Dr. Samantha Cutrara:        Ian, thank you so much for speaking with me. It was so wonderful to connect with you on Twitter. And I’m really excited to talk with you about teaching history during the pandemic and thought after. Before we get started, do you wanna introduce yourself?

Ian Duncan:  Sure. Hi, Samantha. My name is Ian Duncan, and I’m a classroom history teacher in the suburbs of Toronto. And I live in Toronto. I’ve taught lots of different courses, all in the [inaudible 0:00:39.6*Canada world] studies sort of disciplines and documents from grade 10, 11, and 12.

SC:        So I always start with the first question about whether or not you’ve thought of history any different because of this moment. Because when this happened, I kind of did. Like, “Oh, yeah. Like, where does history fit in our world right now if everything is going crazy?” So have you thought of history any different because of this moment? And no pressure if no. Some people were like, “I don’t have time to think of that.” How about you?

ID:        I always think that current events inspire my curiosity for history. So when we’re going into quarantine and physical and social distancing and we’re learning about COVID-19 as a disease and we’re looking at ramifications in so many different ways in our society and in our civilization and around the world, I start going backwards and I start looking at similar moments in history because as a curious student of history, I want to know how the world responded then. So that’s been, I think, how I’m thinking about it a little differently because suddenly it’s inspired me to learn more.

Like, I have never really demonstrated a terrible curiosity in Spanish Flu. And I know you’ve discussed this before on your podcast and on YouTube series, I just wasn’t curious about it at all and all of a sudden, I am more curious. So I had questions and my students had questions as well. We decided to go backwards into ancient history to look at examples that were relevant in the time periods that we’re studying an ancient world history and bring forward sort of the experiences, and impacts, and responses to the now. So that was really — even just having conversation around those things and to say, “Hey, what’s happening now has happened before. We have seen disease and pandemic shaped history in the world in history, so we should think about how this might shape us now.” And this is going back. Now, we’re at, like, seven weeks ago that we started that conversation, but I think that’s really interesting and like I said, it made me more curious about disease and history and certainly engages some of our very scientific minds in that sort of historical learning as well, which is sort of cool.

I also think that the history hasn’t necessarily changed, but our view and our perspective of it has. I think a lot of people are re-evaluating their lives and starting to think about what’s important to me. And the result is that we’re going to do the same with history. Like we can approach history from a new lens and it’s a real opportunity to approach history from a new lens and to correct some of our historical oversights or exclusions to correct the kinds of omissions from the narratives that are traditionally taught in our classrooms or even just sort of profiled through mass media. All of that kind of stuff can be happening, and it has me thinking about, well, I didn’t even think about these folks’ experience in the COVID-19 pandemic. So now, I should go and look for that in history and keep my kids looking at those groups as well because their experience is not just defined by COVID-19. It was defined by all the things that happened to that group of people or those individuals before and afterwards.

So part of their story will be how did they respond? How were they inspired? Or what did they do in response to those things? I’ve noticed that we have sort of a continuity of fear and our responses to fear in history. And this is like a whole new theme in history that has sort of been my own thinking about our response to COVID.

Yeah, so the idea that fear is a motivator for our actions. And sometimes those actions are good and sometimes those actions are bad. In a lot of cases, I think we’re seeing communities forge together and support one another in new and wonderful ways, but we also see the influence of socio-economic disparity, we’ve seen examples of racism from day one of us talking about COVID. And this was in my classroom before we stopped attending physical school classrooms and we had to sort of unpack those things in my classroom when we started talking about COVID in the world and people — we had great conversations around racism.

So I think that is sort of an interesting theme in history that’s, for me, that I’m thinking a lot about is fear and motivation of fear and how we respond to it. We just finished talking of the Red Scare and the Lavender Purge of the Cold War era. And isn’t that interesting to think that these were periods of fear that we saw these negative interactions and then positive interactions that come out of that sort of thing? So there are new ideas forming about history because of my experience and because of my students’ shared experiences in this sort of COVID-19 context.

SC:        Thank you for that. I’ll tell you why I don’t like that answer, and it’s because you said so many good things. I have so many follow-up, like comments and questions.

ID:        Yeah, ask them. Ask away.

SC:        So the first thing, when you had said like, — well, so one of the things that I talk about a lot in the video is that I feel like sometimes in history classrooms, we can focus on, like, the method of history so much that we miss the [inaudible 0:07:52.5*affect.] We miss the emotion. We miss the, like, human experiences. And Aaron Stout’s video also talks about that.

