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March 8, 2016 episode transcript

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Listen to the full episode

Prologue

Host: Laura Lynn

[Music: theme]

SOUNDCLIP

We will not write what they want. We will not kneel in front of the repressive Turkish government.

LAURA LYNCH: You’d think the Turkish government has enough trouble on it’s hands what with tens of thousands of Syrian refugees, battles with Kurdish rebels in the south east; but now it's taking on one of the country's top media outlets as part of a wider crackdown. But will the West which needs Turkey onside to deal with the refugees and ISIS, stand up for press freedom in that nation? That story in a moment. Later, we are such stuff as dreams are made on. Right?

SOUNDCLIP

Men tend to have more action based dreams, where as women’s tend to be a little bit more subtle as opposed to the, I’m flying!

LL: There is in fact much, much more new information about dreams and sleep. And just what the brain is up to while we slumber including a new form of brain washing that actually seems to be good for you. And in our last half hour…

SOUNDCLIP

Well this afternoon, Mr. Matthews, you are going to learn something from me. Do I have your attention?

[/sc]

LL: Well you have mine. That is a rare breed it seems, a male teacher. Fewer and fewer of them these days are in elementary and high school classrooms. There are new calls for diversity in the teaching ranks but it seems to exclude men. It is time though for today's lesson. I'm Laura Lynch sitting in for Anna Maria Tremonti and this is The Current.

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Turkey's government tramples on press freedom with newspaper takeover, critics say

Guests: Abdullah Ayasun, Gareth Jenkins

SOUNDCLIP

[crowd chanting; whistling]

LL: The fight for a free press in Turkey has become a battle once again. Protesters face tear gas and water cannon outside the Istanbul headquarters of the country's largest newspaper, Zaman, a few days ago. They were there because the government of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan had taken over the publication and its English language edition. And now it seized control of another news agency called Cihan. The US State Department called the move against the newspaper troubling. Adding, “Critical opinion should be encouraged, not silenced.” But the government crackdown on media, arrests of journalists, and takeovers of news outlets ensure Turkey remains near the bottom of the world press freedom index. Today as part of our series, Eye on The Media, we're taking the pulse of the Fourth Estate inside Turkey. Abdullah Ayasun is or was a journalist and editor with the English language version of Zaman. We’ve reached him in Istanbul. Hello.

ABDULLAH AYASUN: Hello.

LL: You were there when the court appointed trustees took over. Can you describe for me exactly what happened?

ABDULLAH AYASUN: On Friday night towards midnight there was a large police presence in front of the Zaman building. Supporters gathered to express their support for the newspaper and the police used tear gas, intense tear gas, and fired water cannon to disperse the crowd. Then they forcefully broke inside the building.

LL: And you were inside the building at that point?

ABDULLAH AYASUN: I was in the garden. There's also an outside door between the office and the garden. First they opened the outside door and we just withdrew back inside the office because of too much tear gas. After that, police also entered the office forcefully. And they forcefully forced us to leave the building.

LL: Was anyone hurt?

ABDULLAH AYASUN: Several friends of ours were brutally treated by police when some dialogues took place between them. Fortunately, we were lucky there were not so much injured journalists inside.

LL: Abdullah, did you have any sense that the police were going to come in, that there was going to be a takeover?

ABDULLAH AYASUN: The threat of takeover was imminent last year before the June 7^th elections. And it was also the same situation before and after the November 1^st elections, the government signalled its intention and plan for takeover of Zaman. But Friday's takeover was a bit unexpected and sudden. So it was a little bit of a surprise for us.

LL: Now Abdullah I understand that you took some photos of the events and for listeners who are interested we're going to post some of those to our website, www.cbc.ca/thecurrent. So if it took you a bit by surprise, what reason were you and your colleagues given for the takeover?

ABDULLAH AYASUN: The reason behind the court decision was based on allegations.

LL: Some charges?

ABDULLAH AYASUN: Some charges we consider groundless and baseless because the court decision or the prosecutors say we are abetting and assisting a terrorist organization which we just regard as ridiculous because the government directs similar accusations against anybody who criticizes the government policies.

LL: So you reject that you're in any way working with a terrorist organization?

ABDULLAH AYASUN: Yes.

LL: For Canadians who aren't familiar with the newspaper, what role did it play in Turkish media and in Turkey?

ABDULLAH AYASUN: The newspaper opened its papers and room for any voice, any critical voice, independent voice, and it is the largest newspaper of Turkey. Therefore Zaman played an important role for anybody who cannot give its voice to the nation because of the government monopoly over media outlets. Considering its wide reach in society, it was of crucial importance for presenting independent and different voices.

LL: Was it critical of President Erdoğan and his government?

ABDULLAH AYASUN: Yes.

LL: Unfairly?

ABDULLAH AYASUN: I cannot say that because it's not just about Zaman, there's a general pattern in Turkey the way the country takes direction; we have seen setbacks from democracy and many freedoms. When you criticize Erdoğan, you have many factual grounds, not just from some sort of ideological opposition of being on to Erdoğan, it's not the case.

LL: You're talking about the situation in other media outlets and some of your colleagues at other publications that have been jailed. What can you tell us about that?

ABDULLAH AYASUN: The past few years, the media freedom suffered setbacks at an incredible level. We saw many reporters and journalists were jailed because of their criticism of government policies. Two years ago, Hürriyet Daily and Radikal Daily published stories about Turkish intelligence sending arms to some groups in Syria. When it came out to the public it produced a political storm. Erdoğan reacted very harshly. He wrote that those journalists will be punished.

LL: So the first issue of the Zaman that had been overseen by these trustees hit the streets on Sunday. What editorial changes have there been so far?

ABDULLAH AYASUN: It came out with the new project by Erdoğan to build a bridge in Istanbul. On the first page you see a big photo of Erdoğan, the bridge, and [unintelligible]. So it's like a pro-government approach to news publication. It changed overnight.

LL: So there's no criticism of the government in it at all?

ABDULLAH AYASUN: No.

LL: The last edition of Zaman before the takeover had a quote in it; it called it, “One of the darkest days in the history of the Turkish media.” And I'm wondering what that means for you; how have you been affected by this personally?

ABDULLAH AYASUN: Personally, over the past four or five years we have heard or we read stories of firing of our fellow journalists. Now we are going to through a similar experience. I was about to resign but after talking to my editors in France and my lawyer, they told me not to personally resign, but expect them or wait for them to fire us because if that happens we can demand compensation and our rights can be re-instated in the future. But if I resign, that will play into their hands, the trustees’ hands, so they would be happy to see a presentation of mass resignations because it will make their job easier. But we are not going to do that. We will wait.

LL: So you've taken a leave of absence from the newspaper?

