Dr. Samantha Cutrara:       Hi, Katy. Thank you so much for taking some time to talk with us today. I know that you’ve been so active in the work about the Spanish flu a couple years ago and now you’re still active in thinking about the pandemic and I think it will be really great to talk with you today. Thank you for taking the time!

Katy Whitfied:        Thanks for the opportunity. I’m looking forward to sharing with you today.

SC:        Yeah, definitely. So, I’ve been asking everyone three questions.

The first is whether or not you think about history any differently because of this moment? Because I have, but some people have said, like, “I’m already doing social history,” or “I’m too busy.” What do you think? Are you thinking about history any differently?

KW:        I think that I always love, as a history teacher, to seize the defining moments of our lives. So I see this as an opportunity ideal for critical inquiry. And my master’s of education degree is focused on history education and inquiry. So the two of these things blending together creates sort of an entire treasure box of how we can sort of take this learning moving forward.

Right now, we’re living history. Our students are living history in a way in which they’ve never lived it before. And as the history unfolds, it becomes even more relevant and more relatable as the pandemic moves on and I think that it creates an interesting parallel narrative to our own lives. I think that it is an amazing opportunity for students, and adults, and scholars to be doing historical thinking and fieldwork in our own spaces.

Often we’re out doing that work outside, whether on an archaeological dig site, in a library, in an institution, but the opportunity to do that connecting and to reframe how we look at what’s around us I think is really exciting for all of us. And in this movement of engaging and doing historical thinking in real and relatable ways, primary source evidence surrounds us at all points. We’re looking at what is historically significant: Is it more significant to me because it connects to me more personally or on a broader world scale? Are we connected in different ways than we ever would have been?

And also, what’s been interesting to me in this moment is the emphasis on women and women’s leadership throughout this. There’s been a lot of news articles about the leadership of the chief medical health officers across the country, both provincially and locally here in Canada and around the world. The prime minister of New Zealand, for example, has getting a lot of air time in terms of her leadership through these crises.

So I think it allows for us to engage with big questions to dive into even bigger inquiries and to connect with other subject areas in multidisciplinary ways. I’m not an expert in pandemics, I’m not a scientist, but I have real interest in how movements of different kinds, whether they are disease or social movements, allow us to engage our students, who may not be so keen on history, to actually find a connection to the subject area.

I think that we’re only beginning to see how the treasures that are unfolding about this moment and where this learning is going to take us as we move forward.

SC:        I love so much of what you’re saying. When you said, “We so often look outside of ourselves to do this kind of learning,” I think about Kristina Llewellyn’s interview earlier this week about oral histories and how we can talk and listen differently in our homes right now.

I also really appreciate that you bring up women’s leadership during this time because Neil Orford also talking about the importance of nurses during the Spanish flu, which led me to reference one of my videos, about how important it is to recognize care work and women as this foundation of how society functions. I think a lot of people are feeling that and seeing that in different ways now because everything is so centralized in our home. So yeah, thank you for that.

KW:        I also think that our young people are starting to see themselves represented. I mean, as I do my social distancing walks up around the neighborhood, I’ve been photographing drawings on the wall, pictures in windows. And part of the documentation is that students can see, either within their own families or within their own communities, how their communities are coming together to resolve this.

I saw a sign in a sign post yesterday of a blog that was saying: “We’ve created an online Facebook community group in order to help each other.” And I think that that is really showing our young people like how it doesn’t take a famous person or someone who’s the leader of an organization to create a movement of kindness and sharing, but rather a small gesture is something that is just as important as we look at how we sort of accord the narrative of this history.

And I noticed last week, some people were posting online on some social media a Facebook post to say, “Well, a year from now, I want to remind myself this was the gas price, this is how many people had been impacted.” And I think that part of that is like really a marking of the time. Like we do that in photographs and on different social media, but it’s been fascinating in the story collection that I’ve been doing hearing from young people in Istanbul having the same reactions to social distancing as someone in Adelaide in Australia as someone in Salt Spring Island in British Columbia. And so, the idea of how we’re more alike than we are different in these kinds of crises, I think is another opportunity for us to really take up.

My own students have been participating in the story project as well, and I think it comes down to the big questions we ask. If you ask the right question and you provide a gateway for an opportunity for someone to share their story, that story comes out of a space where it may never have been released into the universe and into the conversation. And some individuals have shared sort of the catharsis of reflecting. I know that that’s part of a more old fashioned idea of writing a journal or writing traditional letters, in the ways in which people would have done during the Spanish influenza without social media.

