Dr. Samantha Cutrara:        Tim, thank you so much for carving some time out of your retirement to talk with me for the “Pandemic Pedagogy” series. It is so wonderful to end this series by talking to you about ideas about anti-racist history and anti-racist history education. Before we begin, do you want to introduce yourself?

Dr. Tim Stanley:        Well, my name is Tim Stanley. I am professor emeritus in the Faculty of Education and at the Institute of Indigenous Research and Studies at the University of Ottawa. And my main work has been on the histories of racisms in Canada, particularly [inaudible 0:00:48*the effect of] Chinese-Canadians, but also imagining different approaches to teaching anti-racism. And we see that’s about the most important stuff. I spent too much of my life in university governance and administration, but that’s a whole other story.

SC:        That can be a story for a totally different series.

TS:        Indeed.

SC:        There is — I talked to Sean Kheraj, and he was like, “Yeah, I’m a professor, a history professor.” And then as he’s answering, he’s like, “I’m also right now an associate dean.” So that brings all these new stories. So a different series.

TS:        Yes, indeed.

SC:        Yeah. So I ask everyone the same three questions for the “Pandemic Pedagogy” series, and the context has changed so much in the three months since we’ve started. So the first question is have your ideas about history changed at all during COVID? And especially now that COVID has — the ways that we’re talking about COVID has morphed into so much around a social revolution related to anti-racism. Have your ideas about history changed at all because of that?

TS:        Not really, because my ideas around history for a while have been questioning the received processes and forms of historical knowledge that are [inaudible 0:02:16.9]. So like, just the arrival of COVID sort of nothing else, it proves the way that come hell or high water, we are actually part of a globally connected world. And that what happens on the far side of the world can have very quickly an effect on what happens here. And people often see this as a product of recent forms of globalization, but in fact, this has always been the case. And if we look at the history of previous pandemics, you know, we hear about the Black Death in Europe during the medieval period, people knew it was coming. They knew it was coming. They had news from distant places and traveled around the world. So that sort of, to me, confirms an important point that, in fact, we are connected in very material ways to people about whom we know nothing. And here, the problem is the ways in which we talk and teach about history tends to be histories of nation-states in which it’s pretended that somehow the history of people when they immigrate to Canada, for example, suddenly they no longer have ties to the people back home and in the old country. It’s as if the history of one nation is just magically distinct from another. And in fact, there’s an awful lot of going back and forth and a lot of other things going on in this sort of fetishization of national history.

So, to me, this in a way confirms my point. And it also confirms another issue that I’ve been thinking about because one of the things I think that’s happened in a massive ways that anti-racism education has failed insofar as we see a resurgence of forms of racism that we thought had been long gone, and suddenly what’s euphemistically called White nationalists, but it’s really organized white supremacist and often violent organized [inaudible 0:04:37.4*ashes] white supremacy thought is becoming respectable in mainstream in a way that it was not in — not only in Canada and the United States, but generally in the western world even 20, 30 years ago.

And it’s come back to be in full force and was full of that. And so, to me, one of the solutions to this is that we need to actually teach people in a very radical way to understand the complex connections they have across difference to other people in the world, and it starts I think with material understandings of our material linkages and relationships, but also then how in particular spaces, they get marked by particularly dominant forms of cultural expression that tend to exclude other people. Classic example is the fact that we’re giving this interview in English, even though we are both on territories where indigenous languages were spoken for millennia longer than this one.

I know for myself, I know about three words of Algonquin, and that’s about it. And all the signs, all the books in my bookshelf at the back are in English or French or in Chinese, which [inaudible 0:06:07.1] which I look at, but not in the indigenous languages which are excluded. So how we mark our territories tends to eliminate the ways in which we’re actually material connected. And then this becomes embodied in the ways in which certain kinds of bodies feel just naturally they belong because they can see themselves being reflected back through these markings, and other people are excluded and seem to be interlopers.

I think this is the kind of thing that underlies a lot of police violence against the Black people both in Canada and in the United States, and also against indigenous people in both countries as well. The assumption that somehow these are people who don’t belong in the spaces, that somehow they’re newcomers or outsiders or not legitimately present is in part a product of this sort of material construction of knowledge that surrounds us.

