What are the Education Alternatives?

In this episode, I am joined by Shantel Sherwood from Hold My Hand Alberta, and Claire and Heidi from For Our Kids Alberta. The conversation delves into the challenges and potential solutions in the education system, particularly in Alberta. Key topics include the lack of standardization in special education, the need for smaller class sizes, and the importance of integrating environmental education into the curriculum. The guests emphasize the value of hands-on, action-oriented learning and the role of parents and communities in supporting educational initiatives. They advocate for a shift towards a more inclusive and engaging educational approach that addresses both social justice and environmental sustainability.

Welcome to For Our Kids Alberta and Hold My Hand Alberta

Jenny:

Welcome to The Gravity Well Podcast. Here we break down heavy ideas into small buckets that you can handle. Our mission is simple. Help us work through your dilemmas in conversation and process. Together we and your community will face your dilemmas and make the world a better place for all.

In the spirit of truth, I acknowledge I’m a settler on Stolen Blackfoot Treaty Seven Territory in Metis Districts Five and Six. I take Reconciliaction by seeking the wisdom of elders and individuals who aim to restore water, air, land, life, or community, a healthy living relationship with the earth and each other is our guide. Thank you very much for joining me today. I’m thrilled to have members of both Hold My Hand Alberta, Shantel Sherwood, and both Claire and Heidi from For Our Kids Alberta. I’ll let you guys go ahead and introduce yourselves, but I’ll just give a little bit of colour about this conversation before I do.

I’m excited, Shantel and I kicked off a conversation in Episode 13. We talked about the things that could change a lot in different education programs, call it private, call it charter, call it religious, or whatever it is. We have several programs that are strained in many ways, and I’m hoping from Shantel’s perspective she can offer some of those insights. You too, Claire and Heidi. From an environmental standpoint, the lack of curriculum that we’re seeing in terms of what our kids need to be learning about. The honesty behind what we’re experiencing, and what our kids need to be able to express in terms of their experiences in this. There’s a lot of overlap between these things, I find, and I’m curious where this conversation will go. Let’s start with some introductions, please. I see you first on my screen, Heidi. If you wouldn’t mind going first. Thank you.

Heidi:

Hi, I am Heidi. I’m in Treaty Six and I’m part of For Our Kids Alberta. We are an environmental focus group, our core mission is to try to leave a better world for our children. And so we work on a number of different things. Yeah, I started with Claire.

Jenny:

Awesome. Go ahead, Claire.

Claire:

First of all, thank you, Jenny, for hosting this conversation. I’m on Treaty Seven in Calgary. Heidi and I met some years ago now, and I think over our shared concern around climate breakdown, we found the For Our Kids Network, which is a national network, but there was no chapter in Alberta. Together we founded For Our Kids Alberta. We’re very fortunate to have some excellent caregivers and parents that have joined us. We do have local initiatives and provincial advocacy initiatives. We also advocate at the federal level. It’s here, it’s there, it’s everywhere. We are also huge public education advocates. That’s important to our mission of being able to leave a safe future for our kids. Thanks for this opportunity.

Jenny:

Thank you. Before I hand it off to Shantel, I just want to give a little bit of colour on how I came to know Claire and Heidi. Claire and I were in a room where we were expecting to be talking about the energy transition. It was during the election and we had the opportunity to join a discussion that was, as we thought, about the climate crisis and I was very new to the political space. Sitting in that room talking about polling results, I was surprised to not be talking about the climate. I felt alone in that everybody else seemed to think the conversation was great. Across the room, Claire put up her hand, stood up and said, “Why aren’t we talking about the climate? This is the biggest issue we have going on. We have people selling stadiums and other provinces that aren’t even able to get a room of 12 people in one room to talk.”

I said across the room, “Thank you very much.” It needed to be said. And that bonded us together and helped me appreciate the need to expand all of this in education. Even as a parent, I feel that things are so broken, it feels impossible to do anything about it. I just want to say how grateful I am to both of your organizations for [your work]. Now a little colour before I let Shantel introduce herself. Shantel and I met through the Alberta Party while I was running in the election, and I was impressed by Shantel’s message about getting back to base principles of fairness and making sure that behaviour is treated similarly no matter what the background of a child is, and that there is an opportunity, once we invest in people early, and well, to set them up for success. It is a huge benefit to all of us, anyone, regardless of whether you have a disability or not. I don’t know if that did you justice, Shantel, but thank you so much for joining us again and go ahead and add what I missed.