But even some of the project work we’ve been looking at this week is the Guelph Museum asked last week, if you were to curate a museum on COVID-19, what would you put into it? And that provocation came from Twitter and now, a whole bunch of us are creating a series of projects to engage our students in creating that record. What would that look like? Probably a digital online exhibit, so that is even taking museum education to a different level. Teachers are sending their students on virtual field trips to places around the world that they would only dream of being able to visit. And so the accessibility of history and being part of that I think is a really exciting.

I think ‘unprecedented’ is an overused word because I think, unfortunately, we may see another pandemic in our lifetime. And therefore, if those are the realities, then we have to think about now what important lessons we can learn about community, about access, about decision-making, about sharing resources both in Canada and around the world, and looking at who are our leaders who are going to lead us forward in that decision-making moving forward so that we’re solution-focused and we’re hearing all of the different voices in the historical conversation and in the social conversation as well.

SC:        Yeah. And I think that also brings up the fact that we can be leaders in our own communities, kind of like you were saying before, because I think of Kat Akerfeldt, who’s the executive director of Toronto’s First Post Office, who I spoke to last week. And she’s running a small museum that is trying to figure out how to move forward in this moment. And so if we want to be leaders in our world, and we’re saying things like arts and heritage are important, then it’s also up to us to demonstrate that commitment. I love this idea of teachers being able to take their students on field trips to places around the world, but I also want to encourage viewers to look at the small museums too because, first, they might actually have a lot more capacity for innovation, but also, because we want to keep smaller community stories growing as much as we can during this period.

KW:        And I want to add one point about engaging the artist community as an extension to that.

There’s been lots of opportunities where artists and writers and musicians are using history, and so to engage them as other partners in this conversation I think is really important, particularly as there are group of individuals who are really experiencing hard times. It will be the playwrights, and the singers, and the poets who are going to add to the narrative, as they have in many social movements and in many crises historically. So I would encourage people to think about how could they engage in their community with those voices and add them into the conversation too.

SC:        Yeah, I think that’s a great point. I think that it’s a moment where we can realize that we shouldn’t be taking for granted that these artists, musicians, heritage creators still also need to eat and pay their bills during this time. And I think when everything is so normal and everything is moving, we can kind of miss those lessons and this is an important reminder that if we want to be leaders, that we can engage this.

KW:        Absolutely.

SC:        So this leads me to my second question, which is about do you think that teaching history is going to change after this? A lot of people said that it should. I’m interested to know if you think that it will.

KW:        So I think that the sign of a good history class is when stories are in the room. And whether those are stories that are provoked by teachers, whether or not that is allowing for a pause in the conversation for a student to reflect on their own stories or their own experiences, I don’t think that we’re going to lose that sense of story.

I do think, however, that when you experience periods in time like pandemics, the opportunity for connecting to the wider world is even more possible. And so, the incorporation of those voices. And I know that some of the work that the Ontario History Association [JOHN LINK] has been doing as well as other organizations in ‘bringing experts’ into the room whether that’s Skyping in a professor or Skyping in a community member, I think that they’ll be greater opportunity for doing that because we don’t know long term. How long our school system is going to be in a state of remote learning. We just don’t know.

We were talking in the last question about connecting to your place and space. I think that we’re going to be looking more at relationships with the land, relationships with environment. I mean, if you go back to the trajectory of what the last three months have looked like, we started January with a more loud conversation about the Wetʼsuwetʼen pipeline issue and how that became part of our media with the disruption of railways and the relationships between government and indigenous people. That’s not a new issue. That’s one that just came to the surface yet again.

So looking at the land and the environment and the climate crisis, and how, as historians, are we looking at how previous generations and indigenous people have cared for the land and our relationship to it. How do we care for the environment? And how can we take lessons out of the environment when we’re in this period of pause. A friend of mine was calling this the pandemic pause. And every once in a while, I catch myself and I feel like I’m too frenzied to actually pause and think about that.

But I think that also oftentimes in history class, we think that our students find conversations about government boring. On March 13th, when the World Health Organization made the declaration that this was an international pandemic, I walked into my civics classroom and the prime minister of Canada was giving his address to the nation and I just let it run. I just let him run for about five or six minutes. And he finished at the end and he said, “Ladies and gentlemen, Canadians, we will get through this together.” And I thought, “Okay, there is my launch into this lesson. We have no idea what’s going to happen next.”

And then we looked at the provincial government, and we were at the time in our unit looking at ministry responsibilities. So I provoked my students to look at particular ministries, how is the ministry impacted by this particular issue, and what suggestions might we give to that ministry? So it takes looking at government and sort of like jazzes it up for lack of a better expression of making government in decision-making something that’s worthy of our consideration.