And so then finally to me, part of the solution here is to really teach people to think historically in the sense of understanding how the world they live in is a historical product, but it’s the product of all human beings who have come before and not just the ones that we put up statues to. So that’s my short answer.

SC:        That was a great short answer. I mean, I’m thinking of a couple things, and one is another piece of evidence to support that point, which is like how quickly certain discourses can manifest again during moments like this. Like the anti-Asian sentiment related to the virus, right? Like there are so many parallels to past historical moments that it does, like you’re saying, indicate a failure for us to really tease through that, or indicates a failure of having not been able to teach through that in previous generations or like incarnations of teaching history in classrooms.

TS:        Yeah, very much so. So like in part, behind all this is also I guess what could be thought of as a massive failure of teaching history despite the valiant efforts that many teachers and other scholars are making because people don’t actually know the pitfalls, don’t know some of the things that they’re playing with and what it can lead to, which we as historians generally have a much better sense. But if you look at the history of anti-Asian racism in Canada, for example, or any of the other racisms, but when I can talk about most of the early of the anti-Asian one, there’s a long history of assuming that Chinese or Japanese or people from Asias are diseased and somehow threatening to those of us here.

And sort of what’s interesting is we can also see in that how it actually disarms people from the actual things they need to do to protect themselves. So if you think the solution is to keep people who you see as Chinese out, you’re going to die of COVID because it’s not that they are the ones who are carrying it more or less than anyone else. And it’s not actually stuff that’s based on race, it’s based on being human.

In the 19th century, it was noticed that Chinese often had a lower incidence of cholera than other people, so was assumed that they were somehow immune to and carriers of cholera. Well, in fact, what most Chinese people did in the world is they only drank boiled water and it’s a Chinese cultural — this is what they call [inaudible 0:10:08.4]. It’s a cultural practice that is widespread in China still. But if you drink boiled water, it’s less likely to be carrying the stuff that causes cholera. So there’s very much that’s going on today that is disturbingly familiar.

SC:        It’s interesting that you’re saying like the failure of history education. There’s a few things I want to say to that because on one hand, I think it shows the success of history education to keep dominant narratives eurocentric white colonialist, right? Like as much as there are valiant efforts of individual teachers, the structure of history education is such that it could perpetrate and replicate these inaccuracies and these racists, and sexists, and classes inaccuracies on purpose.

And I was doing a curriculum review not too long ago and it’s amazing how many curricula in Canada are very passive. Like talk about confederation without bringing people into it. And as soon as you start doing that, then you can’t talk about challenges now. It’s just about this event or this piece of legislation. Do you have any comments on that? Like it’s not the failure of history education, it is the success of history education which is why we need to deconstruct it more.

TS:        Well, there is a failure of history education in the sense that — and maybe also, I hate to say it, but we saw failed historians too to some extent because we end up talking about informal forces as the actors rather than people as the actors. So I know exactly what you’re talking about. This is the idea the railroad was built across Canada and finished in 1885. It’s just like, okay, who did it? How? Why?

SC:        [inaudible 0:12:12.0*It was good, yeah]

TS:        Were the people whose land were literally paid over by the railroad thinking about it? You know, there’s all sorts of stuff that you can get there, but as long as it’s passive, there is no actor. It’s something that just happened. Canada was founded in 1867. Well, except unless you’re in New Finland, but that’s a whole other story.

TS:        So there’s ways of talking and habits of thinking associated with them that are very common in history education in public schools. I think they are less common, but also present in like scholarly historical research, and there often are sort of lazy ways of ignoring actually who’s doing what to who and what are the longer-term consequences of that.

There is a marvelous book that came out recently called The Death of Democracy, which is on the rise of the Nazis in Germany. And what it shows is basically how [inaudible 0:13:24.7*the NotANazis] just magically came to power. It was the right-wing parties that actually allowed them to come to power thinking that they could control them. And, of course, the leaders of all those parties, [inaudible 0:13:37.1*and as soon as two, three years,] the Nazi is coming to power or all dead as were many other people.