ABDULLAH AYASUN: I also demanded the removal of my name from the editorial board so my name is not on the paper anymore.

LL: If you cannot return to your newspaper because of the takeover, what other options are there for you as a journalist? What could you do as a journalist in Turkey?

ABDULLAH AYASUN: I can work as a freelance journalist in much less favourable material conditions because there are no jobs currently. And also there are not many outlets left for opponents of the government so it's very difficult to get a place in today's media world in Turkey.

LL: Abdullah, I thank you very much for your time.

ABDULLAH AYASUN: You are welcome, it's a pleasure.

LL: Good bye.

ABDULLAH AYASUN: Thank you, goodbye.

LL: Abdullah Ayasun is a journalist and editor on leave from the English language edition of Zaman and we reached him in Istanbul. A free press and democracy are supposed to go hand in hand meaning the situation at Zaman raises some critical questions for Turkey. To find out about what pressures inside the country have led to this situation, as well as those preventing Turkey's allies from getting too closely involved, we've reached Gareth Jenkins. He's a Senior Associate Fellow at the Institute for Security and Development Policy and he's been based in Turkey since 1989. Gareth Jenkins is also in Istanbul. Hello.

GARETH JENKINS: Hi.

LL: Gareth, what was your reaction to what you just heard from Abdullah Ayasun?

GARETH JENKINS: To a large extent I agree with him but I think this was coming. We've already had two newspapers and two television channels run by the Gülen movement, which were taken over in October last year. And on the first of March, the authorities announced that they were going to be liquidated, so it was only a week ago. Zaman has always been the flagship of the Gülen movement, so I think it was just a matter of time before Erdoğan moved against it as well. But it forms part of a broader campaign Erdoğan’s conducting against the media we've seen. Not just, of course, media outlets taken over, we've seen a lot of journalists fired or been pressured out of their jobs, and the main non-government controlled media group, the Doğan Group, is now heavily self-censoring. The scope for an independent media is being steadily squeezed and I think that the seizure of Zaman and the closure of Cihan are just part of this kind of more general process.

LL: You mention the Gülen media empire; these newspapers are closely associated with the movement of Fethullah Gülen. Who is he and why does President Erdoğan seem to be so threatened by him?

GARETH JENKINS: Gülen is in his early seventies; he was trained as an imam and practiced as an imam in Turkey. He built up a movement of followers and he fled the country, under the previous regime, when politics was still very much dominated by the military and took refuge in the States; he's currently living in Pennsylvania. The irony is that initially when Erdoğan first came to power, when that party came to power, the Gülen movement and Erdoğan were allies. They worked very closely together and although of course the seizure of any newspaper and suppression of any opinion from my perspective is wrong, it has to be said that the Gülen movement played a major role in the imprisonment of a lot of other journalists from 2008 to 2012. And they helped Erdoğan, both through the media outlets and also through some of their supporters who were in the police and the judiciary, to suppress their shared enemies and their shared rivals.

LL: So what caused the falling out then?

GARETH JENKINS: There was always a sense that eventually when they were the only two men left standing they would probably turn on each other. The tensions then began to rise through 2013 and both Erdoğan and the Gülen movement knew that the confrontation was coming. The Gülen movement arrested a lot of Erdoğan's close associates on corruption charges as Gülen supporters and followers in the judiciary and the police. And ever since then Erdoğan’s hit back very strongly. But they did have this alliance of convenience up until late 2013.

LL: You seem to cast this simply as a power struggle; were there no issues that they became divided over?

GARETH JENKINS: No, not really. Ideologically, they're not very different; they're both conservative Sunni Muslims. There's quite a lot of difference of course in tone. Erdoğan is very aggressive, Gülen always talks about tolerance and dialogue except on ideological issues. It really got down to a power struggle between the two.

LL: So it was not about the dealing with the Syrian situation, there was no difference of opinion about that, or dealing with the Kurdish uprisings in the east?

GARETH JENKINS: No, far from it. Since these falling outs, these have been used by the Gülen movement as instruments against Erdoğan, they’ve become very critical. But before that, they went along with everything he did and certainly towards the PKK, the main Kurdish militant group in Turkey, there is no difference of opinion between them even now.

LL: But the crackdown does reach beyond any outlets controlled by Gülen, am I correct?

GARETH JENKINS: Yes, absolutely. Most of what Erdoğan’s attempted to do is try to apply pressure behind the scenes. So people in his office will call up editors and tell them to fire critical journalists. And will try to influence the news and to force media organizations into self-censorship. That's been largely successful but there have been two main media groups which have resisted this. One is Cumhuriyet, which is relatively small. But the much larger one, particularly since 2013, has been the Gülen Group. With the Gülen Group, Erdoğan still hasn’t managed to intimidate it into acquiescence and into silence which is why he's resorted to this.

LL: It seems tensions now are really reaching a boiling point. Are you concerned about what could happen?

GARETH JENKINS: Yes. I've been in Turkey for 26 years and to be honest, I've never been so concerned. There’s a lot of tension in society, there’s always been clashes between people who are against the authorities, particular political persuasions, and they’ve clashed with the police and things like this, and been anti-government. But what we're seeing now, to an unprecedented level, is tensions moving into society itself. So inside society you've got a lot of tensions between supporters and opponents of the government. You got a near civil war happening in the Southeast with the Kurdish insurgency. You’ve got this huge problem of migrants, and Erdoğan becoming increasingly repressive. I think from the outside there's been a tendency to see him as being kind of static, as being a very authoritarian and that’s it. But it's becoming worse. And unless he pulls back quite quickly, Turkey is going to reach a breaking point.

LL: Now all of this is happening against the backdrop of the Syrian refugee crisis. And the European Union has been asking and depending on Turkey for its help in this in handling those Syrian refugees to help keep the flood from moving into Europe. We saw the Turkish government trying to leverage, I guess is the word, more concessions out of the EU on this. Where is the West when it comes to what is happening in Turkey? They seem to be rather quiet about everything that's going on.

GARETH JENKINS: Yes, absolutely. I think both the US and the EU have given Erdoğan a free ride. The US, because it wants Turkish cooperation with its military campaign, it’s air campaign against ISIS in Syria and Iraq. And the EU because it needs to get cooperation with the migrants. I think it's very short-sighted because if things go on as they are in Turkey we’re going to have very serious destabilization which will make things even more difficult. But it's been quite extraordinary really, how muted the criticism has been about what's happening in Turkey.

LL: Is President Erdoğan worried at all about falling out of favour?

GARETH JENKINS: No I don't think so, just the opposite. I think we saw this in the attitude towards the EU, we had the summit yesterday in Brussels and Prime Minister Davutoglu turned up with a whole load of extra demands, which I'm sure he was given by Erdoğan before he left Turkey. And from Erdoğan's perspective he thinks both the US and the EU need him a lot more than he needs them so I don't think he's worried at all.

