if you are home, and this is something Kristina Llewellyn talked about withdrawal histories, you can use this as an opportunity to get to know your family and your family’s history in different ways, as well as an opportunity or parents, for example, to do more “unschooling” to be able to focus on particular elements of knowledge that are important at this moment, but then there’s also that loss of community and ways to kind of — that can be virtually connected. But sometimes when we are working with elders, for example, that virtual connections are either not possible or they’re just not preferable because of that kind of afect that’s important.

Any kind of comments about the individualism of being home, being socially isolated as a way to generate knowledge because we don’t have the kind of the same community around us?

FA:        Yeah, absolutely. I think persons of African descent, communities of African descent have long kind of push back against this desire to be individual to be isolated. There have been [inaudible 0:12:19.1] and important ways by which our communities have constantly worked to build those community connections, and it’s still happening in the COVID crisis, right?

I’ll speak specifically about what’s happening in Nova Scotia in terms of like the Black community activists that are there who are still working really diligently to remind people that we are connected to one another, right, to promote and encourage race-based data. The collection of race-based data during COVID-19. They’re visiting members in prison and they’re practicing social distancing, but they’re not forgetting about kind of this communal connectedness, this communal sense of responsibility, and of course, accountability, right, for our governments, for our powers that’d be to ensure that communities of people who haven’t had access to these things continue to be able to have the same kinds of rights as everyone else.

And so I think that racialized communities have long pushed back against this, and this is a historical legacy of the way that they advocate. And so while the platforms have changed, right? Like some of that might be driving in their cars, staying six feet apart, or whatever the case may be, but the political activism has never ended. I think the mechanisms by which they’re using that community activism has changed. But I also think there’s a revaluing of community connection now that we’ve been isolated in this really forceful way. So I’m thinking in a more practical sense about how much I’m working to engage with my nephews and my siblings, right, in a really concrete way —

FA:        — to ensure that we are constantly getting together, right? We are valuing the different things that we probably would have put off into a later date. We’re making sure that it’s an important part of how we exist. And, of course, valuing community knowledge keepers, elders in our community trying to get them to record their stories, trying to sit with them in spaces so that they can begin to document their experiences and then share those experiences.

So in some ways, yeah, the mechanisms have changed, but I think the inherent community practices that have always been there remain, right? So I think it’s been a forceful way of trying to resist this notion of individualism, but were also adhering to safety measures and making sure that what we do know of those things. So it’s revaluing our community members, revaluing our community elders and the knowledges that they have and understanding that there are traditional knowledges and traditional knowledge keepers in our community that we sometimes don’t gravitate too, and that maybe we should go back and revisit and talk to [inaudible 0:15:01.1] and figure out what their experiences have been throughout, right, their life story or history.

SC:        Yeah. You know, that’s interesting about that kind of pushback against individualism. I posted a video last week that I actually had recorded way before this happened that asked teachers to think about what their purpose of teaching history is, and I used a book from 1990 that talks about different kind of forms of curriculum. Transmission, transaction, transformation. And this transmission is a kind of conservative, a transaction is liberal, and transformation is a more radical perspective as I’m sure you know.

And I always advocate against kind of this liberal approach to teaching history because of the ways that it is focused on individuals. It isn’t focused on progress as the product, but just as like a process. Like, it’s going. Don’t worry, things will be fine. And that we really should advocate for more history education that is transformative, and that is based in intersections, and it’s based in community, and based in making social change. And that was really cool that Kristina Llewellyn talked about in her video that if we aren’t hearing stories differently, then we can’t advocate for social change based on the experiences of those stories.

And so those are some of the things that I’m pulling from — like that I hear from what you’re saying. Do you think some of that will shift the way we teach history after this moment? Do you think the teaching of history will change after this moment? Do you think there will be more of a transformation, social change, political activism connecting with elders after this moment?