But it’s something that really focuses on the idea that actually work. In any given moment, what individuals are doing actually has effects. It’s something that we don’t often see, but it has effects. And those effects can be good or ill, and part of the thing is that we never know what the outcome is going to be when we make our choices. But I think the more that we can understand the complexities of human action and understanding that those human actions are not just individual things, but they’re parts of sort of webs of association, and relationships, and effects, the better our understanding will be of the complexities of things like our current moment. And the better we’ll be able to react to.

SC:        Yeah. Because one of the reasons why I like to really advocate for thinking about humans and people is to be able to keep — in our history teaching is to keep demonstrate to students resistance and resilience, right?

TS:        Yup.

SC:        That we aren’t just thinking about these forces that nobody had a control over, but that there were always pushes against these things. And sometimes they were allowed, sometimes they were quiet, sometimes they didn’t have the agency to make a big splash, but that we have to ensure that we know that people can make change so that we too can make change.

TS:        Yes. Absolutely.

SC:        Yeah. And when you’re talking about the webs, like one of the themes that came up a lot, especially in the early conversations I had when we were all trying to sort this out because this series started at the end of March was how we are really witnessing — well, I’m bringing these words into it, but I found this as a theme. We’re really witnessing the deconstruction of a system that was never meant for everyone, and so we can see the inequities of COVID response, COVID treatment. And we talked in this series about whether or not we can bring that into our history classes in a more explicit way because we have this example.

So perhaps this is a good way to segue to the second question, which is do you think that witnessing what is happening right now with COVID, with the social revolutions, with a lot of people recognizing anti-Asian racism related to disease transmission? Do you think that’s going to change the way people teach history after this moment? Do you think it will lead to changes?

TS:        I’m always leery as a historian about predicting the future, because when historians start talking about the future, [inaudible 0:16:41.3] are wrong.

SC:        I won’t tell. I won’t tell.

TS:        That’s been 20 years, so I’ll give you an answer.

SC:        Okay.

TS:        I hope so, but I’m actually not optimistic. I think the real challenge is to improving the quality of history education and the main challenge is improving what’s available to the people who teach history. So in Canada, most people who teach history have no training in history. It’s only usually the specialists and steer in senior secondary school who teach history that have any history background. Most history teaching is done by people in primary and junior high schools and so forth who may not be able to sort of articulate some of those sophisticated things.

The other problem is you have a continual challenge with young people, and we’ve seen this in places around the world that have tried to sort of reinvent historical knowledge and understanding. So I’m thinking of in South Africa, for example. So at the end of the apartheid regime in South Africa, for the first few years, the curriculum, they just added in sort of few great Black men to the great White men who had founded the nation. So they talk about Nelson Mandela and stuff.

And it’s in part because both White and Black teachers, that’s what they knew how to do, right? So when they started looking around 20 years later looking on redoing their curriculum, one of the problems is that young people were not interested in the struggle against apartheid because that was their parents’ and grandparents’ world, right? So something we often forget, we sort of think, okay, well this is a moment that’s going to last forever and we can draw on it to sort of illustrate all these things that are injustices. So as the Great Depression was like that. So there were previous movements in the past. A whole sort of 20th-century socialist in its very different varieties of movements were based on very highly developed concrete critiques of inequality.

So I’m less certain that it’s actually just using this moment to sort of illustrate how inequality is real, which is I think a very teachable moment in this case at this point. I’m not sure that that long-term is going to enable a real remaking of things because the things I was talking about at first, that sort of mass of sort of representation that surrounds us against which these histories are being read works to actually efface that and to actually make it less visible. So it becomes a continual teaching against the grain, and that’s always hard and it’s always difficult to continue and to sustain.

I think instead, if we can actually use this to not sort of simply teach that there is this inequality, but to actually use the technologies that we have to, for example, to reach out to communities where they are suffering from the virus more directly to find out what their stories are to actually bring alive the human consequences of these inequalities, that that is the stuff that begins to have transformative potential. When we get people to engage with people who are in vastly different circumstances and they realize that, you know, there, but for the grace of whatever you prefer, go [inaudible 0:20:35.5] and you create this notion of solidarity with other human beings across all those differences and you actually begin to see that many of those differences become things that actually make those other people more interesting in yourself, that that is the thing that has transform potential.