Shantel:

Hi, that was a touch on it. I am Shantel, I’m from Treaty Six and here in Edmonton I created Hold My Hand Alberta. I’m one of the co-founders. It initially started when Covid hit and we saw the 26,000 EAs laid off and we thought, “Which kids are that going to impact the most?” Of course my own. I was set up to support my son, but I knew a lot of other people would not be. We started looking at what that meant and having some connections with certain people in the government. We thought, “We need to organize and we need to create something.” A few MLAs said, “We would love it if we saw some more parents.” What I noticed was there’s a big gap, there’s nothing between parents and educators and specialists. All these groups are just parents or just educators.

We decided to collaborate more because we were finding a huge gap in the in-between. Our kids are getting dumbed down in the “in-between” and there is a lot of ableism in education. There’s a lot of ableism in the government. We have recently had a lot of things happening to our kids, which we can discuss later, showing how often our kids get lost in the process and it doesn’t hit the media. It doesn’t hit anything. We’re losing a huge part of our population that is capable and willing to do so much more than we’ve given them credit for. Our mission is to make sure that every family knows how to access the support they need, they know how to communicate with schools, with FSCD, and with all of that. They have the tools so that not only can they help themselves, but they can lean back and help the people behind them because the mission is to continue this, not just have myself and the people running Hold My Hand do everything. We’re just trying to educate as we go.

Jenny:

Right, teach a person to fish. Right?

Shantel:

Exactly. We can’t do this forever.

What Is Going Wrong In Alberta Education?

Jenny:

Yeah, that’s amazing. I couldn’t agree more. Okay. Why don’t we start with this first question? What are some of the things that you can say are going wrong? If you wouldn’t mind, just expanding on anything you missed in that, Shantel, from your point of view. I heard obviously that there is support that has been dwindling in recent years. What other ways? What things are going wrong? Let’s do a shedding in the round of what’s going wrong in Alberta.

Shantel:

We’ve just laid off a bunch of FSCD caseworkers, which increases the caseload, which means that families and children will now be waiting.

Jenny:

Can you say what that acronym is again? I’m sorry to interrupt.

Shantel:

Family Supports the Children with Disabilities, and you can correct me anytime, always. I sometimes forget which organization I’m talking to when I’m using my acronyms. Family support the children with disabilities is your FSCD. That is under community and social services. And what they do is make sure that family has access to things like occupational therapists, speech and language pathologists, community aids, respite, psychology, psychiatry, all of those things this gives us access to tools. In my eyes, we shouldn’t need this. I mean, if we are so against private healthcare, we shouldn’t need something like this, just in my own opinion, because an occupational therapist seems like a no-brainer.

Wouldn’t we just support the child? We don’t just do that? AHS offers it, but you have to qualify in such a strange way. There are only two facilities here in Edmonton. It’s really hard to get to. If you are new to Alberta, new to Canada, you are not going to know how to access any of this. It would just be much easier not to make people apply for it, to speed it up, to condense everything. What we’ve seen in a letter recently to some of our families is that they will be “given an opportunity” to have a contract. And when you see that and you think about it, you “get an opportunity”. It is “an opportunity” to get their child help. Is it an opportunity to provide child support? It seems such a, maybe it’s poorly worded. Maybe they made a mistake, but at the same time, it does seem to be how they view what our kids need.

It’s an opportunity for them to get the therapy and support they need. What they’re saying is, “If you are from this socioeconomic background, if you are all of these special things, you will know how to do this.” What a great opportunity your child has. It’s so gross and it’s the thing that we’re seeing in schools, the schools, everything is who you know, what you know might not get your kids support because you didn’t say the right things or you said the wrong things and you’ve upset somebody. And everything depends on your admin. And the reason that is is because there are no updated standards for special education. That’s a big key point for me usually is there’s no standard for special education. It hasn’t been done since 2003 with an amendment in 2004. Without that, there is nothing to say that this is how it should be.

Now, there are a lot of things in schools we speak about environmentally that aren’t laid out in schools because it all depends on who your admin is. What if it was straight across the board? It has to be this way. We need these that are laid out. One of our big things is we saw seclusion rooms. I was part of the fight to end seclusion rooms and restraints. It’s horrific, it’s traumatizing. We need to remove that from schools. No, there’s no space for it. We did that. We got it laid out. The NDP said, sure, it’s gone. But they didn’t say how they were going to make it gone. They didn’t lay down any footwork for it. They didn’t make it a rule. Within months, the ATA went to the new government, which was the UCP, and went to Adriana LaGrange and said, “Yeah, we’re going to have to undo this.”

