TORONTO -- From defunding the police to campus security to decolonizing education, online sessions covering a wide array of topics related to racial justice took place across Canada as part of a two-day strike by post-secondary instructors in solidarity with anti-Black violence protests in the U.S.
The Scholar Strike, which was initially organized by University of Pennsylvania professor Anthea Butler who was inspired by strikes in the WNBA and NBA, took place on Sept. 9 and 10 in Canada.
While approximately 30 instructors actually sat out of their classes, the action was endorsed by more than 500 post-secondary institutions across the country.
Over the course of the two days, striking scholars substituted their regular classes for free online sessions hosted by academics and activists who covered a range of subjects concerning racial justice, police violence, and labour equality.
El Jones, a poet, activist, and professor at Mount Saint Vincent University in Halifax, led two such online sessions during the strike: “Gender, Colonialism and Anti-Black Police Racist Violence” and “Scholars’ Strike Nova Scotia: Teach-In for Black Lives.”
“I think the most important thing was that we’re having the conversation,” she told CTV’s Your Morning on Friday. “It's just important for us to be there, sharing our points of views, having people able to discuss and debate. There were really good debates.”
Jones said the comments section during the sessions was particularly active with audience members participating in lively conversations about the topics at hand.
“Sometimes people were critiquing, people were defending different points of view. So it created a really good space for a kind of public debate around what's happening right now,” she said. “Certainly, there were a lot of people there that already agreed with these ideas, there were a lot of people that either wanted to learn more, and some people that flat out disagreed.”
Jones said that having a public forum to discuss these kinds of topics in a substantial way is important for creating change.
“As we’re talking about what a different kind of society might look like, and what different solutions might look like, having that discussion is the way that we're going to work out what it is we think the solutions are, and where to go with it,” she said.
On an academic level, Jones said they discussed what that looks like at post-secondary institutions’ administrations and on campus.
“So many of our universities made statements in solidarity with Black lives and now we have to pick up that challenge,” she said. “What does that actually mean? What does it mean at the level of our board of governors in administration? What does it mean as teachers? What does it mean for our students? What does it mean in the way our campuses look? And who has access? What does it mean for politicians in the ways that education is funded?”
Jones said the Scholar Strike gave educators and students the opportunity to engage with the outside world and move away from the thinking that the classroom is an exceptional space that exists in an academic bubble.
“We tend to believe the university is this ivory tower, and it’s somehow different,” she said. “We have to think about the classroom as connected to this world and that what happens outside the classroom impacts us inside the classroom and how we're going to negotiate it.”
