“WITHOUT ANY DIRECTION OR ASSISTANCE FROM THE EDUCATION MINISTRY OR TORONTO BOARD OF EDUCATION (TBE), CLINTON CREATED ITS OWN ENGLISH AS A SECOND LANGUAGE (ESL) PROGRAMS. ITS FIRST ESL CLASS OPENED ITS DOORS IN 1951.”


hour periods a week. Clinton and two other neighbouring schools with predominantly Jewish students responded with civil dis- obedience. They either watered down the curriculum or noted the subject on their timetable and then ignored it. Their reaction was based on an appeal from the Canadian Jewish Congress, teachers’ relationships with Jewish parents through the home and school association and the schools’ desire to support their students. Vipond concludes: “Clinton was not part of some Anglo-Ontarian as- similationist juggernaut but an institution that worked together with parents to find what worked for its community of students and parents.” The historical significance of this episode


is that Clinton used the issue as an opportu- nity to bridge religious differences and fos- ter a stronger community. It’s a lesson that Vipond suggests could have benefited those involved in the recent religious symbols de- bate in Quebec or the controversy provoked by the Harper government’s attempt to pre- vent Muslim women from wearing a niqab at citizenship ceremonies.


EUROPEAN CLINTON


In the 1950s, the Clinton student population became predominately Italian and Portuguese in ethnic origin. For European Clinton, the dominant focus became the need to respond to language rather than religious issues. Without any direction or assistance from


the education ministry or Toronto Board of Education (TBE), Clinton created its own English as a second language (ESL) pro- grams. Its first ESL class opened its doors in 1951. The school had to find its way through experimentation that included assigning all ESL students to one class, holding students back for a second year of kindergarten, and ultimately a more integrated approach that had students spend part of the day in inten- sive language instruction and return to their regular classroom for the balance of the day. Drawing on academic literature, Vipond


stresses that the board’s goals for ESL were “to assimilate immigrants, improve their


44 ETFO VOICE | FALL 2017


educational standing, and socialize all chil- dren to the norms of the Anglo-Saxon elite.” According to former students, this assimila- tion approach was evident to a certain extent. They remember teachers reprimanding them for speaking Italian, anglicizing their names and calling their parents to encourage them to speak English at home. By the mid-1960s, both the province and


school board had woken up to the impor- tance of immigrant education. The earlier assimilationist theories of ESL began to give way to goals related to individual student needs. In 1965, the TBE released a research report entitled Immigrants and Their Edu- cation, which addressed not what immigrant students needed to do to adapt to Canadian life but what the school system needed to do to support them. Clinton also discovered the importance


of having diversity among staff. Office staff who spoke Italian or Portuguese played an important bridging role as did educational assistants in kindergarten. Clinton alumnae talk about their cultural horizons being ex- panded by a Japanese-Canadian teacher who arrived in 1966 and how a black teacher be- came a role model and mentor.


GLOBAL CLINTON


Language instruction heightened as a politi- cal issue during the Global Clinton period when the school’s demographics evolved to include students from Latin American and East Asian immigrant families. Between 1975 and 1985, the diversity of schools like Clin- ton provoked a debate about multicultural programing. The TBE established a multicul- turalism working group whose final report in 1976 called for schools to provide immigrant children “with a means of recognizing their own cultural and linguistic heritage as a mat- ter of routine experience.” A number of schools set up heritage lan-


guage classes offered as extracurricular pro- grams by instructors from the various cultur- al communities. Clinton offered after-school programs in Italian, Portuguese, Spanish and Greek. At the board level, support increased


for extending the school day by 150 min- utes a week to offer the courses within the instructional day, a proposal the Toronto Teachers’ Federation opposed. Heritage languages were introduced


to the instructional day if supported by a school-based referendum. Clinton, based on advice from a school sub-committee, ultimately rejected the concept. Parents were concerned about the impact of a lon- ger school day for their children and the reduced opportunities for extra-curricular activities. They were also worried about the quality of the concurrent program for students not enrolled in heritage language classes. In spite of significant pressure from the


TBE, Clinton rejected the option. Vipond concludes that Clinton parents didn’t reject multiculturalism, but believed the school, especially through extracurricular activi- ties, fostered cross-cultural understanding and worked effectively to integrate immi- grant students. Vipond sees this moder- ate multicultural approach as a useful and defensible way of thinking about multicul- tural citizenship.


PUBLIC EDUCATION’S CONTRIBU- TION TO CITIZENSHIP BUILDING


Vipond looks back on Clinton’s history as a story of how one school sought to find “the right balance…between acculturation and adaption” and how through the pro- cess “it constructed multicultural citizen- ship.” Whether the school was responding to top-down policies or trailblazing its own approach, the underlying themes were the school’s understanding of its students and school community and the desire to help them succeed academically and as citizens. Much of what Clinton staff and school


community learned resonates with the eq- uity work that ETFO promotes through its professional learning and resources – work grounded in reflecting classroom diversity and meeting individual student needs. n


Vivian McCaffrey is an executive staff member at ETFO.


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