FA:        I hope so, right? The optimistic side of me is really, really hopeful. Yeah, and is thinking about how we have these interconnected histories that are parallel to one another, that are constantly in dialogue with one another. I think sometimes the way that Black Canadian history has often been treated in Canada has been that it’s something separate, right? That it’s something that people over their experience. If not something that was inherently part of the Canadian nation, it’s not part of the national story. And I think the potential for this kind of moment is that it’s forcing us to think about how, just how deeply interconnected these stories are, and how much they learn from one another, how much they are in communication with one another.

And so I think teaching history will be that. I think people will realize that these digital platforms [inaudible 0:17:50.8] have allowed us to bring community into the classroom, but also that the school, right, the physical place of the school is not just the end-all, be-all place of learning, right? That learning can happen in community, that learning can happen — and it seems simple to be [inaudible 0:18:09.2] things because I know other educators often think of this. But I think really genuinely people will — I hope people are thinking about the way that learning can happen in different places. So I think history will change in that sense.

There is also a pessimistic side of me that kind of thinks that the people who have always engaged in history and I’m thinking about the teaching of history as constantly evolving and constantly relevant to our daily life will continue to do that. And the people who haven’t really thought about or cared about history and the way that history informs our present context will continue to think that way too. And so part of me kind of [inaudible 0:18:49.6] interesting input. I’m also deeply, deeply grounded in the social reality that we’re in where people, given all the historical information, given all of the scientific information that we have, continuously ejects factual data and evidence for something else, right? And I think that’s something that we have to be acutely aware of and combat against.

I think the way that we’ve taught history in the past that I think many people who are invested in social justice education often are thinking about the optimism and were not thinking about how to protect and begin to anticipate what happens if the opposite happens in our world where there’s going to be a bunch of people who don’t care about the relevance of historical data and evidence about what it means for the long-standing legacies [inaudible 0:19:41.1*of how people lived today.] And I think that we need to really take more proactive. So things will change I hope. But if they don’t, I think we need to be ready for the potential of that as well.

SC:        Yeah, that’s really important. And really, when you say like that there are people that still might not look at things like evidence, I think of the conversations I’ve had particularly with the American scholars, John Bickford and Andrea Hawkman and Sarah Shear, that like I’ve heard that more from the American scholars, but I think it’s important that we need to remember that that’s happening here, especially when it comes to things like inequity and things like social justice. How easy it is for us to turn our ear on or off to things that already kind of fit our world view. And so everyone that I’ve spoken to identifies that this can be a moment to look at and reveal the structures of inequity. But yeah, I appreciate what you’re saying that we need to think about how this might not be something that everyone is going to take with it and come from it. And so, how and in what ways do we think through that?

For me, this leads to my third question, which happens to be a good segue, which is always nice when that happens, is that the purpose of the video series generally and my work generally is on this imagining a new ‘we’ because I have found in history classes very similar to what you said. That there is this — well, we’ll do Canadian history and then we’ll do the other histories after. Like those are important, but like let’s first to the Canadian history. And especially when there are racialized students in the class, that that gets even more separated. The us and them. The othering of students in the narratives that they carry are even more prominent.

And so imagining a new ‘we’ is a huge focus of my book, but also of the series. And so I wonder how we can imagine a new ‘we’ during and after this moment. Will it change? Will it morph? Will there be more opportunities for creativity? In collaboration and community? Do you have any thoughts about how we might imagine a new ‘we’ after this time? Do you think we even should?

FA:        Yeah, it’s a good question, especially in the Canadian context. And I really love and appreciate that you make this distinction about how in the American context, it’s easy for Canadians, right, to look at the United States and how that imbalance, that inequity is so vast, right? And it’s so evident that it’s really hard to deny the way that disengagement happens, but in Canada, we aren’t as vocal with inequity, but it’s very much there, right?

FA:        That we have whole communities. I remember at the beginning when scholars, academics, and activists were demanding, right, that race-based data be collected for COVID-19. And so many people, politicians particularly were saying, “We don’t have a race problem here. There’s no need, right, to collect this data.” And I think that leaning on erasure, that leaning on silencing is something that we really need to try as much as possible to push against. And so the imagining a new ‘we’ for me is a complicated question, right? Because when I think about racialized communities, when I think about Black Canadian communities, I recognize that this COVID-19, the questions that have arisen as a result of COVID-19 have always been present for Black and Brown indigenous communities, right?