They put it back in and reinstated it. Edmonton has some of the highest uses of seclusion rooms in Alberta. What’s going on at BPSB? What’s happening where this is a norm why are we not moving past it and why is this okay? We’re okay, with traumatizing children, we’re okay touching children, we’re okay. There’s just so many things. And of course, it comes with a lack of supports, lack of education, ableism, all of those things. But we are not doing anything because there are no rules. And we’ve seen the dark side of not having rules in place and standards in place that they would have to follow. That’s all of the things we’re working on in a nutshell.

Jenny:

Thank you. That was incredible. I hope this round is a shedding of all the awful things, but yes. So yeah, I’m hearing that there’s no consistency. It’s who, it’s relationships, it’s up to a certain staff and there’s no standard. And that part is very consistent when you think about what’s happening from an environmental standpoint, this lack of standardization, it’s fascinating. Okay. Claire, if you wouldn’t mind going next?

Claire:

Yeah, that’s a lot. Shantel. I think what you’ve just described is also what I’ve encountered in the advocacy that I’m doing. A couple of things that I’ve noticed are because there is no standard in the province, the province hasn’t put in rules around protections in terms of clean air in schools. That’s one initiative that I’ve been working on. We’re seeing certain schools are doing, certain school boards have done some things. Edmonton public, for example, has put HEPA filters into their classrooms. Medicine has school board has by Calgary, public has not. Again, it’s just this piecemeal approach that feeds into inequities in our classrooms so we know what the best practices are because there are studies out there that show that when you improve ventilation and filtration in classrooms, students do better. They do better from a health perspective, they do better from a learning perspective.

The data is all there. As a parent who sits on my parent council, I wrote a policy that then went to the Alberta School Councils Association, AGM, where the policy was passed. A majority of parents who represent school councils were in support. Now it goes to the board of ASCA, the Alberta School Councils Association, they’ve taken it to the Minister of Education and the Minister of Education has said, “No, that’s on school boards to do that.” We’re back at square one. It is quite frustrating. And, I hear that in what you’re saying and I’ve seen that in the work that I’m doing as well. Just getting back to the question of “What do we need to do?” We need to first of all stop underfunding public education, we need to get the support back in the classroom. The PTs, the OTs, the psychologists, those wraparound services are critical.

I believe that that’s so important and that it’s happening at a young age to catch young people before these problems and their learning are impacted. Yeah, I do want to just say I’m not an education policy person. That’s not my background. But I was a classroom teacher for 10 years and I know the demands on classroom teachers are significant. I do believe the majority of classroom teachers are doing their best, but they can’t do this alone. And so it requires, in my view, leadership from the top levels who believe, they tell us they care about our students. They say these nice things, politicians, but if they’re not investing in teacher education in public schools, then I just don’t believe them. And that creates conditions for burnout. People don’t feel like the work they’re doing is valued. There’s a moral injury because they feel like they could make a difference, but it’s just exhausting like pushing a boulder uphill and those good people leave. I think we need to go back to the investments. We need to see it as an investment in our kids’ future, not as a drain on society, not a drain on our finances.

Jenny:

Right. Yeah. I heard very similar in that there’s what Heidi, why don’t you go next and I’ll try to add some comments afterwards. Go ahead.

Heidi:

Yeah, for sure. I think of course just the underfunding education. So my husband is a teacher and he has a classroom of 25 or 30 kids and it’s just like, it is so difficult to keep that many students engaged, regulated, ready to learn. You have varying abilities within the classroom trying to keep other people up to speed. You’re losing some of the kids who are grasping things more easily and vice versa. And it’s just so difficult that if classroom sizes were smaller if we had more EAs that could help and fill in some of those gaps, it would just make such a difference. I just think it’s so important for kids to be excited to learn and if they’re struggling or if they’re bored, then they’re not going to want to keep going to school. And if kids aren’t going to want to go to school, it’s just like I can’t imagine children spending their whole lives going to grade one to 12, going to school and just being disengaged.

I think that’s just such a failure in our education system and you can’t do that on a tight budget. And these kids deserve to be excited to learn and society will benefit so much if we have citizens that are excited to learn. And I guess also with the curriculum, we need a curriculum that is appropriate for students that isn’t, there’s not so much to teach. My husband struggled a bit with fitting in all of these topics that are expected now rather than getting in-depth. It’s just more about breadth it seems like, which is tough to keep kids interested when it’s just moving along and we’re not tackling topics. I would love to see a little more work on honing in on the curriculum, not making it so political, this big fight. I don’t know why. So my father-in-law is an ex superintendent and he’s just like, he can’t believe what he’s seeing with curriculum right now. He’s back in my day, it was like the kids came first. All that mattered was teaching them appropriately. It didn’t matter which political party was involved. To see it kind of become this battleground is just so disheartening. I feel like I’m all over the place.

