Change the system, not the students: Sociologist on Black lives in Canadian education
'We just cannot think one approach is going to fit all our students and enable them to be successful.'
*Originally published on Oct. 28, 2022.
After four decades as a community youth worker and sociologist, Carl E. James speaks of Canada's school system as if it were a student baffled by basic math.
"In some ways it might pay attention, but I don't think it's learning fast enough," Professor James told IDEAS host Nahlah Ayed in an interview about his winning the 2022 Canada Council Killam Prize for Social Sciences.
The sociologist's latest work borrows a technique he has used throughout his career: returning to the same interview subjects across years and decades, updating their life stories and expanding his account of Canada's systemic laws in the process.
In First-Generation Student Experiences in Higher Education: Counterstories, co-authored with Leanne Taylor, James follows up with eight students who attended York University in the early 2000s by means of a special mentorship project devised by the researchers.
The students were all first-generation immigrants to Canada. In return for agreeing to be studied, they received money for tuition.
"They would also receive an honorarium for participating in what we call the 'Common Hour'," explained Taylor. "These were weekly one-hour sessions where they would meet with both Carl and I to talk about their experiences. So these were really mentorship meetings, but they were also part of the research."
Increased inequities
The original study catalogued the barriers and hurdles facing the students as they navigated the university system, make friends, and handle relationships with families who often knew nothing of university life. Some students had never used email. Others reported confusion at the sight of their peers at work in study halls outside of class.
"That was not what I was used to," recalled one participant, now a lawyer working in the U.S. "I knew how to sit on the couch and work. But you couldn't just go up to the students, and say, 'Sooo… what's going on here? What are you up to? What is this?"
Taylor said that several of the students would have quit university without the support from the mentorship sessions and the support provided by fellow research subjects in the program.
"We just cannot think one approach is going to fit all our students and enable them to be successful," said James.
"We might have constructed what going to university means, or how it might enable students, and those constructs might have been from 20, 30, 40 years ago. We have to develop new models now for enabling and supporting those students in university today, and more so, given COVID. It has exacerbated some of the inequities."
Making the system accountable
The latest study joins a body of work by James aimed at connecting the details of individual lives to the data on who succeeds or struggles in Canadian institutions, and why. His best-known work focuses on the lives of young Black men in the Toronto area.
James' 2017 report, Towards Race Equity in Education, is credited with prompting Ontario to end the practice of streaming students in Grade 9, and to confront issues of systemic racism in schools and curriculum.
"He really focuses putting the blame on the system and highlights how, when we continue to put the blame on the student, it absolves the system of responsibility for what they've created," said Kim Tavares, a former student of James, and now vice principal for Human Rights, Equity and Inclusion at University of Toronto Schools.
At various points, this line of argument has brought the award-winning sociologist into conflict with school board trustees in Ontario, especially when he suggested dropping books like To Kill a Mockingbird from the curriculum or advocating for greater influence of Critical Race Theory on teaching.
"I think we in Canada, we need to still come to terms with race and racism conversations right now," James said.
"Sometimes it's difficult to accept change. It's difficult to accept that all along I've been having an interpretation of the world, or my context, or the life I've inherited, [and] I've been wrong in doing that, and therefore, I need to change at once... Yes, it's fear. But it needs to be worked at. It's got to come through relationships, through conversations."
*This episode was produced by Tom Howell.