And so when you said, like, this continuity of fear, I love that. That was so smart because that is an emotion that can really be traced through through history in so many really interesting ways. So I want to thank you for that because I think that’s a real great thing to be able to pull out because sometimes I’m a little worried that we might pressure students too much to be able to, like, self-confess right now what they are going through.

SC:        But we do know that there is anxiety around. So whether or not, or however they are feeling it, they can at least connect because I say that meaningful learning is connection, complexity, and care and we know that they can connect with the feeling of fear in this moment, but also in their own lives separate from this moment. And the complexities of that that I’m hearing from you, I think, is a really interesting way of bringing that out.

Yeah, so thank you for that. Were students able to make the connections between the Red Scare and the Lavender Purge from this or were those connections that you drew together?

ID:        Yes, we were having a Google Meet at the end of last week and some of my grade 10s were attending, which is amazing. We’re working asynchronously, so that’s a challenge. But we were trying to debrief, and I’m always trying through conversation at least to make it relevant and I said, we’re talking about fear. I mean, what does that remind you of? And that’s just my natural kind of what does this remind you of? That’s a literacy prompt in my grade one student at homework, what does this remind you of?

So what does this remind you of is like my really easy and approachable bridge question and some of them said, “Yeah, people are afraid right now.” And I said, “And what are the reactions? What do they do with that fear?” I mean, how interesting to be able to help students digest really intense emotions. And they’re still young. 15, 16. I’m talking about grade 10 history students. How do they use history to help them inform and digest and understand that this is not the first time anyone has experienced anything like this, or the first time that fear has guided this kind of massive civic response.

I did follow up with a student later who was very interested in sort of the fear of Naziism in World War II as being a motivator for enlistment for civic duty and responsibility in a World War II context. And because over March break, the extended March break, I had drawn some parallels between the prime minister’s press conferences early on and he’s referencing to the second World War and Canada’s new civic duty sort of echoing some of that.

So there were connections to be made. And certainly, when they started to connect with just the, “I understand what fear looks like and I see that I’m not the only or first person to try to digest that as a society at this massive societal level,” I think that’s sort of interesting and it makes the history approachable. It’s an entry point for them to actually learn the history of other people who have responded to and experienced fear in this sort of way.

SC:        Yeah. You know, when you’re saying, like, grade one literacy, I actually think that history instruction can be really enriched by literacy practices because history is a story. We can focus on the discipline, but history is a story and these literacy practices can help bring out those connections. And also, I talk a lot in the series that I say that history should transform, but it should be the basis of activist’s action. And for me, when you’re saying that it helps a 15-year-old unpack their feelings about something going on, to me, that is activism, right?

That a student can connect in a healthier way with what they are feeling can be this really amazing source of activism. So thanks for making those connections too.

Before we move on to the second question, I also just wanted to say something about earlier part of your answer when you said it’s causing you to think about history differently? I was going for a walk the other day and thinking about what it would be like once things get back to normal and how, like, there won’t be a normal? And then I was like the Roaring Twenties.

You know, like we always — we associate the Roaring Twenties with World War I, and yes. But as someone that also is not curious about the Spanish flu, like that’s an interesting connection and I’m so interested to see how once things kind of settle. How people will start thinking about that. Has that come up in your class at all?

ID:        Not yet. And I think it’s because we are still very much in the midst of our impacts and reactions too to the context of COVID-19 and to quarantine and staying at home, and I think we’re still trying to digest it. The reality is that because it’s evolving and we never really know, “Oh, am I going back to school? What is next week look like?” And I think we’ve helped the students find flexibility as they approach the new environment rather than routine, and that flexible approach has meant that they’re just not, I think, thinking yet that far ahead. I think the closest we’ve come is to sort of try to digest what are you going to do afterwards? But I think a lot of it sounds like celebration, which I think is often sort of become synonymous with that Roaring Twenties kind of history as well, right? It’s a time of celebration, but also, sadly, of ignorance, of disparity, right?

So their concern is that the celebration will override our ability to understand, digest, recognize disparity in people after a period of challenge, right? So I know that’s a lot along the lines of your last question, but certainly, I think we’re in this space where the students are not yet willing to forecast what it might be like because they’re so accustomed to growth. I think as adults, we are normal, feels a lot more entrenched maybe than theirs does.

SC:        Yeah, that’s a great answer. Of course, a 15-year-old isn’t like, “Oh, remember the Roaring Twenties?” But I’m really excited. Actually, I think this is more of like a five-year long question to see how our interpretation and our teaching of the Roaring Twenty as well take place because we have this experience in a way that we forgot, right? Neil Orford in his video on the Spanish flu says this cultural amnesia about the period, and we won’t be able to forget it.