Jenny:

Right now. No, no, that’s great. No, thank you. You brought some of my thoughts back together. I mean we’re underfunded, but I’m going to hit on the suggestion that I was saying out of the gates as we have way too many programs going on, there’s way too many school types in my view. So again, I’m speaking from a parent, I’m not an educator and I’m curious what you guys think, but I look at all of these sports programs and specialty programs and everything, and I look at somebody who is a geoscientist and being honest about the planetary crisis. Do we care about that at this point? Is this important or should we be focusing on helping our kids learn how to be social together and reconnect with our environment? I was speaking with another group on this, and we’ve been going to an acupuncturist who studies Chinese medicine and she was saying a lot of times she’ll just tell people, you need to be in nature.

Your health issue is related to being disconnected from nature. We are that disconnected. The one thing I was thinking about as you were talking, and I’d like to hear your thoughts about parents. Now we’re going into what can we do instead. Parents used to be much more involved in school, I think, than they are now. And I’m speaking as somebody maybe, maybe not. Okay. I think there’s more becoming awake maybe. And again, you guys can reflect on what you’re saying, but I guess my question is when I look at the lack of support of teachers and this need to create community locally, to me, one of the opportunities that I see is to try and reconnect people with our neighbours. And this is part of the problem is my kids, we didn’t have a school in our neighbourhood, so now we’re sending them on buses and we don’t have kids in the neighbourhood that they have as friends to connect with.

What Should We Be Doing In Education Instead?

Jenny:

I think there’s a big part of that in there and just how we’re separated not only in curriculum but even in proximity from where we live and things like that that I think are impacting. And then of course the curriculum for it to be political now is pretty horrifying. Like you said, we should be able to have a non-partisan group decide on curriculum and that just be how it prevails. It shouldn’t be influenced, which I know this is one of the policies we were trying to move. Right Shantel. Maybe if you wouldn’t mind going next, Shantel, what are some of the things that you think of in terms of what we should be doing instead?

Shantel:

I think we have to acknowledge and address that children learn differently. I think we could talk about the curriculum until we’re blue in the face, but we keep designing one curriculum and it does one thing for one type of student. The new curriculum, for instance, I am pretty opposed to not going to lie, but the new way of teaching back to phonics and stuff for my son, he is loving it. He’s dyslexic though. So this for him is pivotal. This change for him means that his focus has been on reading. My son suddenly loves reading. We’re going into grade five and grade one and two and three, he hated it. And in grades four and five, he said, “Oh my gosh, I can read what changed.” The curriculum changed, so this worked for him. But what did I read the other day on a teacher’s association page, a bunch of teachers complaining saying this is the worst change that’s ever happened.

And that sight words were the best thing ever. And I was like, they’re like, we can’t cater to dyslexics. And I was like, that’s cruel because social studies, math, everything was hard for my son and now he’s finally doing okay and you don’t want to cater to him. What’s the solution then? What’s the solution? Okay, we address that Kids learn differently. We keep talking about choice in education. I am pro-public school 110% all the way. Most families with children with disabilities don’t get a lot of choice in education. We have the public which won’t support our kids or we can go private if we’re wealthy enough and we could get those options and maybe our kids will get support, but then they’re isolated away from their peers. What do we do? We recognize that these children are better when they’re together, that they learn better when they’re together, but maybe they’re not learning on the same path.

We’ve talked before about how Finland has a way of educating children. There is a lot of outside play. There are a lot of mixed ways of learning. If you’re at say a grade four level in English, but you’re also maybe a grade two level in math, you’re going to maybe kind of switch things around and it’s not about so much your grade, but it’s about your abilities and where you’re at and focusing on improving things as you go, which I think is brilliant. Not saying everything Finland does is perfect. I’m sure it’s not. I don’t know enough and I haven’t deep dived to the extent that I’ve lived the experience. It’s not my lived experience, it’s just what I’m reading what I’m seeing and what I watch about it. But we see from Waldorf Schools, we see from Montessori Schools, I’m a former Montessori, we see there are different concepts that kids pick up that other kids.

Are we meeting every child where they’re at by giving one curriculum? Is the solution maybe giving some options and maybe having certain teachers in one public school, we already have one or two grade one classes. We already have one or two grade two classes and so on. There’s not just one grade, one class. So maybe even splitting that and saying, you know what? Our grade ones that are more tactile learners, they’re going to be kind of over here and we’re going to start teaching them where they’re at. My youngest is good in the garden. He loves it. He loves digging in the dirt. He is into the trees, he is up the trees and this is how we help his ADHD. This is how we soothe him. He needs to go, he needs to run. Both my boys do Irish step dancing.

