By Maria Nguyen
I encountered some roadblocks this past week working on my story in
Granted, I made a mistake of forgetting to tell him it was going to be a multimedia project, but I did not just barge in and start taking pictures without his consent. I brought a video camera to class and asked him before students came in if he could ask them for me.
Starting out as my gatekeeper to a small Somali community in
Even though I did make a pact with him that I would not show his students’ faces, he was still very reluctant. But what made me mad was he didn’t even tell his students about my intention, despite me asking him several times. He merely assumed that they would not agree to it. And insisted I took his word.
When he realized how persistent I was about coming back to record his class, he turned to his supervisor at the Toronto District School Board, who bluntly disallowed me from coming back to the class.
When he told me that audio would be OK but not video, I wished I had left the camcorder on to at least capture the sounds in the classroom. There were so many good moments when the students interacted with one another or tried really hard to answer a question in English. I wanted so badly to capture that. But I wanted to do everything the right way, the ethical way, so I couldn’t be sneaky like that.
I’m just so outraged how a person could be so presumptuous about me getting him in trouble that he had to shut me out and take a really good story away from me. That ESL class, as do many under TDSB, clearly needs more funding, and allowing me to tell that story would help the students!
Some women in the class can’t attend class everyday and not for the entire three hours because they have children to take care of and TDSB doesn’t fund caretaking facilities for their ESL students. The class has also been moved twice or three times due to lack of classroom space; again, due to lack of provincial funding.
In any person’s right mind, a story like this deserves to be told. So what if the students can’t speak proper English? That’s what the teacher is there for. So what if the classroom is in an apartment building’s bare, run-down party room? It only shows their real need for a better learning space.
The irony is I wasn’t going to make underfunding the focus of my story. The story was going to be about the students. How can any caring teacher take that opportunity from his students?
In my perfect world, everyone would be open and see the good in things before the bad.
In my perfect world, important stories would get pressed and not suppressed.
In my perfect world, these women – otherwise mute in the vast, fast capitalist world that couldn’t care less about the poor, the illiterate, the ones behind – their voices would be heard.
(Check back for multimedia of the class and its students)
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