Equity Matters

Feb 10

Teaching With Conflict and Controversial Issues in Diverse and Multicultural Classrooms

Christina Parker, OISE/University of Toronto Guest Contributor

This entry is part of the collaborative series on education and equity between the CFHSS’s Equity Issues Portfolio and the Canadian Society for the Study of Education.

At its core, multicultural education is about facilitating inclusion among diverse students. It equitably engages diverse students in its content and pedagogy and it is reflective of students’ own perspectives, histories, and identities. Multicultural education critically acknowledges race, gender, sexuality, and power. Thus, in diverse and...

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Feb 8

Gender Equality 40-Years after the Royal Commission on the Status of Women

Malinda S. Smith, Vice President, Equity Issues Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences

This past Saturday’s Globe and Mail included a story by Jane Taber entitled “Re-paving the way for women on the Hill…yet again.” In the article, Laurin Li, a 21-year old McGill University joint major in History and Cultural Studies student and recently elected parliamentarian who swept in to office in the Orange Wave in Quebec, states: “I think it will last throughout my lifetime and throughout the lifetime of my kids,...

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Feb 3

Canada’s Black Writers: Achieving Excellence and Avoiding Annihilation

Zetta Elliott, Borough of Manhattan Community College
Guest Contributor

Last summer, after returning from a cross-border trip to Toronto, a friend of mine asked: “What’s wrong with Canada?” It’s a question she and I have considered over the years as we’ve worked to establish ourselves as black women writers and scholars. Rosamond is a poet/performance artist/activist. I met her in graduate school at New York University, where she wrote her dissertation on Caribbean immigrant literature, including texts by Canadian authors Dionne Brand and Austin Clarke...

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Jan 26

LGBT young people, public spaces and policing in Australia

Angela Dwyer, Queensland University of Technology
Guest Contributor  

This entry is part of the CFHSS’s VP Equity Issues series on issues related to LGBTQI2-S (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered, questioning, intersex and Two-Spirited) peoples.

Some police still do victimise lesbian and gay men, as the 2006 Amnesty International report Stonewalled clearly documents. Generally, however, the police are more likely to be seen as supporting diversity rather than demonising it. In Australia, as in the United Kingdom and Canada, the...

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Jan 24

Trans Rights in Mexico and Canada: The Geopolitics of Privilege

Oralia Gómez-Ramírez, University of British Columbia
Guest Contributor  

This entry is part of the CFHSS’s VP Equity Issues series on issues related to LGBTQI2-S (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered, questioning, intersex and Two-Spirited) peoples.

When I asked trans activists Angie Rueda Castillo and Irina Layevska what this blog entry should be about, the two of them encouraged me to account for what is happening in the struggle for trans people’s rights in Mexico, and how this may contrast and compare to the state of affairs in Canada.  

In Mexico City,...

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Jan 18

Indigenous, immigrant, inclusive: Three perspectives on diversity

Malinda S. Smith, Vice-President, Equity Issues, Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences

Will Ferrell’s comedy, ‘Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy’ tells the story of a woman who is hired in to a newsroom dominated by an old boys club whose behavior ranged from tolerating her presence, to disdaining her professional interventions, to scheming to seduce or depose her. A kind of benign tolerance pertained as long as the ambitious female character stayed in “her place,” doing girly stories on food, clothing and cute pets. Despite being subjected to the kind of garden variety sexism that continues to underwrite the glass ceiling...

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Dec 22

Disorders of Sex Development: De-Queering the ‘I’ in LGBTQI2-S

Catherine Clune-Taylor, University of Alberta
Guest Contributor

This entry is part of the CFHSS’s VP Equity Issues series on issues related to LGBTQI2-S (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered, questioning, intersex and Two-Spirited) peoples.

In 1993 activist Cheryl Chase founded the Intersex Society of North America (ISNA), kick-starting what would come to be known as the intersex rights movement. Since then, the word intersex has become more controversial, more contested and more divisive than ever before. First used in 1917 by biologist Richard Goldschmidt to refer to those conditions that gave...

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Dec 20

Desiring and Doing Equity: The Triangle Program for LGBTIQ2S Youth

Doreen Fumia, Ryerson University
Guest Contributor This entry is part of the CFHSS’s VP Equity Issues series on issues related to LGBTQI2-S (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered, questioning, intersex and Two-Spirited) peoples.

I would like to add to the Equity Matters discussions about queer equity in public education with some thoughts that have surfaced from an ethnographic study I recently conducted. The study is based on the Toronto District School Board’s (TDSB) Triangle Program, Canada’s only publicly funded secondary school classroom for LGBTIQ2S youth...

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Dec 13

The Note-taker: Innovative assistive technology enables blind scholars to take notes

Michael J. Astrauskas, Arizona State University
Guest contributor

This entry is part of the CFHSS’s VP Equity Issues series on diversity, creativity and innovation / diversité, innovation et créativité

To see a whiteboard at the front of the class, students with severe visual impairment typically use a monocular for far-sight viewing. This provides a greatly magnified but a very narrow field of view of the board. In addition to the monocular, they might need to use their glasses for note-taking (i.e. near-sight viewing). As these students take notes in class, they must repeatedly switch back and forth between the whiteboard and their notes,...

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Dec 8

Conversion Therapy Fantasies and Religious Opposition to LGBTQ-inclusive Education

Catherine Taylor, University of Winnipeg
Guest Contributor

This entry is part of the CFHSS’s VP Equity Issues series on issues related to LGBTQI2-S (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered, questioning, intersex and Two-Spirited) peoples.

As we look towards International Human Rights Day on 10 December, I share the frustration of many students, parents, and educators that as a nation we often stand timidly by while LGBTQ young people are being hurt in hostile school cultures, citing our reluctance to choose sides between religious rights to...

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