They do it very differently. They’re both competitive, but both of ’em are very different even in the same style of dance. And they’ve been teaching my sons to just hone in on what they’re good at. One of them is a trick dancer. The other one is a lyrical dancer. Those kinds of things alone, just teaching them different styles that work for them have improved them so much and leaps and bounds. And you think about it, if you just look at a child and kind of get to know them and you’re like, you don’t learn this. My youngest would work well with sight words. My oldest did not. She learned everything through music. Every child learns differently in the way we’re teaching right now. It’s not meeting kids. It’s not just about neurodivergence or neurotypical. It is every kid learning differently. And doing one curriculum is like, here’s a size seven shoe.

And if you’re a size seven, yay. If you’re a size six and a half or you’re a seven and a half, okay, you’re going to be okay. You’re going to be the not the plus, but you’re going to be a student. And then so on as farther away from that shoe size as you get, the more you’re struggling. And then like Heidi said, these kids no longer enjoy education. I didn’t enjoy it. I coasted through because I was too scared to not do it. But to your point, Jenny, about whether or not parents are involved, what I’ve seen in the past is that parents were more involved in the teacher-parent punishment role. If you weren’t doing well on your report card, you weren’t doing well on things. It’s like how do we get together and punish this child or make this child scared to not do well versus what we’re seeing now?

It’s more of a collaborative approach. And I do appreciate a lot of the teachers now who are like, how can I help you get to know your child? And there are more wraparounds with a lot of these educators. I’ve spoken with them a few times, and I’m speaking with a lot of new educators coming out of Concordia. They’re amazing future educators. They’re more concerned about how to get the parent engaged in their child’s learning versus how to get them punished for the way their child is learning. So I do see a shift and I think we’re in a good shift there if we continue it going. So that’s kind of my take on all of that is that there’s hope. It’s just we have to recognise that not all of these kids can learn with one curriculum. How do you bash a curriculum? It can only work for one size no matter what we do.

Jenny:

Yeah, it’s so true. Brilliant. Thank you. Heidi. Do you mind going next?

Heidi:

I’m kind of appalled that the ATA or their teachers are against phonics. That blows my mind, because, my oldest in grade two now and when she was in kindergarten was like, how do they teach kids how to read? I just literally had no idea. And I was like, sight words seem difficult, just straight memorising words. And so then I kind of did a deep dive and I realised that phonics is the way, it’s now the science of reading because there’s scientific proof that that is the way people read. They see each letter and they sound it out in their head. You get quick at it. Yeah. I’m just confused by that. My son is now in kindergarten and I started the science of reading with him about a year ago, and he can read small books going into kindergarten. He would’ve never done that with sight words. But yeah, that’s kind of all I want to say on that. I find that very interesting.

Jenny:

Thank you. Go ahead, Claire. Do you have anything to add there?

Claire:

Oh my goodness. Shantel, you’ve given such excellent examples to illustrate where I’d like to see things go. One of the things I do want to say is a curriculum is what to teach. How you teach it and how you bring that to life in the classroom can look so many different ways. A curriculum is only a piece of paper saying what, but teachers are imaginative, they’re creative, and they can bring that curriculum to life, as I said, in a multitude of ways. And that means getting to know their students and figuring out what works for them. One of the things we’re going to start to hear about I hope in the next few months in the lead-up to COP 29 is all about UNESCO’s Greening Education Partnership. UNESCO has put out two frameworks including guidelines. Now the main objective of UNESCO’s Greening Education Partnership, and this is happening all over the world, is new tools for greening schools and curricula, highlighting the need to empower young people to play a concrete role in tackling the climate crisis.

The focus should be on action-oriented learning. The two frameworks that have been developed, and you can go on the UNESCO World Greening Education website, are the new greening curriculum guidance. It’s a practical manual providing for the first time a common understanding of what climate education should consist of and how countries can mainstream environmental topics across curricula with detailed expected learning outcomes. According to the age group from five years to 18, it focused on the importance of promoting active learning and designing a range of hands-on activities. This is the ideal curriculum for young people who are not traditional learners in my opinion. Then we’ll get back to this. I have some good examples of already what’s happening in Alberta, but then UNESCO’s Green School Quality Standard, which has been developed in partnership with other UN agencies, civil society and countries, sets the minimum requirements on how to create a green school.