And finally, I think that there’s sort of a surge of new energy to sort of like fight and rise up and advocate for issues of any quality and inequity around issues of education and access. Do people have the resources that they need? How do we continue to do teaching in spaces that are online when access to Wi-Fi or access to resources, when multiple children in the home who also may have a parent who needs this technology or who might be an educator themselves has to share all those resources. And I know that a lot of my colleagues who have young children have taken this as an opportunity to teach their kids about things that they’re interested in. It’s like the home is the kindergarten classroom, you know?

So asking a big question, and then we go on this investigation. And so I think that that energy is giving us an opportunity and finally, we’re being given a pause. A pause that we may not see like this again, or not for a long time. But it allows for us an opportunity to take stock of what we have to knowledge with gratitude the basic human needs that we have, the rights that we’ve been given, the hard work of our essential service workers in order to give us the things that we need and to care for us, but also, it gives us the impetus to sort of stand up and wright, and acknowledge, and ask for the things that even the vulnerable people in our communities may not have access to.

It’s motivating us to care for ourselves and to care for each other in ways in which, hopefully, will lead to a positive change in our society here in Canada, but also internationally about how we think about our neighbors and the things that they need as well.

SC:        Yeah, I really appreciate that. And I want to kind of blend some of those ideas together because this moment of ‘pause’ can also help us do things like engage in research about things we don’t know. And so if we are, for example, interested in greater understandings of the land and greater understandings of indigeneity of this place, then I think of Sean Carlton’s video about having a better understanding of nation-to-nation relationships and how that is playing out in this moment. This can be a great opportunity to take stock of what we still need to know in order to, again, move into the future together.

This then then brings me to the third question about imagining a new ‘we’. I’m actually really interested to hear more about your story project. So maybe you could talk a little bit about that as a way to kind of think about this notion of imagining a new ‘we’.

KW:        Absolutely. So the story project started about two and a half weeks ago now. It’s called Stories from Self Isolation and the project itself is a Google form. Basically, it started off with an idea that if I was to be teaching this history next year, five years from now, 10 years from now, where am I going to collect the primary source documents that I’m going to want in order to tell these stories?

And so, I threw it out to the social media universe and thought, “Well, if I gather sort of five, 10 stories, that’ll kind of be excited. This will be kind of cool.” And then as the stories were ready to roll in and colleagues had been sharing it. The first bit of the questions was sort of a little description of who are you? What’s your age? Where are you coming up from? Sort of that basic demographic information. And I was curious in the first bit to find out what people were eating, what people were doing, what people were listening to. Like, what was the major headline of what was going on? In my teacher brain, I was thinking about what kind of tasks could I have students do with this data? We’re always thinking about keeping the end in mind and how the collection of that data would fuel inquiry or fuel our own research.

And so, in addition to that, there were questions about how people were spending their days, settling in and staying home. And this particular set of questions was focusing on, do you have personal family connections or relational connections to essential workers? How is your relationship with those individuals was impacting your day? How now that we’re being asked to stay home, how are you accessing your groceries, and your food and other services? But how are you also helping local businesses?

And then in addition to that, some of the questions are asking little interesting things like, what’s your go-to snack?

SC:        That’s your go-to-snack?!

KW:       My go-to snack, I would say, are some Cool Ranch Doritos and Diet Pepsi. Those are like my standards, but I also have been eating a lot of gummy worms. That’s something I would never buy, but it’s kind of the luxury at this time, I’m not sure why. But anyways.

The last part of the questions were asking about how people’s attitudes changed in terms of the pandemic, as we sort of settle in looking at opinions around social distancing, looking at opinions about sort of following regulations, looking at quarantine and so on.

So far we have 177 responses. They come from all around the globe. There are very large number of them that are coming from students whose teachers are having them participate, and all of the data that I’ve been collecting has been populated on the websites that I have created. A simple website that sort of gives you a summary of some of the stories that are being shared.

All of the information so far is being shared anonymously, but the idea in the end is to create a resource, a source book, with the permission of the participants, that could be shared within the school system here and around the globe for people who are interested. We’ll see how long this goes on.