Do you think teaching history will change after this moment? So that’s the second question I’ve been asking to everyone. Do you think it should change? Like, people are like, “Well, of course you know the technology, but do you think it should change? Do you think there are things that we should be doing differently that has been revealed because of this moment?

ID:        I think, personally, history should change all the time and the way we teach it certainly. I mean, I don’t know who our students will be when they return to the classroom. And I always try to base my teaching and the ways in which I teach on the students that are in front of me. And that could be different from day-to-day or class-to-class. I think the context of this is yet to be determined.

So I think my advice to my colleagues will be to be flexible and to be open-minded and creative in let’s say the fall when we return to “normal teaching” in a classroom setting will, sure, imbed some new technology and explore any kind of acquired technological fluency that has come about through the experience of learning in more virtual and digital ways. But I don’t know who’s going to be in front of me. I can’t yet tell if my students will be feeling more removed, and more isolated, and happier in that sort of introverted bubble or whether they are going to clamor for interaction in community and talk and debate in conversation and storytelling. I don’t know.

I feel like those are two sort of swings of a pendulum and I’m hoping that they’ll land back in between, but I think I wonder at first what they’ll crave. Whether they’ll say, “I need to talk to people. I want to group work everything. I don’t want to be online. Don’t give me a computer and another Google Doc or something to work through.” I want to divorce myself of it whether they will swing away from it or whether they will have grown so comfortable within sort of social distancing and learning on their own and learning digitally that they will want more of that.

So I think the way in which we teach history may evolve depending on who’s in front of us. I also think that it’s going to give us an opportunity to break some of the chains of our instructional patterns. I’ve already done that. It has been liberating to throw out three quarters of my course and start to reinvent it in a way that students can achieve expectations, and find success, and find engagement from a distance in less than three hours a week, which was we pulled students at the beginning, we said, “Okay, about six hours in the classroom a week, how much homework do you find you’re getting in this course?” They want one to two hours depending on the week or what we were up to. And I said, “Well, we are going from eight to three. What does that look like?” But that has been really liberating because it’s meant that we can really assess for ourselves as teachers what our students want to learn and how they want to learn it and how they will learn it efficiently and effectively, but also deeply and hopefully with connection.

All of those things of my teaching in my classroom, I don’t want them to go away. I want them to be connected to me and to each other. I want them to be learning in heartfelt ways to history. I always say, “If you make a heart connection that you will understand and know the history after you leave my classroom, not just while you’re in it.” So I think it’s going to break some of those patterns, and it’s a little bit liberating to sort of be able to say, “Oh, maybe I don’t need to teach every one of these topics. Maybe I don’t need to do this always so chronologically. Maybe we could dig a little deeper on fewer things.”

And I think for some people — like I’ve been teaching for 17 years and my practices evolved and evolved and evolved. But I think too, there are courses where we get into a pattern of what we think is interesting or what we think students think is interesting and we just go there because we’re busy, and it’s easy, and the lesson is ready to pick up and deliver maybe with some tweaks and changes. And instead, I think it’s like, I do have capacity to change it and to take a step back and to work on building community even more in my classroom and to build relationships with students even more in my classroom and then the history. So I think about those things as well.

SC:        Yeah. Like that student-centric learning approach resonates so much with what I try to advocate on this channel. And for anyone watching that teaches at university level, I also point you — although, I mean, anyone can watch it obviously. I point you to Mary Chaktsiris’ video because she was saying, as a history professor, she’s just like there’s this idea to keep adding and that this allows her to just be like, “No, we’re going to start deleting,” and that, “Yes, there’s some liberation in that.”

The teachers that I work with in my research, they talked about the binder a lot. And they were always critical of the binder. I felt like it was still lingered as a thing, especially for history teachers. And I argued, because I work with teachers at alternative schools as well as mainstream schools, that the teachers need time, space, and place for reflection and research. And maybe, I mean, like for me, the connection is that maybe being away from the standard space of the school and separated from some colleagues, that might be a little toxic perhaps. That might not be so supportive of these things. And just knowing that you need to connect with students provide some of that space, place, and time to re-evaluate what, like you said, you have capacity to do.

That’s a really exciting perspective to kind of move forward with teaching history. So thank you for putting that out there, especially as a “regular teacher” and as a husband and a father, like, because you are bouncing many things right now, right? It’s not just, like, just like you, by yourself that’s like, “Okay, let’s just do it for everyone,” you know.

