The People’s Citizenship Guide - by Tom Peace

Tonight, at McNally Robinson [please click for event information] in Winnipeg, The People’s Citizenship Guide: A Response to Conservative Canada will be launched. This short 80-page book is a direct response to Citizenship and Immigration Canada’s Discover Canada: The Rights and Responsibilities of Citizenship, which has been widely critiqued for its restrictive and overly-politicized definition of Canadian identity (for examples or critiques see the Globe and Mail, Andrew Smith’s blog, my summary of initial reactions on AH.ca, Ian McKay’s podcast on the right-wing reconception of Canada). As in the official immigration guide, The People’s Citizenship Guide’s editors, historians Esyllt Jones and Adele Perry, have brought together a diverse group of scholars in order to succinctly reflect on the nature of Canadian citizenship and modern-day Canada.


The People’s Citizenship Guide closely mirrors Discover Canada. It is broken down into the same ten sections as the book published by the government. Both texts address citizenship and identity, history, governance, symbols, economy, regions and issues Canadian citizens should consider
The biggest difference between these two works is that Canada’s colonial and liberal legacy is directly acknowledged in The People’s Citizenship Guide. Rather than taking Canada as a historical inevitability, with only ‘regrettable’ instances of social and ethnic conflict, The People’s Citizenship Guide more explicitly emphasizes that “Canada is a construct, a product of collective imagination and history” that in the past (and today) has included some people, while excluding others.

Treatment of Aboriginal peoples serves as a good example of the difference between the two guides. When the Discover Canada Guide was first released, historian Christopher Moore lamented the lack of discussion about Aboriginal people and treaties in the government’s portrayal of Canada’s past. The emphasis of the government’s text is on cooperation rather than conflict and dispossessions, making it seem that First Nations unconditionally welcomed European newcomers. The People’s Citizenship Guide is much more explicit about the inherent nature of First Nation’s sovereignty and the legacy (and complexity) of treaties and land dispossession.

At $14.95, it is unfortunate that The People’s Citizenship Guide will not be as accessible as the free Discover Canada Guide (available as a PDF online). In many ways, Jones’s and Perry’s text will better serve immigrants to Canada. Particularly in their discussion of the provinces and territories, The People’s Citizenship Guide is much more frank about each province’s and territory’s economic prospects, political challenges and complicated histories. For many immigrants it could be a helpful tool in assessing where in Canada they would like to settle. More generally, The People’s Citizenship Guide represents a more diverse and complex picture of Canada. The book pays greater attention to the rights of Canadian citizens and the resources available when those rights are infringed upon (though, both guides could discuss the Supreme Court of Canada in greater detail).

This book is a welcome political intervention. From its title through to its back cover, The People’s Citizenship Guide’s politics are open and easily discerned. Such overt and provocative language, which on the first page labels the vision of Canada presented in Discover Canada as “nationalistic, militaristic and racist,” may turn people off the book before they can digest its important content. That being said, the explicit nature of the book’s politics provides excellent contrast to the political perspectives that are often left implicit in Discover Canada. In publishing The People’s Citizenship Guide, Jones and Perry should be lauded for calling explicit attention to the politics of citizenship.

Indeed, one of the book’s strengths is that it closely follows the structure of Discover Canada. Both guides can literally be read side-by-side. There is significant pedagogical and civic merit to this exercise. Reading both books’ sections on trade and economic growth, for example, illustrates the political differences between these texts. Discover Canada begins its section on trade and economic growth with these two sentences:

“Postwar Canada enjoyed record prosperity and material progress. The world’s restrictive trading policies in the Depression era were opened up by such treaties as the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), now the World Trade Organization (WTO)” (DC 24).

The People’s Citizenship Guide takes a broader and more global perspective on the postwar period. Its section on trade and economic growth begins this way:

“The Canadian economy forms part of an unequal global economic system, a system which, shaped by the legacies of colonialism, continues to privilege industrialized nations over those of the global south. The postwar period was a time of economic boom for wealthy nations like Canada, and many Canadians achieved greater material comfort than they had previously enjoyed” (PCG 31).

This type of comparison makes the Discover Canada Guide and The People’s Citizenship Guide useful for teaching critical reading skills in high schools and introductory university courses.