And the reason is is because when people have that sense of connection to others, why do Donald Trumps of the world come along and say we’re going to build a wall to keep them out? Our reaction will be probably just to laugh them out of the room because it’s like this is such a stupid idea, right? And it would have the potential to really remake things. And this includes, if we take a more indigenous perspective as many indigenous people, we’re not just talking about the human world here. We’re talking about the whole material world. The animal world and the entire environment that sustains us all needs to be also part of that sense of connection.

So I don’t know, that’s my answer. I haven’t figured out how you teach people to do this yet, but working on it.

SC:        Well, I mean, for me, one of the things I like to advocate related to history education is to like lessen control. For teachers to think that they can lessen control in the classroom because when they open up more space, like I have found students are dying to learn history. We’re just not teaching the histories they want to learn because they don’t connect with it. They’re like, this is not the world I live in, right? And so I think that lessening control and thinking about the classroom as a community exploring and developing solidarities like you’re saying can provide a lot of that. Which is why like in my book, I talk about imagining a new we because I think that the more teachers are thinking of history education as just telling a story to young people, which I know that the structure of history education right now doesn’t lend itself to that. But I think a lot of practices still kind of do.

There can be increasing circles of inclusion. And to be able to include more about the land, more about the water, and more about a greater kind of spiritual connection amongst people rather than separating people.

So I guess it’s a good segue to my last question, which is based on this notion of imagining a new we. Do you think that we are going to have — use this moment of social unrest and COVID and things being turned upside down in ways that we hadn’t expected, do you think this will allow us to imagine a new we differently or in stronger more active ways than perhaps we could have before?

TS:        Of course. The danger in the current context is that other forces are going to also reimagine that we in much more limited and narrow terms.

TS:        And I think those movements and ideas and individuals are actually the greatest threat to the continued existence of our species that we have ever faced. But I think on —

SC:        [crosstalk 0:24:15.9] hyperbole.

TS:        Well, if you look at the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists that has the Doomsday Clock, the Doomsday Clock is closer to midnight at any point in history.

SC:        Yeah.

TS:        And they talk about the ending of all those arms limitation treaties, but also the rise of global warming, you know. And it’s going to take existing tensions and make them worse as you get a mass migrations of hundreds of millions of people dealing with global warming. And then also what they call disruptive technologies and their effects. But —

SC:        Sorry to interrupt, but like things like that sounded really outlandish, even like two years ago, but now I think we’re feeling it more. Like a friend of mine had said, just when I feel like I’m able to handle what is happening right now, then I’m like, climate change hasn’t stopped, right? Like I think that this increased anxiety and the increased fear that the world is coming to an end will increase as we move further into the 21st century if we can at all. Oh, this is going to end really negative.

TS:        Well, one of the disturbing gallows humor jokes, right, is I always thought the end of the world would be a little bit quicker and more interesting. But —

SC:        Nope.

TS:        But I think there’s a sign for hope here. And believe it or not, it’s the same technologies that are be used to divide us. And I’m thinking here particularly of social media. So as this social media algorithms feedback on us a reflection of ourselves, and so we never —

SC:        Sorry. Can you hold on one second?

TS:        Yeah.

TS:        Sorry, that was a very aggressive knock on my door, but it was just to say I’m leaving you something. Not that there’s a fire, which is what it sounded like. So you were saying social medias that can divide us can also bring us together?

TS:        Yeah. So the problem in social media is that the [inaudible 0:26:47.3*algorithms feed us back on ourselves] and you get closed in more and more in a kind of close circle of people who reflect back on you, which you already believe in is not challenged. But the same technology, if you think about it, a cell phone can directly connect you to something like 4.5 billion people in the world, which has never ever before happened. Now, it’s only half the people in the world, but still — so this is I’m going to go, but this is a huge number of people across all sorts of difference.