ID:        You know, opportunity is knocking to make changes. And you said, “I don’t think there’s going to be a new normal or back to normal. They’ll be a new normal and we have to build that normal, so why not use it as a chance to sort of springboard into some changes that you want to see?”

I’m very lucky, my colleagues, we had a meeting this morning virtually. And my colleagues who also teach history with me are equally excited about making change, which is amazing. Like I’m very, very lucky. I’m very fortunate. Yeah, but there’s so pumped they’re like, “Yeah, let’s change the themes. Let’s do this. Let’s re-organize things.” And I’m like, “Yes,” because they’re feeling that same context of I have an opportunity. I’m learning a lot. Like the kinds of learning that I typically reserved for July and August, I’m able to also engage in now. What am I reading? What am I picking up? What am I looking at online? And like I said, COVID-19 has inspired me to look at new history that I haven’t necessarily focused on before.

So all of that comes into how I teach it, and what I will be teaching, and what I’m able to offer students when we come back in a traditional classrooms in some form in the future.

SC:        Well, and the stuff that you do in July and August, now you can be in dialogue with your students about it, you know.

And I know too, like, if you’re doing something in July and you’re like, “Oh, that reminds me of that student from last year, but it seems weird to just send them an email and be like, “Oh, I saw this inside of you,” right? Like, you can make those connections as more like human beings and less as teacher and student. I talked about that too, this notion of curricular roles. We can get into these roles and just forget these are people in a room with us that have fears, and have anxieties, and have questions as well.

So this —

ID:        Some of our students are — sorry. Some of our students are interacting a lot more via email than they would in a classroom. They might be quiet in class. They were one of 30 or more students in a room. They’re great students, and they’re engaged, and they like what they’re learning, and they like history. They have a passion for the discipline, but we don’t often get to sort of connect with additions. And I’m emailing with students who are very excited about, “Oh, I bought a copy of Plato’s Republic. I can’t wait to read it.” And I’m like, “Holy wow. Okay, that’s like –” Yeah, I don’t think they would have gone there.

We talk about my summer research, but they’re also getting an opportunity, some of them. The real passionate senior students in the discipline of history are using the time to explore that interest and passion with their own research beyond the confines of what I can hand out. And I’ve been trying to encourage some of that too.

SC:        Well, this too reminds me of a video that I did with Joe McGill from The Slave Dwelling Project. So he’s a public historian. He’s a preservationist. He goes to different sites, mainly in the United States, and he — well, exclusively in the United States, mainly in the south, and he sleeps in slave dwellings, and he does learning activities with that. And he was saying that this moment is a real possibility and his words were, “For museums to do the right thing to be able to broaden the type of narratives that they are bringing to their audiences.” Because he said, “If you want to keep your audiences engaged, you have to start telling the stories that you weren’t telling before.” And that’s something I’m hearing from you as well, right? That we are able to have a different kind of conversation because we can use this as an opportunity to be like, all right, it’s already kind of screwed over. So let’s make the best of this. That’s really exciting.

I think of my third question too. So my upcoming book “Transforming the Canadian History Classroom: Imagining a New ‘We’” is about thinking of history classrooms as a lot of the things that you’re talking about. Full of people with questions about the world that a teacher can focus on their learning rather than thinking of just like, the students that need to know what’s in the binder. And a way to do this is to bring in more connection, complexity, and care to be able to think of more inclusion and that we have to start by doing that by imagining it. By thinking of it.

Do you think that we are going to be able to imagine a new ‘we’ in our classrooms after this in ways that we may not have been able to before?

ID:        Oh, gosh, I hope so. I actually —

SC:        I feel like that a lot of our conversation is already kind of led to like a yes, we should answer. And so I’m just interested to hear more of your thoughts about it.

ID:        I hope that we will again and again and again critically assess what ‘we’ means, right? Not just once, but all the time. I think that when we hit this sort of national crisis, international crisis moment, we do have an opportunity to think about ‘we’ very differently and to start to evolve that. And so I think the context for — again, we don’t know who our students. How our students will respond. We don’t know. Maybe we’re going to teach history differently. We’re going to dig in. We’re going to reorganize, we’re going to reassess what we do, but then let’s encourage students to define that, what that ‘we’ looks like.

I teach in a diverse classroom. I know many people across the country do and it’s not just those diversities that are so visible and really pushing into those other spaces. I think that the context of quarantine, of social distancing, of COVID-19 that’s highlighted, the different experiences of various socioeconomic groups, I think it has highlighted and really emphasized the importance of our essential workers. And we’ve redefined really what essential worker looks like, which is so great.