LL: Then what does the West need to do in your view?

GARETH JENKINS: It needs to stick to its principles, I think. I mean it's making these vague comments about commitment to freedom of speech et cetera, but they're just talking and not doing anything else. They really need to make clear to Turkey that they’re serious; that this is unacceptable. I mean, this is not a situation which is static, things are deteriorating. They have to make it clear to Turkey that they will not go on cooperating on the same level. This kind of thing should be unacceptable.

LL: But what are you talking about are you talking about? Are you talking about putting sanctions on Turkey?

GARETH JENKINS: There's no need, I don't think, for sanctions and such, but there's a lot of cooperation between Turkey and the EU and also between the US. I think for example, Turkey is demanding a lot of money from the EU to try to stop the migrants and there are a lot of different conditions being put into this agreement, they're still negotiating because we haven't got a final agreement. But anything like this, I think one of the conditions has to be that there is not more repression inside Turkey. This has to be linked into any cooperation between Turkey and both the US and the EU. At the moment, there’s a tendency to compartmentalize.

LL: Gareth Jenkins, we will leave it there. Thank you very much.

GARETH JENKINS: You’re very welcome.

LL: Gareth Jenkins is a Senior Associate Fellow at the Institute for Security and Development Policy based in Turkey. And we reached him in Istanbul. We contacted the Turkish ambassador to Canada, to the US and the permanent mission of Turkey to the United Nation; no one was available for comment.

Back To Top »

Documentary explores serious consequences of sleep deprivation

Guests: Jennifer Gardy, Robert Stickgold

LAURA LYNCH: I’m Laura Lynch in for Anna Maria Tremonti and you’re listening to The Current.

SOUNDCLIP

[lullaby playing]

VOICE 1: Could you do me a favour? Could you not tuck the blankets because I can’t sleep all tucked in.

VOICE 2: What would happen if I just didn't sleep? How long before I go crazy? Why keep scrolling like something new is going to happen? Should I get new pillows? Best pillows on Amazon..

[alarm clock clanging]

[I’m So Tired by The Beatles playing]

LL: Well, maybe work and life keep conspiring to keep you from getting to bed on time, or the day’s stresses keep you tossing and turning once you do hit the sheets. Either way, that evil alarm clock arrives too early for too many of us and a good night's sleep has become something we can only dream about. Instead, we rely on a coffee or two or three to top up our batteries and power us through yet another sleep deprived day. But as the scientific research continues to grow, it's becoming more and more apparent that getting our sleep is about much more than simply recharging our energy stores, and that the time may have come to rethink sleep. It's a topic that CBC TV's The Nature of Things will tackle this Thursday with an episode called While you Were Sleeping. It's hosted by Jennifer Gardy, an assistant professor in the Faculty of Medicine at the University of British Columbia. And Jennifer Gardy is in Vancouver. Hello.

JENNIFER GARDY: Hello.

LL: It seems like there is an ever increasing list of distractions and worries that keep us from getting a proper sleep. Are we worse sleepers than we were in the past?

JENNIFER GARDY: [laughs] We definitely are worse sleepers than we were in the past, and we sleep differently too. You look back at the sleeping habits of famous people 100,200,300 years ago and people were going down for you know, three-or four hour naps, waking up in the middle of the night, writing symphonies and sonnets and fantastic things and these days we’re just staying up glued to our screens well past our bedtime. With this doc, we learned that when we deprive ourselves of sleep there's some very, very serious consequences that actually play out across many aspects of our lives.

LL: I know that when I don't get enough sleep, I feel like a zombie the next day. I feel kind of like I'm walking through a bunch of sludge to get to where I need to go. But, there's more to it than that as you found out. Why is sleep so important?

JENNIFER GARDY: Sleep, we tend to think of it as it's just you know, recharging our batteries, it's our human power up. But, there's really so much more that happens when we go down to bed. We might just be lying there, but in fact what's happening inside our bodies is tremendously dynamic. There are processes going on that are helping in consolidation of memories, cementing facts and actions, and things that we learned over the course of the day. There are aspects of hormonal regulation, hormone production that influence how hungry we might get the next day. We're looking at dreams as kind of a window into our consciousness and there are so many fascinating things that happen, even you know, our brains cleaning themselves out, taking the dust up at the end of the day.

LL: Okay, we're going to get to all of those things. It amazes me that we sleep at all given how busy our brains seem to be [laughs]. I know you put yourself into the middle of some of these experiments in the course of your research for the documentary. Let's listen to a little of what you got up to in Las Vegas.

SOUNDCLIP

[casino slots and music in the background]

VOICE 1: What I want you to do is to go out have some fun tonight.

JENNIFER GARDY: I can do that. Time to get sleep deprived.

VOICE 1: Jennifer, are you still awake? No sleeping.

JENNIFER GARDY: Good morning, Doc.

VOICE 1: Hey, Jen. How are you doing?

JENNIFER GARDY: To be honest, I'm really tired. I think I'm like a nine out of the ten on the tired scale.

VOICE 1: So, did you get hitched?

JENNIFER GARDY: [laughs] No.

LL:[laughs] Okay, well normally what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas, but not in this case. Can you tell us what you were doing there? Were you gambling in the name of science?

JENNIFER GARDY: We were investigating what happens to your judgment when you're sleep deprived, and really there's no better place to explore a lack of judgment than Las Vegas. We are working with a fantastic researcher who is inspired by questions raised by the military. What happens when soldiers are sleep deprived when they're out there in the theatre of war? Is sleep deprivation causing them to make bad decisions? So, we did a before and after test. We had a simple gambling task appropriate for Las Vegas that was basically designed to assess my judgment, am I making good decisions? So, I did the test before I sleep deprived myself and then myself and the crew, we stayed up for 24 hours, we went all over Las Vegas, we did everything you could think of there, except to get hitched, and then came back, did the test again after 24 hours of no sleep. The results were really remarkable. I was raised by psychologists, I kind of know how to game the psychological test system. I figured I had this test sorted out, I knew what I had to do and I couldn't do it after I'd been sleep deprived. There was a pattern there that I needed to recognize and I just couldn't pick up on it because the sleep deprivation had basically severed the connection between the decision making portion of my brain and kind of the emotional intuitive portion of my brain.

LL: So, had you actually been gambling, you would've lost a whole lot of money.

JENNIFER GARDY:[laughs] I would have lost piles of money.

LL: As you said, this was done by someone with a military background. Why are those findings of particular relevance to the military because I gather they've been replicated across the board.