And through things like Google Translate, you can actually talk to them, believe it or not. And suddenly it’s possible to actually not just discover the teacher stories or the stories that’s in the curriculum or the ones that the governments through their official curricula want you to teach, or they get reproduced in the popular cultures and mass cultures that surround us. It’s possible to actually listen to discover other stories. Other stories about other people across those differences in ways that are direct, immediate, and engaged and build connection with people.

So this can range from all sorts of things. Many of which things are kind of things that teachers do already. Like if you’re a grade four teacher in Canada, get in contact with a grade four teacher in China and set up a virtual get-togethers with your students and they become penpals, or with an indigenous community in Canada. Or even, heaven forbid, the school that’s on the other side of town in your own place, and start talking about things that actually affect all of your lives and differences.

So this is about inventing or reinventing a different we. And it is about moving beyond the taken for granted we that is that of the nation and the nation-state. And to part, ask ourselves when we say we, who do we mean? Do we mean you and I? Do we mean the people like me? Do we mean those of us over here on this side of the room? Do we mean the we of the nation-state? Often in history curricula, the we that’s encountered is that we they imagine community of the nation-state, and it’s an exclusive we that doesn’t include the we that is actually the whole species.

So this process of building this larger we, building an ongoing connections across difference and of time as well, because as historians, we can also go — we historians can also build connections to people who were, in radical ways, like us, but who lived in very distant passes and in different contexts. So there’s this recognition of a shared humanity of a shared humanness in the best historical research, in the best history education even across difference of time and place.

So actually, this becomes like an ongoing curriculum. Becomes a curriculum for life. And actually, becomes a process of education in [inaudible *Medulin] sense. It’s education that opens people up to further experience. And the way you do that is by entering into association with people who are different from you, and this have to be mutually agreed on processes of association. But it’s this continual process of entering into association with others that produces growth. That produces growth in sort of intellectual, moral, and every other term, which is the essence of the educational engagement.

SC:        And it’s like an element of that of getting to know people that are unlike you is to not bring them into your we to be like, these are the things we have in common, and so these are the things we’re going to highlight together, but rather reimagining spaces where our uniqueness and our differences can challenge who we can become. And like you said, like grow.

TS:        Yeah.

SC:        Yeah. You know, one of the —

TS:        If we’re all completely alike, the world would be pretty boring, you know?

TS:        And it’s to recognize community, right? And we talk about communities often this sort of idea of this natural place that has no conflict. Well, communities are also structured by contest, right? But it is about creating communities across differences that don’t actually alight those differences, but recognize, accept them, and at times, engage with them. At the same time, we sort of — we also have to have kind of build a radical recognition that this is a human being like me, even though they speak another language and have different worldviews and vote for Donald Trump.

SC:        Okay. Well, thanks for bringing that in as that last example.

TS:        [inaudible 0:32:36.1]

SC:        One of the things that — you know, like the pandemic is horrible, but it has been really interesting to be able to broaden a conversation about history education because — and through these technologies. And like the people that I’ve spoken to for this series, like they’re from England, and from the United States, and from Australia, from different parts of Canada, and it’s been really wonderful to be able to bring those conversations together. And to me, it does highlight like what you’re saying, that we can all develop and challenge these ideas together even though we’re coming from different places, and the different places can help support that type of imagining that we would like to do because everyone I spoke to recognizes that the world needs to shift and change after this. I mean, it was before this too, but — so thank you so much for ending on that. I think it’s a really powerful way to end. So thank you.

TS:        My pleasure.

SC:        This has been great. I made you follow up because I like to do that. It will be interesting like in the fall or even six months, like you said, or 20 years. Maybe we can do this again in 20 years if we’re still around, the world hasn’t blown up by then, to be able to see if and in what ways it has changed. So thank you again, Tim.

TS:        My pleasure. And I wish everybody well in reimagining new ways of doing history and rebuilding — [inaudible 0:34:12.8*broaden] understandings of who we are.

SC:        I second that well wishes. So we’ll see. We’ll talk soon, bye.

TS:        Take care.

SC:        Thank you.