Case Study #1: Unmasking Halloween
To better include the students in their school who do not celebrate Halloween, teachers at this elementary school have opted to take their students on a trip outside the school rather than celebrate in the ‘traditional’ spooky sense. This does not sit well with everyone, including a few specific parents:

Question: Kim disagrees with the decision the staff has taken to downplay Hallowe’en. What are her arguments for keeping this tradition? What are the counter arguments?
Answer: Kim’s argument is that Hallowe’en is a distinctly “Canadian” tradition, that she feels her child and the other students are being deprived of in favour of “another culture’s” traditions. Apart from the fact that Halloween originated out of the Celtic holiday of Samhain where people would dress up to ward off ghosts and evil spirits; many Christian holidays including Christmas (see Yule) were derived from traditional Pagan holidays, but this does not necessarily mean that these holidays were not a part of the “Canadian experience”. What it does mean, is that the defaulted “Canadian experience” is obviously extremely Euro-centric. The fact that it is expected to celebrate Halloween in schools and not holidays like All Saints Day (originally designated by Pope Gregory III of Rome despite it’s decline in European-popularity) is a circumstance that plays into the segregation of the “Canadian experience” and the “white experience”. Considering Canada is a country of immigrants (apart from our First Peoples) its history has always followed the ones who held the biggest stick, and unfortunately that tended to be the same group of white, European people. They got to set the norms. 
      What Jennifer and her teachers are doing, is to not neglect the Euro-centric holiday, but find a way to still celebrate while being able to include all students, not just ones who celebrate these traditionally Christian holidays. No child is missing out when the whole class goes on a field trip, no matter what day it is. The point that Jennifer is trying to make, is that celebrating a holiday is not a part of the school curriculum, and it is up to the individual teacher to plan what they would prefer to do in their own classroom. Halloween was brought over by the Europeans, not created on Canadian soil, therefore, they feel that class time is better spent doing things like field trips where students can actually get out of their classroom and see more of this country. They’ve told no student how to celebrate in their own homes, but they have imparted their knowledge that there are different ways to be inclusive. 

Case Study #2: Let Them Eat Cake
To help cut down on the costs for running a library in their elementary school, a principal decides to separate all the books into random classrooms rather than leaving them in one single place that is accessible to all.

Question: How are the social norms and culture of a school likely to change if the library books are allocated to classrooms and the library is replaced by access to the internet? 
Answer: To take a single room of books that is accessible to all and split it up into a dozen rooms really only available to those who “belong” to that room, makes it extremely hard for any student, teacher, staff, or person to find the subject they’re looking for. It would be almost impossible to keep up-to-date records of where each book is being kept, and it introduced this idea of inequity throughout the entire school. We know from experience and common sense that just because two students are in the same class that it does not necessarily mean they are at the exact same point in their learning journey. The same can also be said for reading level, and especially, the kinds of things they like to read. If a school were to divvy up its books among various classrooms based on content or reading level based on age or grade, students who seek higher or lower levels of reading will be put at a disadvantage. It is ridiculous to think that teachers and classes will then have to haggle with one another and deal with interruptions just to get the right book, and it is not a stretch to say that eventually books will be forgone all together because of the hassle it would be to track them down and the lack of accessibility. 
      Books are central to learning, and whether or not we see a transition into ebooks in the future isn’t my argument, but the fact that they will always be necessary, is. To default to the internet without the proper resources and teaching to help students understand how to navigate for proper sources, we’re inhibiting our students from learning that will follow them (and still follows me) into post-secondary and beyond, and by shunning and closing libraries, we’re denying students another level of education.

Case Study #3: Bang Bang You’re Dead
Teachers discuss the role of violence video games in correlation to poor behaviour in students. They both have different points of view of how these games can affect childhood learning and temperament.

Question: What is it about modern cultural phenomena such as video games that people find so threatening? 
Answer: The rise of technology in modern culture is obviously one of the fastest-growing revolutions that modern humans have ever seen. The fact that I carry around a computer in my pocket every day that is more powerful than what first got us to the moon is kind of insane, and I think its this extreme jump that really sets some people on edge about technology–especially the kind that’s as vivid and visceral as today’s modern video games. In my lifetime alone, technology has updated at a rate unparalleled to anything. Video games went from “Tennis for Two” to “Call of Duty: Modern Warfare” and beyond. This is obviously a grand difference in content, but do I think that we just went from zero to one hundred? No. In between those two games was plenty of “new for the time” technology. My dad played “Pac-man” at the local arcade, something his father couldn’t fathom. Even if you were just playing as a little yellow circle, the idea was still “avoid death”. 
      I think to unpack what it is that makes people (specifically older generations) so wary of modern video games we have to put a historical lens on it as well. The generation before us experienced or at least felt the repercussions of real war, and with modern technology such as motion-capture, video games are able to get so close to real-life viscerality that it frightens a lot of people. Putting the Uncanny Valley aside, we see children being exposed to intense violence from an early age, the same way past generations were, but this time, it’s expected to be a form of entertainment. This I think, is what really puts people at unease. I do not think that violence in video games inherently create violent people, just as I agree with the case that “not all violent people play video games”. I myself play video games often, but I’ve never felt the need to go out and buy a gun. It’s the generational disconnect that really puts people at odds with an argument like this, and most [most] of the time, we find that this argument is just the result of misunderstanding.