People have talked about how we’re complaining about our self isolation and then I’m reminded of Anne Frank. And Anne Frank writing a diary in an upper room in the Netherlands in the midst of the Holocaust. And I mean, obviously, she didn’t live long enough to know how famous her words would be of words of inspiration, but it has been particularly interesting to me the international stories that I’ve been collecting. I’ve had a response from Costa Rica. I’ve had a response from Australia. One from New Zealand. I’ve traveled to Myanmar, so I have a response from Myanmar and Burma. I have also received some from the United States, which is representing some interesting contrast to our North American experience. Within Canada, I received one amazing story from Salt Spring Island in British Columbia from one of the Governor General’s History award winners. And then within sort of Ontario and parts of the Maritimes, a colleague of mine, his father is leading the medical charge at a hospital in Nova Scotia. And so it’s so interesting how the sort of fabric of these stories are coming together.

Now, what’s needed, I think, of that data is I could see an artist, a member of the artist community being inspired by that data. Could we make theater with it? Could we use music? Could we set it to music? Could we paint something? Is it now allowing for lesser, more vulnerable voices to be at the table? A 15-year-old kid who’s being honest about their experience of life, “This is driving me crazy! I need to get out of here,” versus the young woman from Turkey who I heard from this morning who said, “I just don’t get it. People know they need to stay home, and why are they still walking on the boardwalk?” There’s a voice that’s sort of screaming to the world like, we need to be in this and we need to be committed together.

But I think what it’s also raising for me are sort of some different considerations about addressing ‘isms.’ People have been talking about racism and discrimination. People have been talking about access. People have been talking about their political systems, their feedback about their governments. They’ve also been talking about this idea of what they are contributing to the story project is leaving a record of their experience, but also a legacy for others to be able to tap into.

Fortunately, only one of the respondents so far has identified as being personally infected by COVID-19. So it’s quite remarkable, particularly amongst that group of all who has been impacted.

But I think it’s causing people to consider their own individual stories and their own individual connections to the narrative, but also taking stock of their expressions of gratitude, of sort of acknowledging. I mean, I think good life coaching would say acknowledge the things that you have and the time that you have. And I keep thinking if my grandparents had lived through this, what stories would they be telling?

My grandmother was a great storyteller. My grandparents, all four of them, told stories around the table all the time. I think I’m thinking a lot about them this week because their birthdays and their anniversaries all fall in this one chunk of April. And if they’d be alive today, they would be 101 and 102 years old and would have lived or would have been married for 78 years, but how their resolve, and their courage, and their bravery to have lived through all these experiences, I think that their wisdom is guiding a lot of us. Or like, their generation is kids that grew up during the depression or during the war years. My dad and I were talking about this and he said, “You know, our generation –” even his generation. My dad is 71. He said, “Even our generation hasn’t had to experience something of this magnitude.” They’ve obviously lived through sort of some international conflicts around them, the Cold War and so on and so forth, but this is going to be really defining. I think about how we look at the world. A colleague said one of their students is describing, is this potentially we’re going to talk about pre- and post-pandemic as sort of how events happened as a course of history? Which is I think we’ll see how long that lasts, you know. I mean, it creates sort of this new era.

But I think the other thing that is kind of reassuring through story projects like this is that there are lots of unknowns, but the knowns are that your story exists, your feelings matter, your experience matters. And even just launching the opportunity for others to contribute is giving people the sense of purpose and connection to a greater experience, you know? And I mean, I get obviously so excited when there’s a new message in my inbox saying a new one has been added. But the diversity of their responses and to your question about imagining a new transnational ‘we’, the similarities that I’m finding in the stories, the access and the space to share those conversations. Even posting the list of what we’re all reading and connecting not to the second question sort of about how are we pausing and sort of rethinking.

This is a really exciting opportunity for us to not be so dwelling on the isolation and the sadness, but what opportunity does this give to us as educators and as people who study history to engage people in doing that historical thinking work so that future generations can learn that we got through it in multiple different ways? Some days we’re up, some days we’re down. But that those experiences that we have potentially may be used to inform policy in the future, how communities operate and exist within themselves and in the broader conversation, and that perhaps that we may just smile a little bit more when we pass the people down the street or that will make greater connections with our neighbors and our friends, and with people around the world, connecting students and scholars and so on. I’m hopeful. I’m hopeful about it. and I think that this is an exciting time.

SC:        Yeah. You know, it’s interesting for those of us who are about to experience spring right now, because spring is always a time for us to kind of regroup and to reassess, and to be able to see things growing, and to be able to see this new layer of beauty. And I really appreciate your response because I think that really echo spring.

So thank you, this has been really fantastic. I think that you’ve provided so many really helpful suggestions, but also some really transformative ideas for people to think about it.

more stories. I’m particularly excited about stories from different parts of the world. So the international listeners, I would love to hear from you. Thank you. Take care. Bye.

SC:        Bye!