The People’s Citizenship Guide does not intend to be a replacement for Discover Canada. To find out about government structures, how to vote, or the date of important national observances – like Sir Wilfrid Laurier Day (Nov. 20 for those of you who regularly fail the Historica-Dominion Institute’s quizzes) – one is better to consult the government’s official guide. If, however, you would like a short introduction to Canada that represents the diversity of Canadian experiences and contextualizes many of the critical issues currently facing Canadians, The People’s Citizenship Guide provides a useful starting point.

The People’s Citizenship Guide is being launched tonight in Winnipeg at 7 p.m. in the atrium of McNally Robinson at Grant Park. You can purchase a copy of the guide from Arbeiter Ring Publishing.

Source: http://activehistory.ca/2012/02/the-peoples-citizenship-guide/

The class / Entre les murs (2008)

French School as Democracy and Stage
Dennis Lim, The New York Times (September 26, 2008):

"The Class," a French high-school drama that emerged as the popular underdog winner of the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival this year, belongs to the largely inspirational tradition of the classroom movie. Sometimes the films in this category are odes to youthful rebellion — Jean Vigo's "Zero for Conduct," Lindsay Anderson's "If ..." — but more often (and certainly in the American iterations) they are celebrations of the charismatic, inventive pedagogue, as embodied by Glenn Ford in "Blackboard Jungle," Michelle Pfeiffer in "Dangerous Minds" or Ryan Gosling in "Half Nelson."

"The Class" simultaneously revives and undermines this longstanding genre. Its director, Laurent Cantet, said he was mindful of it, not least because of one grating negative example.

"I didn't want to make a version of 'Dead Poets Society,' " Cantet said in a recent telephone interview, "a film where the teacher is brilliant and heroic and knows everything. I wanted to show a school in all its complexity, where the students don't always learn, and the teachers are not always sure of what they're doing."

The solution, although risky, was simple enough: use real students and real teachers.

Cantet, 47, is one of France's foremost practitioners of a realist, socially engaged cinema, leftist but not dogmatic, with an interest in the culture of the modern workplace and a tendency to inflect his fictional scenarios with strong elements of documentary. His first full-length feature, "Human Resources" (1999), a drama about a father-son conflict complicated by a parallel labor-management struggle, was shot in a factory in Normandy. Most of the actors were nonprofessionals, actual workers, bosses and union organizers playing versions of themselves.

"The Class," which will open the New York Film Festival on Friday (and will be released by Sony Pictures Classics on Dec. 12), is loosely based on a book by François Bégaudeau, itself a hybrid of fact and fiction, billed as an "autobiographical novel" and based on the author's experiences as a teacher. Bégaudeau is the star of "The Class," playing a character named François. The students and the other teachers are drawn from a junior high school in the 20th Arrondissement of Paris, a racially mixed neighborhood.

For some years Cantet had been toying with the idea of a film set in a high school. Both his parents were teachers, and as the father of two school-age children, he said, "I was curious about what their lives are like right now."

The concept fell into place when he read Bégaudeau's book, a best seller in France. "It give me a vision of the school from the inside," he said. He was also intrigued by Bégaudeau's description of his unorthodox and even combative teaching methods, the way he turned classroom back-and-forths into what Cantet called "an experiment in what democracy could be."

Something of a maverick, François is by no means infallible. "This teacher establishes a certain proximity with his students," Bégaudeau wrote in an e-mail message, referring to his alter-ego. "He gives them many occasions to express themselves, favors interacting over lecturing, collective thinking over a linear transmission of knowledge."

"He is the teacher that I was, that I wanted to be," he added. "A democratic teacher, with the baggage of approximation and chaos that comes with it. But in a classroom, as in society, democracy comes with a price. To be a democrat means to accept this price."

Cantet worked on the script with Robin Campillo, his regular co-writer, and Bégaudeau. "It was clear we were not doing a real adaptation of the book," Cantet said. "We would take situations and see if they could mean something to the children we found." Once a week for several months before the shoot, Cantet and Bégaudeau held open workshops that allowed the filmmakers to shape the characters to fit the actors.