By promoting this action-oriented approach, it recommends that all schools set up green governance committees including students, teachers, and parents, to oversee sustainable management. This ties in, Jenny, to what you were saying about parents being a key part of this and parents, we don’t have to wait for the UCP. I’m tired of waiting for the UCP. We as parents can approach our schools maybe through the school council, but maybe just through a conversation with principals and assistant principals to say, you know what? I’m concerned about this. I would love to see a green action committee at this school. This ties in with what the Edmonton Public and Calgary Public are already doing. Edmonton public has a very comprehensive environmental policy. They’re reducing emissions. They have a dashboard that you can follow. Calgary Public has what they call a sustainability framework for 2030.

I don’t see a lot of proactive messaging on social media or in their communications around this, but even in that framework that they’ve outlined, they want to set up these committees. So every school should have one. They have targets for 2030, and it is a way for parents to get involved and help teachers and students. I also want to just say that this shouldn’t be an add-on. This should not be an add-on for teachers. They already have too much going on. This is a greening of the current curriculum. So if there is, for example, a mental health strategy in a school, why are there not climate cafes where young people can get together and talk about their emotions around the climate crisis? And in talking about those feelings and being able to share them with other students and their teachers who hopefully validate their concerns, they can come up with ideas on how to act.

That’s just one example, right? That’s one example. You could integrate climate into shop class. There are schools in Calgary right now that are allowing students to convert internal combustion engine cars into electric vehicles. Why is that not happening at every high school in the province? Cool things are happening in these pockets. What I would like to see is for this to be scaled up. And right now from my perspective, it’s a few of us pushing for this from the bottom up and we’ll keep pushing. But ultimately, wouldn’t it be great if we had leaders leading? So just a couple more examples, I want to give this greening education. The school boards have a lot that they could be doing.

They could be implementing the transition to electric school buses in their school boards, and clean air in schools. Again, looking at all-electric HVAC systems for health and learning. If there’s solar going up in schools, are they educating students about solar? In this school in Rural Alberta called New Myrnam School, one of the teachers has been so hands-on with students. They’ve built a wind turbine and a hydroponic system. They’ve taken an old bus and created a tiny home. And I think in 2023, they now have solar in their community. This has started in one school with a passionate teacher, who knows where the world is heading and has included his students to make the changes that they want to see in their community. They’re heading towards a net zero. They want to be an example of a net zero community.

This is what can be achieved with passion and those ripple effects. He has been on a few, there have been articles and podcasts, and I believe if he was here talking with us today, he’d be able to give us examples of kids who were disengaged who didn’t learn in the traditional way, who are thriving in that environment. I also just want to tie in the amazing work that Heidi’s doing in her community because part of this greening education partnership is about community engagement. And Heidi started what’s what we’re calling a bike bus in her community. I’m going to hand it over to Heidi again because she’s been a superstar in her community and she can tell us all about the bike bus.

Heidi:

Thanks for bringing it up, Claire, because I was like, oh yeah, I forgot. I wanted to talk about the bike bus, which is wild because it is my favorite thing in the entire world.

Jenny:

Yes, I’ve already heard. I know about it. Please go ahead.

Heidi:

Yes, it’s so fun. So we did our first one in the spring on Earth Day and it was cold and we had, I dunno, six other kids aside from our own family, but it’s growing. And then we started doing it every single Friday on our last one in June. Before summer we had 30 people and there were members of the community. We had a town counsellor come with us. And it’s just so much fun. We have music playing and the kids are so pumped and the kids that come once come every time after they love it. And it just makes me so happy. It sets me up for the weekend and I can’t encourage it enough because it’s the most wholesome, joyful thing I’ve ever been a part of. And just what a cool way to take a little bit of climate action, just bringing happiness to it. It’s been a really good experience for me.

How Do We Support Education For All In Alberta?

Jenny:

Incredible. What I love about this is this action-oriented stuff, Claire. I mean to me that’s the switch that is flipped here. We’re no longer building on what we knew and trying to adapt it. It’s time to take action. It’s time to as parents decide what our future looks like. I hear these stories about this teacher in rural Alberta doing that. And I wonder, we’re in the section of how do we work together to support this work and make it duplicate because that’s really what I’m picturing now is we have a Rubik’s Cube, that’s our system. We have this messed up Rubik’s Cube, we can’t make any sense of it. And every one of these little actions brings that Rubik’s Cube into the right orientation and at some point, the pattern is going to be crystal clear. And that’s not far off.

I think it’s just so messed up right now that we can’t see that. But I look at these little initiatives if we figure out what is a template of what he did in that school and help people understand this is a template of how you want to build out your program like they did in that school. And Heidi, for you and your community engagement activity, same thing. What are the nuts and bolts of how you built that and what? That is what I’m learning more and more. I’m excited about this dual screening that we’re doing in Calgary next weekend. These two movies are called Outgrow the System and Water is Love. They talk all about this future of education, which is tangible, actionable, physical activities towards restoring our environment and learning how to make food locally and all of these great engagements with the environment.