JENNIFER GARDY: Exactly. Yes, these have been backed up by a number of peer reviewed studies and the military is interested in how can it ensure that the folks that it has out there in the battlefield, are they making the right decisions? You've got people that are flying missions that are dropping bombs. I know some of this research was motivated by a friendly fire incident and one of the questions was did this misfiring occur because the troops were sleep deprived? Were they not able to make the right judgment call in the field and not recognize that it was friendly troops that they were firing on as opposed to the enemy? Really interesting stuff that's leading to a number of interventions for the battlefield, you know, can we use for example, caffeinated gum to keep soldiers up, and is that going to fix the sleep deprivation or is it just going to keep them awake, but their decision making is still going to be a compromise. It is fascinating stuff.

LL: The jury is out on that still, though. So, moving on to a different subject group. You also travelled to Germany to tag along with Ruhr University psychologist Sabine Seehagen as she looked at how babies retain memories. And here she is talking about her research.

SOUNDCLIP

[babies cooing and gurgling]

SABINE SEEHAGEN: Infants have to learn so much in the first few years of life and they develop in such striking ways really every day but until a few decades ago, many people even doubted whether infants can form longer term memory. But, I think our study shows that sleep seems to play a really fundamental role in early memory processing and I mean, that's a very fundamental task for infants to build long term memories so that they can use them at a later point.

LL: How do you test a baby’s memory?

JENNIFER GARDY: It's tricky, but fortunately child psychologists and infant behavioural theorists have figured out a couple ways that you can test these non-verbal but incredibly adorable infants and one of them, the task that we used in this study was a puppet-based task. There was this little pink puppet and the puppet has a mitten on one of its hands and so Sabine would sit there in front of an infant with the puppet on her hand and she demonstrated a very simple action. She would take the mitten off the puppets hand, she'd shake it and there was a little bell inside so it would make a sound, and then she would replace the mitten back on the puppet. Then, what we did was looked at babies who went to sleep after they had learned the action. Sabine fitted them with an accelerometer basically, to see who was crawling around and active, and who went down for a nap. So, you come back a few hours later and you're able to see which babies have slept after they learned the action and which babies didn't sleep. And then, you simply sit there in front of them with the puppet on your hand and wait for a little bit of time and see what the baby does and what was so fascinating was, the babies that went down for their nap right after they saw the original series of actions being demonstrated, they would reach out to the puppet, they'd take the mitten off, they'd shake the mitten around, it was a little much for them to get the mitten back on my hand as they are babies. They’ve got fat little non-dexterous hands, but you could tell they had learned this action that Sabine had demonstrated. Whereas the babies that didn't go down for the nap, you confronted them with the puppet a few hours later, and they looked at it with googly eyes and maybe they'd kind of reach out and try and pat it on the head, but they made no indication that they had recalled this, the remove the mitten and shake it action, it was really interesting.

LL: Jennifer, you also looked at research into dreams and to tell us about that I'm going to bring in Robert Stickgold. He's a cognitive neuroscientist, as well as the Director of the Center for Sleep and Cognition at Harvard Medical School. He studies the links between sleep, dreams, and memory and he joins us from Cambridge, Massachusetts. Hello.

ROBERT STICKGOLD: Hello.

LL: You've looked at a specific role dreams play in memory. What have you found?

ROBERT STICKGOLD: What we find in some ways, people I think have always thought that the brain while we're sleeping, while we're dreaming, is sort of going over the events of our day, the events of the past in really weird and strange ways. Our research has shown that in fact, people don't replay their memories when they dream, that they don't actually take those memories and review them and replay them as they would if they thought about them when they were awake. But, instead they sort of do associative transformations of it, as if I'm almost in a car accident driving home and someone runs a stop sign, I do live in Cambridge, Massachusetts, it's a daily event, and that night I might dream that I’m at an amusement park with my son Adam and we're on the bumper cars, and cars are crashing into us, and he's crashing into them, and he’s having a great time and I'm feeling like I really don't want to be here, this is really unpleasant. And, I wake up and I say wow, I had a dream about that accident I almost had but it was about it. I didn't dream that I was in my car, that I was at that intersection that a car came through, I dreamed about a totally, well not totally, but only weakly related scenario. I think that that's what it turns out that dreaming is about.

LL: Can I ask you a little bit more about what you understand to be the process of dreams and memories? After watching the documentary myself, my understanding is almost as if you've taken in these experiences during the day and during the night. As you dream, you're trying to figure out which file folder to put the dream into.

ROBERT STICKGOLD: It is. You know, if you take a computer and try to have it record, memorize a visual image, an auditory sound, something you typed on the keyboard, it’s exquisite at that. It can record those things whilst doing 20 other things. If you ask the computer so what does that mean, the computer has no idea. It’s the same way with the human brain. Recording memories is relatively easy, it's figuring out what they mean and what use they are. Dan Schacter, who is here at Harvard with me talks about how memories are about the future, not about the past because it's about our ability to have that information available when it's useful in the future. For it to be available, it has to be filed properly and I think that's what the dreaming and what sleep is doing. It's taking a memory and saying, oh well that's sort of like exploring a maze, or exploring a cave, so I’ll store it under caves. It's sort of like other games I play in the computer where there are people at checkpoints, so I’ll store it under computer games. Where else should I store it? Maybe I should store under ways to make money because I'm getting paid to do this. No, that's probably not the right place to store it, but the brain is sort of looking around and trying to figure out how might I be using this in the future and that determines how should I store it now. The dreams are looking at those various ways that we might use it in the future.

LL: Fascinating. Given all that you've come to know, how far do you think we’ve come in terms of our knowledge of the role of sleep since you started in the field?

ROBERT STICKGOLD: Oh, you know, it's amazing. When I got into this field which is 20 years ago now, a long time for some people I think, but not that long ago in science terms. 20 years ago, Allan Hobson famously said, the only known function of sleep is to cure sleepiness. We knew that little about function but now we know that it's important for hormonal function, most of our growth hormone is secreted while we sleep, insulin regulation is controlled while we sleep, immune function--if you get a hepatitis vaccine and then put an all-nighter afterwards, you're only going to produce half as much antibody to that hepatitis than if you had had a good night's sleep, and your memory consolidation, how you remember, how you understand that emotional regulation. All these things now are known to depend on sleep and we're starting to work out the mechanisms, too.

LL: As I said, fascinating work. Thank you.

ROBERT STICKGOLD: You're welcome.

LL: That was Robert Stickgold, who is a cognitive neuroscientist and the Director of the Center for Sleep and Cognition at Harvard Medical School. He was in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Jennifer Gardy, let's come back to you. You also spoke to another dream researcher, Antonio Zadra, who has collected more than 10,000 dream stories, and that includes yours. Here he is interpreting your dreams.