The most eager students — about half of the 50 who responded to the casting call — ended up in the film. All are untrained actors, but self-consciousness was not a problem. "Many of them are already friends, and they were not embarrassed in front of one another," Cantet said. "They were also not affected by the lights and cameras. I think because of their generation the camera just felt normal for them."

"The Class" was shot on high-definition video, and to create a fly-on-the-wall effect in the classroom scenes Cantet had three cameras rolling at all times — one trained on Bégaudeau, another on the students, and a third continually on the prowl, "looking for the details that make the classroom real," Cantet said.

Bégaudeau functioned as a surrogate for Cantet, "directing the film from the inside," as Cantet put it, eliciting reactions from the students. "It was very convenient for the film," Bégaudeau said, "and it also enabled me to not focus on my acting and get tense."

The unforced verve of the performances across the board is striking, though maybe not surprising. As Cantet noted, the setting encourages theatricality. "School makes everyone an actor," he said. "The teacher is putting on a performance. The way he uses his body and his voice is an improvisation. Maybe that's why François is such a good actor." And for students the socializing aspect of school involves role playing and recognizable archetypes. "You have the tough guy, the good pupil, the bad one," he said. "Even in real life they are working with characters that have been assigned to them."

"The Class" evolves from observational scenes to a more pointed dramatic conflict, centered on the disciplinary action taken against a boy originally from Mali, but there are no obvious heroes or villains, a stance that Cantet and Bégaudeau both associated with the famous line from Jean Renoir's "Rules of the Game," "Everyone has his reasons."

Bégaudeau said: "Before judging your characters you try to understand their motivations, to understand a process rather than give grades on a moral scale. I believe that in 'The Class' everyone acts according to what they believe to be good, and what's tragic is that it still produces drama."

Bégaudeau, an occasional film critic who has written for Cahiers du Cinéma, placed Cantet within the humanist "Renoirian tradition," whose other heirs include, he said, Eric Rohmer, Maurice Pialat (the last French Palme d'Or winner, for 1987's "Under the Sun of Satan") and Abdellatif Kechiche, a contemporary of Cantet's whose films ("Games of Love and Chance" and the coming "Secret of the Grain") have an affinity with "The Class" in their attention to the lived reality of teenagers and of multicultural France.

As suggested by its French title, "Entre les Murs" ("Between the Walls"), "The Class" never ventures outside the school, but the classroom, as in all classroom movies, registers as a microcosm of society. While the riots of 2005 exposed the fissures of the new France, Cantet said he was striving for an optimistic portrait. "It was important to show the diversity in the classroom as something natural for the children and enriching for everyone," he said. But the utopia is tinged with ambiguity. "School is an integrating system, but it's also based on exclusion."

"The Class" opens in France this week and has already reignited arguments there about diversity and elitism in the education system, already a subject of public discussion in light of proposed reforms by the Nicolas Sarkozy government. Cantet said some conservative commentators have bristled at Bégaudeau's pedagogical approach: "He's not their idea of what a teacher should be."

Bégaudeau maintains he never intended to make a political point. "I did adjust the book according to certain aspects of the discourse of the school system, he said. "But above all I wanted to disarm all discourse by presenting facts too complex for any discourse to address fully. It's a way to bet on storytelling rather than ideas."

Cantet, for his part, had no interest in settling a conflict that defies resolution. "There is a very old fight in France, and I think everywhere, between the moderns and the ancients about the culture that we believe should enrich our children." he said. "The debate is much older than the film. The film provides arguments to both sides to continue this debate."

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/26/arts/26iht-21lim.16510682.html?pagewanted=all 

Maintaining Classroom Discipline by using Democratic Methods (1953)

Practicing Democracy in the Classroom (1953). Points out that democratic techniques are more effective in teaching good citizenship than laissez-faire and authoritarian methods. This educator instruction film advocates the use of democratic prinicples within the classroom. Even today, so many classrooms based around teacher centered, autocratic methodologies, this is a timely message. This film displays many practices that are at the heart of progressive educational thought: student centered learning, authentic tasks, collaborative work, authentic assessment. This is all couched in the framework of bolstering democracy, which ironically it does, by promoting an independantly thinking citizen that tries to gather facts and reason, rather than relying on talking head demagogues. Producer: Educational Film Service. Creative Commons license: Public Domain.