Shantel, when you talk about being disengaged in school, I was always the disruptor in school because “What are we doing? Are we not supposed to be having fun?” I never understood that. I think there are all these challenges that our kids are experiencing and I think a lot of it has to do with what they are, the size seven shoe being shoved down their throats, if you will. Bad way of putting it. But you know what I’m saying. Okay, I’m going to stop there. If you guys can go maybe, I don’t know who wants to go next. Maybe I’ll leave it up to you in terms of how can we support each other to make these things, make these changes.

Shantel:

I can go, because this all made me think of something. So funny, Claire had mentioned just getting these kids outside and doing these things and you were saying, Heidi, about your bus initiative. All I could think was back to when I was in school. Way back in the eighties and nineties, I’m not that old they had clubs when we were little and we had these awesome Save the Environment Clubs. This is such a big deal, and I still remember all these people who would come talk to us about what lands and all of this. And when I haven’t seen it over the last few years is any of that? What I do see in schools is we are very focused on the seven sacred teachings, which is beautiful, but part of that is what we’re talking about today. It seems like if we’re going to go beyond just saying these seven sacred teachings are a goal, we should be implementing it.

It’s so much more than just the words, it’s our actions. And these kids are curious. I just did a walking field trip with them. We live near the ravine. The school is near our ravine here. We go outside and all these kids, yes, they’re a technology bunch, so we do still have to reach them on the level. What they were doing was taking my iPhone and scanning every plant and we did this for hours and these kids were just scanning the plant. What is this? What is this? What does it do? And I’m like, well, some groups believe it heals this. This is a tea, this is used… We were talking about rose hips and they were like, I didn’t know roses could do two things. And I was like, they can. So they are curious. And again, a lot of them have families that aren’t new to Canada, and this isn’t something that their families are focused on right now.

They’ve got bigger problems and that is okay, but for those who can do these walks, for those of us who can do these things with these kids, they’re curious. They’re going to use the tools that they know how to use. One of them was my phone, and if that’s what it takes to get them interested, I’m all for it. We’re going to get messy and dirty. My son was, my hands are red right now because we pulled beets out of the garden and my son wanted to make blood. Sure, we’re going to go make beet blood. It’s whatever it takes and it’s whatever it’s going to get your kid interested in. And I saw these kids getting so excited, they were told to pick eight items and put them in their little bag. And it was kind of unfortunate that we were using plastic bags for this experiment, but they were gathering eight items and every one of them was like, what do I have in my bag? What is this? What is this? What is this? And you’re like, this is phenomenal, but there’s 30 of you and…

Jenny:

Right.

Shantel:

It’s too many for this poor teacher who then has to go back inside and go back to that idea that a lesson can go so fast and they’re too fast. These kids had all of these things and they had so many questions, but that lesson was done for the day and the next day was going to be a new science lesson. So all of that curiosity and we peaked them and we’re going to slam them back down because they’re not going to learn what we just went through and what we just experienced. And we could have gone for days on this with these kids. And I speak as a volunteer in that classroom. I sit back and I watch these teachers scramble trying to keep 25 to 30 kids busy with kids who are not speaking English yet kids who are nonverbal and not speaking yet.

And there’s one EA for five classrooms and my son is in there as the brittle diabetic, so “yay”. But this teacher is up at the front and she’s like, just, you sit down, you do this, you do this, you do this. Who’s learning? How are they possibly learning with that? And on top of this challenge of teaching something so quickly, because they’ve got to compress so much information like Heidi had been saying her husband has had to do, we’re forcing so much information into these kids, they’re not digesting it and it’s already shortened because the classroom is now so busy that no learning is going to happen. It’s unfortunate because these are awesome, bright, curious kids and I don’t want to see their curiosity killed. They’re grade threes. They’re at this peak level of curiosity and I dread what happens in a couple of years when they no longer want or care to learn this stuff. They’re in the Miss Frizzle stage right now. They’re so stoked about science, but we’re going to lose it and it kills me.

Jenny:

Yeah, I hear you. It’s stretching. Everybody’s so thin and nobody’s set up for success. Nobody and yet we’re meant to compete with each other. I think one thing I would love to do after we’ve settled on this conversation is come back together around how this translates for you, Shantel. When we’re talking about the environment, social justice comes with that, right? It’s making sure that children are, like you said, in a space where they can thrive. So I am just curious, can you hear any of the social justice acts aspects to the greening of a curriculum that you see overlap yet or is that something we should come back to you?