And I think what’s happening in that, we are finding a common context with all of those different people in their context, but different experiences within it. I don’t remember where it was. It was Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, somewhere, but it was we are not all in the same boat. We’re in the same storm and we’re all in different boats. And some of our boats are lavish and some of them are much simpler. And I like that that is even just a nice way in for students to connect with one of the most challenging elements of ‘we’, for me, is looking at people who, for whatever reason in their identities, experience socioeconomic struggle.

And also, the intersection of socioeconomic status in our society with so many other elements of a person’s identity. The ‘we’ is not just one type of person with one element to their identity that we crossed different barriers and boundaries and we look at one person as a whole person, not just as like an example of someone who is LGBTQ2+, or someone who happens to be a woman at that time period, or who happens to be a person of color in the 1970s. You know what I mean? Like, I don’t think it’s that one type anymore. I think that COVID has given us an opportunity to see that there are so many intersections of identity that are really relevant to the conversation that will allow us to challenge what ‘we’ looks like and start to hopefully undo some of the consistent othering that I see in the system, in our curriculum, in resources that are made available. Even in hiring practices of educators, there is examples of ‘the other’.

And in our classroom, I think our students often do that to one another. They other each other. They label externally rather than understanding the whole person. So I sort of hope that maybe some empathy and some compassion, because we’ve seen a lot of those examples in our communities and in our lives will transcend into the classroom from there.

SC:        And, I mean, I also think that the othering can happen in our practice, right?

SC:        I think even just the divisions of saying like the students, the students, the students, the students. And like, again, just thinking of them as students rather than human beings can miss the nuances and the complexities of who these young human beings are in our classrooms. And yes, they are students in our classrooms, but the othering of just student can wash away a lot of those diversities as well.

And students now up here, and I just did. Young people today, because of the ways that they interact on a lot of online communities, they already see a lot of diversities of ways to be a human being. And one thing I thought of with your answer is that they can now think too about not just the interaction or the performative nature of those different identities, but also the inequities of some of those identities in the ways that something like this will impact. And it will be really interesting how young people will think through this. What the next 10 years will look like with these 15-year-olds going into their adulthoods with these experiences, for example.

And I think of Sarah Glassford’s interview too because she also used that boat metaphor. That we have to remember about how this has been experienced so differently for everyone and not by choice, right? And the difficulties of that.

Another connection. I also think of Nicole Ridley’s interview that I did when she said, “We have to be careful that we’re not also prioritizing those experiences.” Like, “Oh, you had internet connection? Obviously, you may now be in the advanced class,” right?

SC:        Like, because what’s that — we all know what that’s going to do. It’s going to exacerbate, like you said, the othering already within the system.

ID:        You know, I hope that the experience of COVID-19 will slow us down so that we can listen a little bit more. Listen to students and learn their identities. I mean, it’s certainly always the effort doesn’t mean that every student always wants to share that with you. It can take — we’re talking of building relationships as defining success during sort of distance learning.

And I said, “I only had less than 20 days in the classroom with my students. That is not enough time for me to build relationships with 90 plus students this semester.” I think that the new ‘we’, it is always dependent on what we can know of our students and understand that our students are multifaceted individuals who have potential and capacities beyond what they have shown us in a given day or time that all of these things maybe will slow us to listen to their story, to listen to them telling us what they think is important or who they think we should listen to, maybe even offering opportunities for choice to explore different experiences other than themselves and like their own in a time period and place. That there are so many stories out there. And I think everyone will have their COVID-19 story.

And just like our parents’ generation, maybe we’re talking, “Oh, I have my moon landing story, right? For me, my big history awakening was when I was in grade 10 and we were leading up to experiencing the 95 referendum in Quebec. I mean, these were the moments that catalyzed my interest and started to illustrate diversity and inequity because I learned about the diversity of Canadian culture and language even if it was just sort of the French-English divide at the time and started to empathize and understand some of those things.

So I wonder and I hope that this will catalyze people into an interest in history, and politics, and civic duty and action, but also into sort of understanding others. And I hope that we’re able to teach and tell many more stories as a process about learning. Not just about COVID, but in all the things that we do.

SC:        Yeah. Like, that’s the thing too about being in people’s homes. We’re seeing different sides and to be able to listen to what that interaction tells us, I think, is really powerful. And that’s a really wonderful way to end. Thank you so much. This has been great.

ID:        Oh, thank you very much for speaking with me today, Samantha. You’re awesome.

SC:        Thank you. You’re awesome.