Who is Crafting our National Identity?

by Cynthia Wallace-Casey
PhD Student, University of New Brunswick

Nationalism is modern but it invents for itself history and traditions. (Eric Hobsbawm, The Invention of Tradition, 1983)

 
Public institutions in Canada, particularly those with a national focus, are mandated to present a national perspective on the past. Such a mandate raises the essential questions of “Who defines nation-ness” and “What represents a nation’s true identity”.

In Les Lieux de Mémore (1989) , Pierre Nora establishes a distinction between real memory and historical memory: Memory is life, while history is the reconstruction of what is no longer; memory is a perpetual bond with the present, while history is a representation of the past; memory is selective in its information, while history calls for analysis and criticism; memory is sentimental, while history is prosaic; memory is bound to a specific group of people, while history belongs to no group in particular and is thus universal; memory takes root in concrete objects, while history is temporal; memory is absolute, while history is relative. As historians, we are taught to be suspicious of memory, for as Nora explains, the “true mission [of history] is to suppress and destroy [memory]” . With the acceleration of history, Nora argues, there has occurred in France a slippage of collective memory (authentic environments of memory). In turn, collective memory has been replaced by “lieux de mémoire” (sites of memory), which serve the people as their official keepers of memory. Thus, these sites of memory constitute France’s national memory, and can be monuments, emblems, commemorations, symbols, rituals, textbooks, documents, or mottos: the material culture of France. Ironically, having destroyed memory, history “calls out for memory because it has abandoned it”, and in its place, nations “deliberately create archives, maintain anniversaries, organize celebrations, pronounce eulogies, and notarize bills because such activities no longer occur naturally”. Such national sites of memory are problematic, in that we must question who is creating the memory site and for what purpose.

Every public institution in Canada has a Collections Management Policy and curators, as well as archivists, must be selective in what they actually collect – so in an indirect way, they are crafting our national memory, or, as Benedict Anderson would indicate, creating our imagined community. Nationality, significations, nation-ness, as well as nationalism, are cultural artifacts of a particular kind that are fabricated and imagined. Nationalism is not real: “it is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion.” Such imagined communities are perpetuated through the creation of a national consciousness - expressed through such national icons as emblems, maps, monuments, census, official languages, the arts, school instruction, and museums. As Anderson poignantly explains, “no more arresting emblems of the modern culture of nationalism exist than cenotaphs and tombs of Unknown Soldiers” . Rather than recognizing such monuments as sincere expressions of remembrance, Anderson sees them as tools to bind together our national imagination and somehow justify loss of life for a greater cause of national destiny.

Within such a gamut of national memories and imagined identities, our pursuit of “truth” in history seems ever more evasive. But, if our “national treasures” are the keystones to our national identity (no matter how fabricated this identity may be), they spark our imagination and thus selectively hold us together as a nation. This indeed is a great feat, and so the role of public historians in working with academic historians in crafting our national identity must be valued as a profession of utmost significance.

ActiveHistory.ca: Podcast: Ian McKay on the Right-Wing Reconceptualization of Canada

Great piece from the blog site of ActiveHistory.ca!

Ian McKay, professor of history at Queen’s University, recently delivered an engaging and provocative talk titled “The Empire Strikes Back: Militarism, Imperial Nostalgia, and the Right-Wing Reconceptualization of Canada”. McKay’s talk was the keynote address of the 15th annual New Frontiers Graduate History Conference at York University.

The talk is available here for audio download: ActiveHistory.ca

McKay is the author numerous books, including The Quest of the Folk: Antimodernism and Cultural Selection in Twentieth-Century Nova Scotia (1994) and Rebels, Reds, Radicals: Rethinking Canada’s Left History (2005). He won the Canadian Historical Association’s MacDonald prize for his book Reasoning Otherwise: Leftists and the People’s Enlightenment in Canada (2008). More recently, McKay co-authored In The Province of History: The Making of the Public Past in Twentieth Century Nova Scotia (2010), which was reviewed here on ActiveHistory.ca.