SOUNDCLIP

[mystical music playing]

ANTONIO ZADRA: In over half your dreams are references to animals, so the fact that there are many animals and the way you interact with them, I would say that you are concerned about animals’ well-being. Not just your dog or your cat if you happen to have one, but that the well-being of animals is something that is dear to you, generally.

JENNIFER GARDY: This is crazy. You’re making me all misty and teary eyed because this is remarkable. I do, I have a cat, I have a dog, I love them to pieces. I love all animals. Wow.

LL: And as you said, you did get teary eyed. I saw a tear rolling down your cheek. Why was it such an emotional moment for you?

JENNIFER GARDY: It was so interesting to see what a window into the soul dreams provide. It was a really remarkable, eye-opening moment. I had been keeping a dream log for about six or-eight weeks before we met with Dr. Zadra and he knew nothing about me. He didn't know my name, he had no way of sort of looking up who I was, knowing who he was going to be working with for this show. He just wanted a page with some of my dreams written down, so I would log them when I woke up in the morning, little paragraphs about the strange things that came together. We gave them the document, he processed it to sort of figure out what was going on there, made his predictions, drew his insights and inferences, and we were kept apart that morning before we were filming the actual scene. He didn't want to interact with me, so that he didn't get a sense of what my life was like, what my personality was like. So, I go into this room and I'm essentially really just kind of meeting him for the first time and based on what I've written, he nails so many things. It was just hitting them out of the park one after the other. It was my career and specifically kind of the life sciences, the amount of travel that I do with my work, animals, the importance of movement and activity in my life. It was a window into my soul.

LL: He was reading your mind.

JENNIFER GARDY: [laughs] He was.

LL: What has he found out about in his analysis, about how men and women dream differently?

JENNIFER GARDY: They definitely do dream differently. Men tend to have these more sort of you know, action based dreams, things are happening whereas women’s tend to be a little bit more on relationships and interaction, a little more subtle, I guess. We don't have as many of the action hero flying around dreams [laughs]. Mine tend to be more of the problem solving sort as opposed to I'm flying ones.

LL: That is interesting because I remember as a child having a lot of dreams about flying and I wonder, and I don't know this, if in the research they’ve actually been able to research how dreams change as you age?

JENNIFER GARDY: Oh, it would be fascinating. There were so many strange things just chatting with Dr. Zadra between the breaks. He told me so many interesting facts about dreams and one of my favourite ones that I took away and I've been trying to look for in my own dream since then, is he says there are two things that are very difficult for a brain to do in the dreaming state, and one of them is to read a text off a page. In a dream you might open a book and you might be able to read a little bit of the text, but it's certainly not all of it. Your brain can't really create the text. And, he said one of the other things that doesn't happen very often in a dream is lights going on or off. Our brain just doesn't seem to be able to change the shading, change the lighting conditions in our dreams so quickly. You know, since you mentioned that, we were filming this I guess about maybe eight or nine months ago, and I've looked for light switches in my dream. I haven't found a single one.

LL: [laughs] You looked at one imaging experiment that found a previously undiscovered role for sleep that I find so interesting. What did they discover about how the brain gets cleaned?

JENNIFER GARDY: This is neat. This is literally brainwashing. Jeff Iliff was the researcher that we talked to here and he was curious about how does the brain clean itself. You know, the cells of our body are constantly producing waste, producing debris and in most of our body, our lymphatic system is what carries this debris away as a series of vessels that runs into every little corner of our body. It picks up this junk and it takes out the trash, but the lymphatic system stops at your neck, it doesn't extend into your brain. But the cells of your brain, the neurons for example, everything within there is creating debris, and this debris has very serious consequences if it's something like the amyloid beta protein that starts to build up. That's when you see conditions like Alzheimer’s emerging. He was interested in how does this waste get cleared away if there is no lymphatic system, if there is no trash collector for the brain? And the solution actually turned out to be quite elegant. The cerebral spinal fluid, the CSF that fills our brain, what happens is that it travels down the outside of our blood vessels, it kind of piggybacks on this existing circulatory system and as it runs down our blood vessels, it's on the outside of them, it's collecting the cellular waste and taking it out of the brain. What Dr. Iliff discovered is this process only happens when you're asleep.

LL: So this is tantalizing because it suggests that if you do get enough sleep, you shouldn't get Alzheimer’s, I'm taking it to the simplest conclusion.

JENNIFER GARDY: It is the simplest conclusion, definitely, but that's exactly what they're interested in sorting out. There's going to be a lot of research that needs to go into sorting out the cause versus the effect, but this does provide a tantalizing clue that the build-up of amyloid beta, in conditions like Alzheimer’s, is potentially related to the amount and the quality of sleep that we're getting.

LL: Okay, I already knew that I generally need to get about seven to eight hours of sleep a night in order to function properly, but for a lot of people that's easier said than done. How do you make it happen?

JENNIFER GARDY: That's a great question. I think it's different for everybody. You have to kind of recognize what are the triggers for poor sleep quality in your own life, and I know in some of the work that I do, in population and public health in my day job, when we're looking at conditions that flare up, one of the things that I found is most successful, is to have patients journal their experiences and look at what's happening over the course of a day, and does that lead to flare ups of whatever condition we're investigating. The same thing can be done for sleep. If you find that you're not sleeping well, consider keeping a journal or keeping a record of your activities throughout the day, things that you eat, when did you drink coffee, for example, what did you do before bed, record the hour that you went to sleep, the hour that you woke up, did you wake up in the middle of the night. You might use something like one of these wearable bits of technology that actually tracks your sleep. Are you down for the count for eight hours, or are you getting up and wrestling and wrestling around constantly? Just start to learn what the triggers are for you. There are some obvious ones that are out there, caffeine, different people metabolize it differently. You know, my parents can both have a cup of coffee after dinner and suffer no ill effects, but if I have any after noon, I get a terrible night's sleep. Screen time, distractions like that, light sources, light in the bedroom, it’s a matter of figuring out what is triggering you and making changes to those behaviours.

LL: I’m the same as you. Coffee after noon will wreck me for the night. I mean, you're a busy woman, you must need some extra caffeine sometimes. Do you get enough sleep?

JENNIFER GARDY: I value sleep so highly. Sleep is amazing. It is one of my favourite things to do. I sleep at a ridiculously early hour. When I was in my 20s, yes I would go out for the night at 11:30, at midnight, and these days I'm happy to tuck myself into bed at 9:30, read for just five or so minutes, either a book so I don't have that distracting screen light, or if I've got a screen or something that takes that blue light part of the spectrum out, the type that really sort of messes with our system and keep us up, and then down for the count and get a solid, gosh, I'm usually about nine hours a night.

LL: Good. I'm envious [laughs]. Jennifer Gardy, can I just say thank you. It's really been very interesting and I wish you sweet dreams.

