Ryerson school educator practises what she teaches
Cindy Gangaram is challenging the province on its sex-ed curriculum
You wonder who the Ontario government’s lawyer expected to face when told he’d be cross-examining a Hamilton teacher named Cindy Gangaram over the province’s attempt to roll back sex-ed curriculum to one taught in the 1990s.
Maybe he expected a woman pushing five-foot-three if she’s wearing winter boots, who packs a combination of intellectual rigour, geniality and fire in the belly for social justice — and who worked at Queen’s Park before she was old enough to drive.
Gangaram feels it went well, although the experience was made no easier by a concussion she suffered after getting whacked in the head with a volleyball in gym class at Ryerson elementary school.
“It was fascinating, and dare I say I
enjoyed it in a weird way,” she says of the cross-examination. “He asked questions and I made my points.”
In a café on James Street North, Gangaram drinks a cup of tea and feels the burn. It’s as though she doesn’t have two minutes to pause and let it cool. She teaches a Grade 6-7-8 class, chairs the board of Environment Hamilton and this week prepares to host a Black Canadian Curriculum workshop as chair of her union’s justice committee.
She wrote an affidavit for the court case on the health education dispute, on which she was cross-examined in November.
She also attended the Divisional Court hearing at Osgoode Hall in Toronto last week, at which the curriculum was challenged in two separate court applications — one by the Canadian Civil Liberties Association and the other by the Elementary Teachers’ Federation of Ontario. Gangaram was recruited by the ETFO to be its figurehead — a co-applicant.
She wrote: “I believe the 1998 (health) curriculum is grossly inadequate ... A safe and inclusive space for all students can only be achieved when every student is valued and respected, including students that selfidentify outside of (gender norms).”
On Jan. 30, Gangaram will be cross-examined on a union brief she wrote for a case before the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario involving a transgender student.
She worries about stretching herself too thin, letting down students, or friends and family. (She and her partner, Andrew, also a teacher, have been together for 18 years; they met in high school.)
But the slogans adorning buttons on her backpack aren’t just words. (One of them says “question authority,” and she says that includes her when she’s at the front of the classroom.)
“With privilege comes power, and with that power comes responsibility,” she says. “I’ve been
given avenues to participate in struggles; it’s my duty to do so.”
As a little girl, Gangaram lacked intellectual tools, but those raw instincts were there.
“I wanted to go up to people I didn’t know and hug them, to share with them that I thought they were worthy of love, make everyone feel good ... It was a childlike way of looking at the world, certainly.”
It wasn’t long before such sunny idealism clashed with the real world.
Her parents, from Guyana, came to Canada in the 1970s. She grew up in Brampton the youngest of three kids. Her brother, Terry, lives in Waterdown, and the oldest, Andrew, died while jogging at 21, a victim of a heart
condition the family had known nothing about, when his sister was in Grade 8.
“That had a lot to do with why I eventually wanted to teach Grade 8. It can be a tumultuous time for a young person, this bridge between childhood and adulthood. That was a tough year.”
Gangaram felt it growing up, her status as an outsider, a visible minority. Her family filled her with self-confidence, and when others treated her as less than she was, it angered her.
Her father, Rolland, once told her that when he applied for a job, the manager told him: “We don’t hire your kind here.” Her mother, Norma, was a nurse.
Before Gangaram started high school, she served as a page at Queen’s Park during Bob Rae’s NDP government. One of her pictures from that experience is in an album at home: She sits in the legislature with her feet up on the premier’s desk.
It wasn’t until she attended McMaster University that she found her voice, graduating with a bachelor’s degree in political science and a master’s in labour studies.
She was drawn to critical theory and its notions of social justice, the connection between economics and gender and race.
After graduating from teacher’s college, Gangaram landed at Ryerson and its Sage Quest program when it first began 14 years ago.
She teaches language arts, history and geography, but she imbues the curriculum with such issues as colonialism and oppression. Gandhi, and the principles of nonviolence he famously stood for, are favourite topics.
Carrying a torch for her principles has its moments. During a recent forum on climate change, one man yelled that she was a hypocrite for driving her car to the event.
Gangaram did not yell back, but she didn’t ignore him, either.
“I engaged him, I said I’d like to talk to you but not feel assaulted. And he was actually wonderful in changing his tone. I do believe in the humanity of people. Most people just want to be understood.”
While she reads and admires philosophers like Jiddu Krishnamurti and Paulo Freire, her guilty pleasure is “Game of Thrones,” both the TV series and books.
She cites an episode named after a quote by a character who says he has “a tender spot in my heart for cripples and bastards and broken things.”
Gangaram says those are words she wouldn’t normally use, but she has undying faith in the sentiment she hears behind it — that, in the end, the world will be made good, perhaps saved, by these same people.
“Even the smallest person can change the course of history.”