The Ontario school board’s anti-Islamophobia strategy is called into question after a Muslim student was singled out
An Ontario father questions the legitimacy of a school board’s anti-Islamophobia strategy months after his son was singled out by a teacher during a class featuring racist cartoons.
During class in January, the high school teacher in the Peel region, which includes the Toronto-area cities of Mississauga and Brampton, showed two caricatures from the controversial French magazine Charlie Hebdo to international baccalaureate students as part of a module on censorship.
Without commenting on the stereotyped nature of the cartoons — which targeted Muslim, Jewish, and black communities — the teacher discussed the 2015 Charlie Hebdo massacre, in which the magazine’s offices were attacked by two al-Qaeda affiliates. members who killed 12 people.
The teacher then called the student – according to his father the only Muslim in the class – to ask if he found the images offensive, to which he said yes. Her questioning then focused on the student’s opinion of the massacre.
“I almost felt sad and helpless,” Rahim Kassam, the student’s father, said in an interview with CBC News. “Because unlike getting injured at school playing sports, you could take him to the hospital. This was something that affected them mentally.”
The teacher was suspended for three months in January and returned to school in April.
A spokesperson for the Peel District School Board told CBC News in a statement that the teacher has been held accountable through progressive discipline following a thorough investigation that took into account input from the affected student, their parent, community members and other students. .
The spokesperson said the board is committed to its anti-Islamophobia strategy and that “additional measures, arrangements and support were immediately offered and implemented to support student comfort and well-being at the school.”
The incident occurred the same month as the school board’s anti-Islamophobia strategy — the only district-wide policy inCanada — was implemented, part of which includes training teachers to detect their own implicit biases.
Teacher back to school after suspension
Kassam met with the principal in January after the incident and again in April. According to him, at the second meeting, the principal acknowledged that Islamophobia and anti-black racism had taken place in the classroom during the incident.
Often these issues boil down to what the teacher meant, one expert said.
Teachers may visit a student who belongs to a particular community because they “may have an idea or insight that will benefit the class,” says Naved Bakali, a professor of anti-racism education at the University of Windsor.
“It could be that the teacher had good intentions in bringing that to the classroom,” Bakali told CBC News. But that approach wrongly assumes there is a homogenized voice of a particular community on the issue, which is why training is necessary, he added.
“There are many students [who] doesn’t want to be in those positions where they have to be that representative voice.
Strategy includes sensitivity training
The Peel District School Board’s anti-Islamophobia strategy was more than two years in the making before launching in January.
The board passed a motion in September 2021 to develop the strategy, aiming to make Muslim students and teachers feel safer in the classroom after a series by hate crimes against the community in Canada.
LOOK | CBC’s 2021 story on Peel’s anti-Islamophobia strategy:
The Peel District School Board in Ontario is the first school board to announce the implementation of an anti-Islamophobia strategy for both staff and students.
At the time, community leaders said that to be effective, the plan would need to center student voices and include a revision of the curriculum, among other actionable measures.
The annual mandatory anti-Islamophobia training for all board members was one of the main pillars of the strategy. The Toronto District School Board voted to develop a similar policy in April.
Bakali said sensitivity training for the teacher might have been helpful, but talking to community members or affected family would be a better approach to combat misunderstanding and ignorance.
“I think that’s what’s really missing in school spaces,” he said.
“You can have all these kinds of professional developments, but if you don’t establish connections with the community as a whole, with community members who are typically silenced within the education space or feel like they don’t belong there, the barriers remain there.”
While Kassam said he thinks the strategy could be an effective way to teach educators about Islam, he said he’s not convinced the school board is taking its own strategy seriously.
“Because the way it’s been handled so far, I felt like it was just pushed out — like it’s just on paper, right? I bet if it was followed I wouldn’t be in this situation,” he said .
Effectiveness of strategy questioned by former curator
While the Peel region is one of Canada’s most ethnically and religiously diverse regions, it has not been spared a disturbing pattern of anti-Muslim violence that has emerged across Canada in recent years.
The board itself had been placed under scrutiny by the Department of Education in 2019 following allegations of anti-black racism within its schools. The appointed supervisor ended his tenure in January, write in a letter to the minister that the board was self-sufficient again.
Nokha Dakroub, a Peel parent and former board member who introduced the anti-Islamophobia motion, told CBC News the strategy was designed to educate teachers and students and confirm students’ identities.
“I’m sorry, Charlie Hebdo cartoons don’t confirm anyone’s identity,” she said. “They are going against that. Everything that happened in this case goes against the anti-Islamophobia strategy.”
“It brings to question the legitimacy of the work we have done so far.”
Kassam said that when the teacher returned to school, his son was told by the principal that the teacher would not make eye contact with him nor was he allowed to look at her. He was also told that he could leave the classroom 15 minutes early to avoid running into her in the hallway.
“He said something to me that was quite striking after this happened,” Kassam said. “He said, ‘I’m being treated like a second-class citizen now.'”
Training teachers to be more sensitive about dealing with bigotry or checking their own biases is important, but the most important thing is that there is institutional accountability, Dakroub said.
“If there’s a sense that it doesn’t really matter, and people can… make big mistakes and still be OK and get away with it with a slap on the wrist, as they say, nothing’s going to change.”