JENNIFER GARDY: Thank you to you, too.

LL: Bye bye. Jennifer Gardy is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Medicine at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. She's the host of While You Were Sleeping, which airs on The Nature of Things this Thursday evening at 8 PM, 8:30 in Newfoundland and parts of Labrador. And now we'd like to hear from you. How do you make sure you get enough sleep? What happens if you don't? Share your stories on Twitter, we’re @tehcurrentcbc or me @lauralynchcbc. You can e-mail us through our website at cbc.ca/current. Or find us on Facebook.

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Diversity program for teachers draws criticism for leaving out men

Guests: Melanie Janzen, Douglas Gosse

LAURA LYNCH: Coming up a look at getting more diversity among teachers. But first I want to let you know what's going on the show tomorrow. Anna Maria Tremonti is in Newfoundland, which is why I'm here. She's been talking to people about how the downturn in the economy there is affecting their lives. Travis Hann is a pipefitter who was working in Alberta's oil patch until he lost his job three months ago. Now, as with so many others in his situation, he's back home now with his family. Anna Maria visited him, his wife Crystal, and 3-year-old Camden, in their home in Spanish Room, Newfoundland.

SOUNDCLIP

TRAVIS HANN: Yeah, there's a lot of people home without work. It’s pretty unfortunate that this slow time has come upon us. But, I mean, everybody is doing the best they can and mucking through and hopefully turns around. You want daddy to get your trains?

CAMDEN HANN: Okay.

TRAVIS HANN: Okay. Here you go. You play with your trains. Come down. You and daddy put all your trains together. Lots of time with my son and my lovely wife. I mean, you love to spend time home as much as you can, but at the same time you've got to be working, right.

CRYSTAL HANN: What does the train say? Choo choo?

CAMDEN HANN: [indecipherable]

CRYSTAL HANN: He hasn't missed him walking for the first time. He hasn't missed him crawling for the first time. He got to hear his first words, Daddy. He's got to be here for - now we're doing potty training so really we're very lucky that even though it's been difficult and he's been home, we're just trying to make light of the fact that, you know what, every day that you're home as a day as a family.

TRAVIS HANN: Now, my son, where’s all the cars that belong to these trains? Where do you get them? Oh, I love it. I wouldn’t trade it for the world. It’s going to kill me when I got to go away, but on the other I'm really looking forward to getting a job. This one?

CAMDEN HANN: This one.

TRAVIS HANN: What’s his name? What’s his name? I’d go tomorrow. I’d go back to Alberta tomorrow if I could. If I had to go for eight months, I'd go for eight months but I'd still make sure I got that other four home. Definitely.

CAMDEN HANN: Woah!

TRAVIS HANN: Choo! Choo!

CRYSTAL HANN: Yeah, this time it's a whole new ball game. It's very emotional knowing that he has to go away because I'm going to have to be explaining to my son Why his daddy is not here even when he's asking for his daddy. But you know I'm going to make sure that he knows when he gets older how, you know, all the sacrifices that his daddy made and how brave his daddy was and how much exactly loved him and me enough to go away and work and make all the sacrifices that he’s made.

CAMDEN HANN: [indecipherable]

TRAVIS HANN: Is that Gordon? Hey, what’s his name? That’s Salty, the dockside diesel. He says that to me sometimes, the dockside diesel. [chuckles]

LL: Tune in to The Current tomorrow to hear more from the Hann family and meet some of the other people Anna Maria has been talking to on her travels throughout Newfoundland and Labrador. They'll shed some light on the impact of the drop in oil prices, from financial strains to what could be a cultural shift in a traditionally mobile workforce. That is tomorrow and Thursday when The Current comes to you from St. John’s.

[music]

LL: As they stand up at the front of the class teachers do much more than just educate our children on the A B Cs in the one, two, threes. They help to explain the wider world and society. And so it's no surprise that more and more efforts are being made to ensure teachers reflect Canadian society. But when the University of Manitoba’s Faculty of Education recently announced a new diversity initiative there was an interesting reaction. The programs goal is to make sure more people from Indigenous race or other minority backgrounds would become teachers. But it led some to ask, what about men? Men are in the minority when it comes to teaching, especially in elementary schools. And that's an issue we're set to explore now and we start by hearing from one of those teachers.

SOUNDCLIP

[large group of children all talking at once]

[Canadian anthem]

JOHN DEN OUDEN: Morning, my friends. How are you today?

STUDENTS: Good morning.

JOHN DEN OUDEN: My name is John den Ouden and I am what's called a MART, which is a Methods and Resource Teacher, with students who need some extra support. What is a fable? Can you put your hand up? My brother had a learning disability. I saw the lack of confidence that he had growing up and going to school. Even when he went to university he thought he failed every test, which he didn't. He is a successful businessman to date with a lovely family. My mother was a teacher. My aunt was a teacher. And it was just something I used to pretend to do as a child. But I have to give my brother the credit. And so for today all of my students and their families, I want to empower them and give them that confidence to know that they are all smart and capable. Yes, my friend, tell us what a fable is.

STUDENT: Um, a fable is… It gives you a lesson about something you can do in life.

JOHN DEN OUDEN: Right. When I started my career it was a common phrase to say, girls didn't see a male teacher until junior grades. The world that we're living in is diverse. That's a representation of how life is and we need to have that represented in the classroom. Absolutely, The Tortoise and The Hare, which was a fable that we looked at and some of you wrote about on Friday.

LL: That is John den Ouden, a teacher at Howard Junior Public School in Toronto. The University of Manitoba wants to address that issue of more diversity in the classroom and to explain how I'm joined by Melanie Janzen. She is the Associate Dean in the Undergraduate Programs at the University of Manitoba's Faculty of Education and she is in Winnipeg. Hello.

MJ: Good morning.

LL: What led the Faculty of Education to decide it needed a diversity initiative?

MJ: Well, we had a previous policy that was developed, I believe, in the early eighties that needed to be revised and when we did some research on the diversity of Canada's population and Winnipeg’s population, the lack of the ways in which the diversity of the teaching force was keeping up with that change in population, and also the ways in which some groups had been socially and historically marginalized we knew that we needed to make a more substantial change to our policy. And so we did that by increasing our diversity targets of up to 45 percent of our students who will be admitted will be admitted into five various diversity categories.

LL: Okay. Tell us a little bit more. What groups are you targeting?

MJ: So, we're targeting five different groups of people: Those who identify as Indigenous, Métis, or Inuit; those who identify as racialized or persons with disabilities; those who identify socially disadvantaged or those who identify as LGBTTQ.

LL: Why those groups in particular?