Shantel:

I see so much. I think because we have such complex learners, sometimes I know when I reach my son, it’s most often when his hands are in the dirt. Our kids are hyper-focused. They’re the best social justice warriors. I’m sorry, but I’m autistic myself. We are hyperfocus and we’re your worst enemy or your best friend because if you’ve got our interest and you’ve piqued our interest, we’re going to deep dive with you. We’re going to go with you. These kids do well in nature, most of them do well, even my kiddo who would much prefer to play a video game and do all that, I’ve learned to connect him with nature. We go for walks after school through the ravine. We do all that and give him time to breathe. And so whatever it looks like for him, we change it. But I do find that they are best when they’re outdoors.

They are best when they are doing these things. My kids have been to all my rallies. When we fought for PUF, my kids came when we fought for masks and we fought for better ventilation in our schools because most of us have the air purifiers in the schools, but they don’t ever plug them in. My kids learn how to build a Corsi box. You can engage them, but you have to find a way. But they’re super engaged. My kids know what I do. They love what I do. My daughter is now going to be a teacher. She’s been on this ride with me for a long time and she’s herself and now she’s going to be a teacher because of it, because of the things that we see and she does, she is invested in it because for instance, Jody Calahoo-Stonehouse was put in that seat yesterday for water and air and the environment and my kids are like, woo. And they’re just kind of gauging who she is, but they know that that’s her thing. They know that we just put somebody in place that’s going to look out for water. They learned what happened in Calgary because our relatives are in Calgary they just went through this huge water crisis and there’s a water crisis coming and my kids are learning how to conserve water. Again, it’s just teaching them at their level. You can cross lines. Many people think, “These kids barely know how to do this.” You know what? I have an easier time teaching my kids this. And I’ve been in teaching, I’ve worked in daycares. I’ve had an easier time teaching neurodivergent kids this stuff because they kind of want something to hold onto.

They want a job, they want something to grab onto, and this is a great initiative for them to grab onto and give them a place in the world. So maybe you know what, you’re having a bad day and maybe you didn’t read your best and maybe you’re struggling in math or whatever, but every child can recycle. Every child can build a Corsi box. Every child can be a good citizen. And that’s something they don’t have to be the best readers at. They don’t have to be the best at anything. Every child can do this. And what an amazing thing to level that playing field out. It’s one thing that every kid can do. Go, you’re not the fastest runner. Doesn’t matter. You’re not the best at soccer. Doesn’t matter. You’ll have a rule. You’ll have a place and it’s like that one little thing. So of course you can. Of course, this kind of stuff crosses lines. Of course, it does.

Jenny:

Of course. I’m realizing we’re close to the hour and I know you guys wanted to sign off soon. Claire, do you guys have any closing thoughts quickly before you hop off?

Claire:

Everything Shantel says, I’m just shaking my head, shaking my head. This is so true. One of the frustrations I had during the pandemic was people talking about pandemic learning loss. And I thought, oh my gosh, my kids are learning so much about planetary health. This is real-life, real-world learning. And so we talk about these teachable moments. Covid was a years-long teachable moment. It is still a teachable moment, caring for each other, and wearing our masks to protect each other. Those are all amazing skills that some children are learning. Hopefully. Wouldn’t it be fantastic if we elevated that to be a systemic learning at the systemic level? So it’s not just Shantel’s kids, lucky kids learning from her. It’s all our kids learning those skills. I wanted to touch on what Shantel said about the clubs back in the eighties and nineties. You’d have these environment clubs and people would come and talk to you and those things are happening.

There are a few points I’d like to make. One of the professors I follow, her name is Dr. Ellen Field. She is instrumental in climate change education and she did a great podcast on LiveIt. Earth conversation, Insights on Climate Change Education with Ellen Field. She said, what she’s finding in the interesting research is it’s not the young people that are learning. It’s not young people necessarily in their science classes learning about climate change that are inspired to act. It’s the young people who are taking art classes where the art teacher is infusing the environment into the art projects. Those are the kids that tend to act. Also, the kids who are learning leadership skills, are the kids that act. So just teaching young people, the science of climate change is not the be-all and end-all.

It’s those other, the art one really stuck out for me. Heidi and I were talking about this before the podcast and we were just talking about how some schools are cutting back on art and music and those things I think are so important. And again, that’s going to reach another pocket of students learning to dance, learning to perform. That was just one point.

Environmental Education Misinformation Concerns

Claire:

Then I’d also like to point out something, and we probably need a whole other hour to talk abo