By: Emma Sleigh, FASS Ambassador 2022-2023
Why does high school feel like a prison to so many students? Is that prolonged stress worth graduating for? Why is school even necessary?
These are some of the difficult questions I wrestled with when I was a high school student, which I was reminded of while attending the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences’ Healthy Cities: Back to School in the City event on September 27.
In high school, I moved in between different alternate forms of schooling. I was desperate to just get school over with. I could never visualize a learning environment that I could tolerate, let alone enjoy.
When I was finally introduced to the Enriched Support Program (ESP) at Carleton University, after meetings with a chain of guidance counselors and supports, I felt a new kind of chapter in my life emerge. Interestingly, it was the connections I made with those guidance counselors, and now a whole community of ESP staff and students, that truly ignited the desire I’ve always had to learn. With those communities, I gained more than just a few skills, but actual opportunities to create those engaging environments that I couldn’t quite visualize before.
The journey of connections I’ve made hasn’t stopped there. I find my life has become a sort of cycle of motivation, learning, unlearning, and action. Humans are extremely socially dependent and community is always at the center of this cycle, fueling each step of the journey. The integrating and privileging of social bonds within education was reinforced and crystalized as a kind of revolutionary, plausible reality when I listened in on the Healthy Cities roundtable discussion between three Carleton professors — Drs. Julie Garlen, Leila Angod, and Maria Rogers — and elementary school principal Sherwyn Solomon.
I came into the event as a now senior ESP mentor and a FASS Ambassador, ready to absorb as much information as I could. The three panelists and moderator added new layers of reflection onto the preliminary ideas I had. All speakers gave a different approach to their critique of the impacts and the resulting opportunities that the pandemic has created for students, teachers, parents, and so on. One reply by Mr. Solomon about the devastating statistics on racialized children highlighted the inherently discriminatory nature of today’s schooling.
The greatest message I took away from the speakers was this:
The pandemic hasn’t just made foundational issues within the education system more obvious, but has created a rare opportunity to radically re-structure the system entirely.
As an anthropology major, this is especially important to me as I learn how to decolonize my mind to better understand my place in relation to others on the traditional and never ceded territory of the Algonquin nation.
Increasing the quality and amount of social connectedness found in schools needs to be a primary goal of education. Just like when I was an ESP student, I find the most diversity, the most collaboration, and, consequently, the greatest successes to occur in spaces of community and support.
In these spaces, I must acknowledge that I am a white, middle-class, able-bodied, and cis-gendered female and that I’ve been privileged to even have the opportunity to go to school my whole life. At the same time, if someone with as much privilege as me found school so intolerable, it only makes sense that there are larger systems of power creating a space that is fundamentally anti-human or at least anti-collaboration.
Altogether, the event felt like another stepping stone towards building the kind of academic spaces I strive to belong to.
Emma Sleigh is a second-year student majoring in Anthropology and minoring in Archaeology, and a 2022-2023 FASS Student Ambassador.
Learn more about Emma and the FASS Student Ambassador program.