MJ: Well, I think those are groups that, again, if we think about groups in our country's history that have been socially or historically disadvantaged, those are some groups that definitely need a leg up as far as being able to see themselves in the teaching force and to have access, more equitable access to perceiving themselves as teachers.

LL: Now, what are the requirements? You say that they, according to your targets, they should make up almost half of the class. What are the requirements?

MJ: Yeah. Our program is an after degree program, so that means that all of our admits, all of the students who are applying to our program need to have a previous degree. They need to meet a minimum GPA standard. They need to provide three letters of reference, pass a writing test. And all of those factors are compiled into what we call a composite score and it has those scores that are used to create the rankings for students to be admitted.

LL: When is the program supposed to get underway?

MJ: It'll be implemented for the intake of fall 2017. So, that means that students who are applying in February of 2017 will be eligible to self-identify in a diversity category.

LL: So you haven't seen any of the people from these groups applying yet?

MJ: Well, no, that’s not to say that we don't have people from those groups in our faculty, but we have no way to create incentives for them to currently admit in under these circumstances, nor do we have any way to track those numbers.

LL: Tell me what—Again, when we talk about the groups that you want to target, what is it that you think that they can bring to the classroom?

MJ: Well, I think one of the things that our research showed us is that it's really important for kids to be able to see themselves in the faces of their teachers over the duration of their education. When kids can see themselves being represented in the teachers around them it allows them to develop more meaningful relationships. And we know that good relationships lead to good learning, that that's for sure is undisputed. We also know that when students see themselves there they can also conceive of themselves as being teachers. And the thing about diversity is that when we surround ourselves with different perspectives - and this is kids in the classroom or in the teaching force in general - the differences in perspectives that people can bring enrich our experiences. So all kids have a more rich and diverse experience if we have teachers who can identify from various diverse backgrounds to bring various perspectives into the classroom.

LL: Do you have measurable evidence of this for what it means for children if the teacher are not diverse?

MJ: Well, yeah. We did three to four years of research looking at the literature around kids' perceptions of themselves and teachers, the ways in which they can develop relationships, the ways in which diverse perspectives help to enhance particularly marginalized groups of students learning. So, yeah, there's quite a bit of evidence to support that.

LL: So, you named the groups that you are targeting and there's one group that wasn't in there specifically and that's men. They are underrepresented among teachers, especially in elementary schools, but also, to a degree, in high schools. Why not include them as part of the diversity?

MJ: Well, first of all there's no reason why men can't apply into any of the general category or any of the five diversity categories. Of course, Indigenous men or men who identify with disabilities are welcome to apply. So, you know, that's an important factor. Men have not been socially or historically disadvantaged by admission categories previously, so it's one area of our admissions policy or – sorry – through the admissions policy men are still welcome to apply. I think, in addition, it's important to recognise that this is a bit more complicated. So, for example, although we see less men, particularly in early years, the gender proportions are more balanced when we get to senior years. And what's really quite interesting is that although we have more women who are in the teaching force - about two thirds of the teaching force is women - we have far more men who take up senior leadership positions and they advance more quickly. So we can see this in a really startling statistic, for example, if we look at administrators, senior superintendents across Canada. So although, like I said, women make up two-thirds of the teaching force, when we look at superintendents across Canada less than ten percent of those are women.

LL: I take your point, but that still doesn't seem to resolve the issue of having men in the classroom teaching children.

MJ: No, it doesn't and what I'm trying to indicate is that it's a complicated issue. So our diversity admissions policy is looking at admitting various groups of people. What I'm suggesting is that the disproportionate gender within education and within administration needs to be dealt with with different mechanisms.

LL: That seems to be a separate issue though. But why do you think more men aren't attracted to education, aren't attracted to becoming teachers?

MJ: I think that's in part the ways in which society genders teachers. So if we think about who we think of when we think of early years teachers we think of them as caring and maternal. And we construct a profession that way it devalues it, so men are less likely to apply. And it also conflicts with particular notions of identities of masculinities. Those two things are not aligned in our society. There's a particular way that society expects men to be and there's a particular idea of who we think early years teachers are and these are not aligned in our minds and so I think that that creates a lot of difficulty for men who want to be early years teachers. They have to deal with issues of perceived homophobia. Are they going to be sexual predators? There's all these misconceptions that surround these gendered notions of who teachers are.

LL: Well, if you are outlining what seems to be a problem then then don't you have a responsibility because of the problems you just outlined to try to get more men into the profession?

MJ: Well, I think that men have equal access to applying into the profession now. A hundred percent of our categories are open to men, so we're not discouraging men. And as a matter of fact, we might see a more diverse group of men applying, which is obviously our hope. What I'm suggesting is that these problems are a bit more complicated than just being solved by an admissions policy. That there are things that need to happen within hiring practices, within our understandings of who teachers are, and with a more complex understanding of who men can be in our society.

LL: All right. We'll leave it there. Melanie Janzen, thank you.

MJ: Thank you, Laura.

LL: Melanie Janzen is the Associate Dean in Undergraduate Programs at the University of Manitoba's Faculty of Education and she was in our Winnipeg studio. My next guest believes we can’t talk about greater diversity at the front of the classroom without talking about getting more men into teaching. Douglas Gosse’s research has focused on the male teachers in the education system and the lack thereof. Professor Gosse teaches at Schulich School of Education at Nipissing University and he’s with me here in our Toronto studio. Good morning.

DG: Good morning.

LL: Do you think men should be included as an underrepresented group in this admissions policy?

DG: I do. I concur with my colleague Melanie that men would likely be admitted within those several categories of Indigenous, racialized, people with disabilities, Aboriginal, LGBT, and disadvantaged. However, there is a possibility that they would not be adequately included within that diversity policy. Now, the reality is that we have about one in ten primary elementary teachers who are male and less than a third in Canada as a nation who are male. When we look at Melanie's comment about students seeing themselves in the faces of students and so many students are-- Female students have been shown to decide, about 30 percent of them, that they want to become teachers when they're in elementary school. So the same would apply for Canadian boys. And if there's a dearth, an absence of male teachers at the elementary level, that can preclude them from wanting to enter the teaching profession.

LL: Let me see if I understand what you just said. You said that the young women, girls in school decide they want to become teachers in elementary school. And you're suggesting that’s because there's a woman at the front of the classroom.

DG: That's what some research indicates. In one study there were about 37 percent of female education majors who identified elementary school as the time when they wanted to become elementary teachers.

LL: And boys?

DG: Boys, not so much. It was at three times the rate of the-- Female students had three times the rate of the male students of deciding at that age level.

LL: But it's hard to know whether it's because—

DG: It's hard to know. It's hard to know, indeed, it is. The other comment about administrators, I think that's beside the point. When you're looking at school administrators in Canada about 62 percent of school principals and administrative jobs are actually held by women in Canada. So I believe Melanie was referring to the very upper echelon if a superintendent or director of education. But, in fact, when you look at principals, for example, and to other types of administrators at the school board level there is a majority of women across Canada.