SC:        Right.

FA:        Food insecurity has always been present. Procurity of work has always been present. Lower socio-economic challenges have always been present in Black Canadian communities. And so the questions that COVID is causing mainstream Canadians to question, there are things that Black Canadians, racialized communities have always been questioning, right? The hypervigilance, the policing, all of these things have been part of their everyday experiences.

And so I hope that the ‘we’ is asking people what happens if we include, what happens if we consider people in our society who are different from us, right? And maybe we’ll be able to tackle these questions if we consider the most disenfranchised in our communities and in our societies. And so I hope that the reimagining of the we expands who we are, right?

I think a lot of times, the definitions of we have largely been positioned as mainstream white eurocentric [inaudible 0:24:37.6*mooshings] of what it means to be Canadian. And I think we really need to blow that definition up and say that we is inclusive of so many other people. And I don’t mean inclusive in the superficial sense. I don’t mean inclusion in the way that, woah, we have cultural diversity, yay! I mean, like we thinking about how our institutions are making people belong or unbelong, right, to how we think about citizenship and are we thinking about the people that aren’t there, right? Are we thinking and considering the people who aren’t part or who aren’t sitting at the table to be part of that conversation.

So I hope that that’s what the we will have for us, or the question or problematizing what this we actually means, and to make sure that this umbrella of we is really thinking about and considering communities of people who have often been engaging in these conversations for a really long time. So it’s really about what can we learn from each other, and what have people in the past been telling us prior to COVID-19 that we refuse to listen to that COVID-19 has facilitated us to think differently about, to open our ears differently as Kristina Llewellyn was saying earlier, right, to listen truly to what it means when communities of people are saying that these things have been happening and it’s not equitable, right? And it’s not making us feel like we are true Canadian citizens and we need to shift that. We need to shift that conversation.

So I hope that’s what the we [inaudible 0:26:11.1*changes into.] But I still don’t know, right? I still don’t know if that’s what we will take away from it. It’s really, really difficult to see what we will take away from these conversations. But also I hope that the we also allows us to understand just how much power we have as a community of people. So I think the way that we imagine a new we is to think about how each and every one of us has the ability to be knowledge producers, right, to be able to dictate and change the parameters of our society, right? That it’s not so farfetched to imagine like a living we for everyone, right? That we are having a moment where we’re starting to think about that.  And like because I think so much we’ve thought of these things, of these institutions both historically and in a contemporary context as so farfetched, so grand, right, that we can make the kinds of changes that are necessary.

But I think COVID-19 is asking us to think about how we as a community of people have a lot of power and have the ability to demand for our governments and our community agents to be accountable for the kinds of rules we want to live in after this. I hope.

SC:        Yeah, I hope too. You know, there’s a lot of things that I would like to respond to there because it was just so awesome. Let’s just talk about the hope because I hear hope a lot in all of these conversations, and I hear people saying like, “I would like to be optimistic.” And I think that this notion of hope and this notion of optimism can also be blended with these feelings of discomfort to be able to see things that, like you said, we have been trained not to see or [inaudible 0:28:08.0].

And I think also to point viewers to some other videos about Sean Carleton’s conversation, who is like, colonialism hasn’t stopped, Like, where are our conversations about nation-to-nation relationships? Or Geoffrey Reaume’s discussion about critical disability history and how — again, there are a lot of vulnerabilities that we’re feeling now that we can look at with the critical disability lens. But this notion of imagining a new ‘we’ that it needs to look different, I think of the conversations I had with Andrea Hawkman and Sarah Shear. It was the same video, and they were saying like, if the we that you’re imagining does not make you feel — actually, I don’t know if they say this, but this is what I took from it. If the we that you’re imagining doesn’t make you feel uncomfortable, then it’s time to rethink what that looks like.