LL: Let's get back to the classroom though. What have you found in the research about why relatively few men want to be teachers?

DG: It is a question of socialization, but one of the major deterrents is a fear of male sexuality. There is often the suspicion that males who want to work with children have ulterior motives. It’s often conflated with homophobia too, that they're gay as with other men who occupy other female dominated careers, such as nursing. So that is certainly a deterrent. Another deterrent is that many men today still feel the pressure to be the chief breadwinner, so conflated with that lack of status sometimes associated with being a teacher and a more humble salary compared to other traditional male jobs in business, for example. Those are two of the major reasons.

LL: If we look at beyond classroom teachers there is another picture that emerges in leadership roles as we were talking about in education. That's something Dawn Wallin studies. She is the associate dean of Undergraduate Programs, Partnerships and Research at the University of Saskatchewan. Have a listen to her.

SOUNDCLIP

Women may be more highly represented in the teaching force, but when it comes into the leadership cadre, men still tend to dominate. Women certainly are in administration and leadership. They tend to be more represented in vice principal-ships, assistant superintendencies, for example. When they are represented in leadership, they more typically are principals in elementary schools than they are in high schools and they are less typically represented in superintendency. And, actually, across Canada their numbers are not high in the superintendency. So although it may appear on the surface that the teaching cadre is gendered and supports women more so than men, those men that self-select into the field of education in general certainly wind up, if their career path is administration, they still become privileged in that respect.

LL: Now, we've touched on this a couple of times and you did mention this already, but I wonder what you make of what she says.

DG: If we look back a few years, 2004, 2005, there were about 8,000 men that were principals in elementary and secondary schools in Canada and 7,000 women, but if we look at the statistics since the eighties, the nineties, there is a clear increase in school administrators. In Ontario currently, for example, if we look at the Ontario Principals Council we have over 5,000 active administrators that are female – pardon me – in total and over 3,000 are female and just about 2,000 are meal. So the trend has been that women are increasingly becoming school administrators, including at the upper echelons. And it's interesting too, in Dr. Wallin’s research, one can't separate family from some of the decisions to become a superintendent or a director of a school board and many of the interviewees in such studies indicate the challenge of having balance between work and family and raising children. Many of the men and women who have been interviewed about administrative positions in education talk about how the difficulties of doing what is very arduous work and being able to spend time with their family.

LL: In all of this, in the administrative positions and in the classroom, what we do seem to agree on here is that there are many fewer men teaching. What impact does that have on the students, because this is perhaps the most important point.

DG: I think that's a crucial point and there was a study in Great Britain by the Teacher Development Agency. It showed that male primary school teachers acted as a fundamental role model for one in two men and 35 percent of men felt that having a male primary teacher challenged them to work harder in school and 22 percent felt that it built their confidence. They were also more prone to go to male teachers with issues of bullying and problems at home, questions about poverty. Now, myself and a colleague Steve Arnocky wrote a paper called The State of Canadian Boyhood and we looked at statistics regarding student achievement and mental health for boys across Canada at a local, regional, provincial, national, and international level. So we looked at gender gaps and achievement test scores, students receiving top honours, participation in and engagement in extracurricular activities, dropout rate, suspension, suicide attempts, depression, conduct disorders and so forth. And in just about every category we found that Canadian boys were fairing less well than their sisters.

DG: But you're not blaming this on female teachers?

DG: No. I think that male and female teachers are equally capable of being excellent teachers. And it's not by virtue of one's gender or sex that one becomes a better teacher. But other research, as Melanie has related, indicates that to be a positive role model we should reflect the diversity of our population a little more closely. So we have some LGBT teachers, we have Aboriginal teachers or Indigenous, we have disadvantaged groups other than the white female middle class prototype of teachers in Canada. All these diverse people, including males of different social classes, races, genders, abilities, and so forth bring different perspectives, different experiences to the classroom. Therefore, I think that males should have a stronger presence in any diversity policy.

LL: Okay. And just briefly then, because we only about 30 seconds left, what needs to happen to get more men into the classroom in your opinion?

DG: I think we need to have better discussions at our faculty levels in our schools of education, in our departments of education, at the school board level and we have to have more studies that are discussed about the problems that male teachers encounter. Many of the issues that male teachers encounter are similar to what women teachers encounter in male dominated careers.

LL: Do you want to see targets as in the University of Manitoba? Do you want targets for men, yes or no?

DG: Yes. I applaud having these targets and as well men and other groups that are that are underrepresented in the teaching profession.

LL: Thank you, professor. Professor Douglas Gosse teaches at the Schulich School of Education at Nipissing University and he was in our Toronto studio. And we want to hear from you now. What do you think about the effort to diversify the face of teachers in this country? How important do you think it is to get more men into the classroom? We'd like to hear from you on your opinions and your experiences. Send us an email by going to our web site, cbc.ca/thecurrent, and click on the contact link. We're on Facebook and on Twitter @thecurrentCBC. Now that is today's edition of The Current. Earlier today we heard about some of the surprising physiological benefits of getting enough sleep. Let's leave things off today with the author and co-founder of The Huffington Post, Ariana Huffington, who calls herself a sleep evangelist. Here she's sharing what she calls her secret of success. I'm Laura Lynch in for Anna Maria Tremonti. Join us tomorrow when Anna Maria presents a special edition of The Current from St John's. Thanks for listening to The Current.

SOUNDCLIP

This is a room of Type A women. This is a rom of sleep-deprived women.

[audience laughter]

And I learned the hard way the value of sleep. Two and a half years ago I fainted from exhaustion. I hit my head on my desk, I broke my cheekbone, I got five stitches on my right eye. And I began the journey of rediscovering the value of sleep. And in the course of that I studied, I met with medical doctors, scientists and I'm here to tell you that they way to a more productive, more inspired, more joyful life is getting enough sleep.

[audience applause]

There is now a kind of sleep deprivation one-up-manship, especially, here in Washington. If you to try to make a breakfast date and you say how about 8:00, they’re likely to say 8:00 is too late for me, but that’s okay, I can get a game of tennis in and do a few conference calls and meet you at 8:00. And they think that means that they're so incredibly busy and productive, but the truth is they’re not. Because we at the moment have had brilliant leaders in business, in finance, in politics making terrible decisions. In fact, I have a feeling that if the Lehman Brothers was Lehman Brothers and Sisters, they might still be around.

[audience cheers]

And we women are going to lead the way in this new revolution, this new feminist issue. We are literally going to sleep our way to the top, literally.

[audience laughter]

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Mar. 8, 2016 Episode Transcript

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