And I point to the archivists we’ve talked to, Chris Sanagan and Adam Birrell, were talking about the records that are being created during this time. If all those records look very similar, if all those records are saying very similar things, then we need to be able to broaden how and in what ways we are understanding and thinking of this moment and the stories that frame our lives. Like what is it that allows us to only hear a certain set of stories? So thank you for bringing all those conversations together. Although, of course, that wasn’t what you intended to do. [crosstalk 0:29:39.9] them all. So I hate to do that, but that’s what I hear, like this wheeling together of so many of these different important ideas. So thank you for doing that.

FA:        Yeah, I love it. And that that hope doesn’t mean anything if we don’t put it to practice and action, right?

SC:        Yes, yes.

FA:        [inaudible 0:29:58.2*That the next step at this,] I hope COVID-19 is allowing us the space to actually think really critically through how we would like to direct our activism because that’s the next space, right? That it doesn’t mean anything if we’re having these conversations and we don’t move into the next phase, which is to mobilize, right, in a really clear way that includes all of the wes we want into these conversations. The wes that make us uncomfortable. The wes that we’ve forgotten about.

And so, for me, that’s the exciting potential of this all is that we are all what the world will look like next, but the idea after this is to be like, then we need to — we are all responsible for ensuring that that world happens, right?

SC:        Yes, yes.

FA:        And that that needs to be part of how we move, right? That as teachers of history, educators, it is not enough now to talk about these things. It’s not enough to just say that this is what the world look like, the next step is to say, this is the we or these are the potential platforms that we can use to facilitate change in a way that truly makes you feel like you belong to the Canadian nation if you want to, or that you want something completely different. And so I hope that’s where we go.

SC:        Yes. No, thank you so much for reaffirming that importance that if we keep hoping for these things, that we have to act on it. We have to mobilize. We have to identify our priorities. And it’s funny because I’m doing a curriculum review right now and it’s interesting how often it will say like, get students to identify the different attributes of active political citizenship, but it doesn’t actually ask them to do anything.

And, for me, like again, I call myself a history education strategist because I think that the strategies that we have for learning history need to mobilize us to ask for a different future because history can teach us so much about things that we don’t think are possible because of the way grand narratives work. And so thank you for reaffirming the importance of activism related to hope.

FA:        Anytime.

SC:        This was a fantastic conversation. Thank you so much.

FA:        No, thank you for having me. I had a really good time.

SC:        Yeah, that’s great. And I’ve been saying to a few people that it’d be kind of interesting to like follow up in September when our anxieties are like in a different place. Although again, that makes it seem like more work, but just to kind of see where these conversations go because we talk about this as a moment or at least I do, but it will have such lasting effects that it’s kind of good to check in to where we were. So hopefully, we can do that.

FA:        I would love that. I would love that, and I’d love to hear everyone else’s kind of progression of their thinking or change in thinking over the next couple of months, right? Because we’re kind of in the thick of it and then things will die down and we will kind of have an idea of where we’re going next. So it would be kind of interesting to see how our thinking changes.

SC:        I know. I feel like everyone has like said yes to the conversations and they’re also signing up for months of me being like, let’s do this thing too. Because I do think it’s important that we stay connected and we stay talking with each other, and we have these moments of collaboration to make all of our practices better. So thank you again.

FA:        No, thank you. Thank you for doing this and all the labor that comes with it because it is a lot, and I think often at times, we assume that it’s just kind of easy, but I think facilitating and bringing all of us together in this kind of way is significant and important. So thanks for all of the labor that you’re putting in and making things accessible for people. So thanks.

SC:        Oh, that’s so kind of you. Thank you so much. I do just like having an opportunity to like get a little dressed up [inaudible 0:34:03.1*during these days.] And it is really [inaudible 0:34:06.7*nice to feel] to like connect with people and like feel a little bit normal. And so it feels like a lot of really great things. Anyway, thanks again.

FA:        Anytime.

SC:        Okay, bye.

FA:        Bye.

SC:        Thank you.

FA:        No problem.