In this Covid-19 era it seems that many areas crying out for urgent attention have unearthed themselves—most spectacularly the recent resurgence of the Black Lives Matter #BLM movement in the US and countries around the world. Along with this comes the push to tear down monuments of public figures once revered, now vilified who stand as symbols of prejudice, injustice and oppression. Many are going back into history, citing the wrongs of those who committed transgressions against humanity as facts of history, and using them to justify removing statues and other monuments to these persons as symbols that celebrate…well, what really?

I am asking myself, is this history’s moment? Are we on the cusp of a great historical awakening in which members of the public become more interested in understanding how things worked: cycles of change that interspersed long periods of continuity, truly revolutionary moments that upset the status quo and tore down power structures that divided and oppressed, but that we still hold on to today due to the veneer of respectability and acceptability they confer? Have we come to a time when more people will recognize and celebrate the study and interpretation of the past as a legitimate activity in its own right rather than a subject to be endured, perhaps enjoyed, but ultimately discarded at school? What have we really come to here?

I loved history from the very first moment I started doing it at school when I was 13. I found a niche studying the past, connecting one thing with another and bringing together strands that only made sense by considering how they connected with other, sometimes seemingly more random trends to tell a story that would not make the same kind of sense otherwise. The first topic I did was Renaissance and Reformation. Wow! There are perhaps few topics that describe such a time of change in Western society. I was fascinated by the advent of the printing press (even if now I see it did not bring the democratization of access to knowledge and learning that I supposed then). I was thrilled by the description of innovations in the production of fine art that still thrills many today. History—what a subject!

That love persisted. It survived and remained fresh even as I began to study it at university, and people asked the invariable question, “What are you going to do with that? Are you planning to become a teacher?” The love prevailed as I embarked upon my doctoral program, and as I encountered the look of pity in people’s eyes as they discovered fresh evidence of my folly. It did not wane even when others attempted to reassure me with tales of how they had loved history—still indulge in the movies and books now—even though they didn’t do pursue this fondness beyond a certain point in school. And yet I have found good people chronically unaware of history, even simple things. Lack of awareness that has made our society vulnerable to the machinations of some who wish to craft new, ahistorical narratives in service of their own political agenda.

So while I applaud this renewed interest in, for example, eschewing monuments of Christopher Columbus in Trinidad and Tobago (where I live) due to the disastrous impacts he brought along with his three ships to the Caribbean, I am not convinced that the interest lies very far beneath the surface. I am concerned that the removal of a symbol will be sufficient to assuage the public outcry, but there will be little to no questioning of the historical narrative and its spinoffs that led to Old Chris’s celebration as it persists today.

The sins of Columbus and company have not been hidden these many years. The descendants of First Peoples all over the Americas have decried the fact that the stories told to children about the Spanish conquistadors continue much as they ever did, lauding the exploits of these tremendous explorers. But the history of what really happened has been knowledge for many years. It is good that we are finally acknowledging that the dialogue, and perhaps the position, that accompanies the statue standing there in Columbus Square, Port of Spain must change. However, If all that happens is the tearing down of a statue with no desire for greater historical understanding or a changing of the way about which it is spoken, then this is not history’s moment, but a blip in a larger story of how-the-world-didn’t-shift, not real transformation of how we understand our people’s story.

First published on LinkedIn, 30 June 2020. Link: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/historys-moment-marcia-carrington-headley/

Photo of a red window on an old house on the southern tip of Bonaire, Caribbean Netherlands by Stephen Pedersen on Unsplash

The world has changed. The details of how and how much it has changed are not clear. We are in the throes of a future-making event. We know some of the economic effects thus far, but the pandemic is ongoing, and we are yet to see the end. The earliest timing for even talking about post-Covid is probably 2021. The reality though is that this pandemic’s effects will continue well beyond that time—economic and otherwise.

For Business in T&T as elsewhere, not only the economic impact will have consequences for business operations. Businesses have their raison d’etre within the context of society. Not the other way around. Hence, businesses will have to contend with the social impacts in particular as their stakeholders—including their suppliers, staff, and customers and so on–grapple with the realities of a post-crisis world. The uncertainty will be around for a very long time. Upheavals of which we do not yet have a glimpse will likely exacerbate the situation.

So, what is a business to do? Keeping carefully abreast of local, regional and global developments, opening themselves to perspectives and possibilities that do not necessarily align with the sources to which they usually turn for advice, is not an option. Most businesses fixate on day-to-day operations and the bottom line. One essential activity for this time when there may be some breathing room is for businesses to prepare for the future by thinking about the past. How may they have been sabotaging business continuity pre-Covid-19 by their own business practices? What do they want to be in the future? How can the business grow and develop to take advantage of possibilities that will open up in the times ahead?

The process of reevaluation should be thorough and complete, carefully devoid of unwarranted self-congratulation. Business owners should ruthlessly identify and eliminate blind spots. The idea is not to make this a public process or an opportunity for good public relations. It is a process intended for making alignment to the future possible. Post-Covid-19 there will be opportunities as well as challenges—businesses need to be ready by using the present moment to prepare for that future and not just anchor themselves to a past that is now gone.

First published on LinkedIn, 27 April 2020. Link: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/thinking-through-business-post-covid-future-marcia-carrington-headley/

Photo by AbsolutVision on Unsplash

Over the past few weeks, as Covid-19 draws closer and closer, I have thought many times about the story of the drastic decline in numbers of the Caribbean First Peoples after the Europeans came. We may be tempted to think that their numbers declined drastically due to European guns or being overworked in the Spanish mines. And no doubt that was a part of it. But my research indicates that the greatest impact of the Europeans coming to the Caribbean came through the introduction of disease, including the influenza that most of us get every year and overcome after a week at most.

The original inhabitants of these islands had no immunity to the microbes brought to the Caribbean and the wider Americas. To them, they were new. It is said that the devastation on the First Peoples exceeded that of the Black Death in fourteenth century Europe. The words “demographic catastrophe” have been used.

When Columbus landed in Hispaniola in 1493, it only took days before the original inhabitants began to die. “Twenty-three years after 1493, in 1516, the Spanish historian Bartolomé de las Casas wrote of the same island that is now Haiti and the Dominican Republic: “Hispaniola is depopulated, robbed and destroyed … because in just four months, one-third of the Indians [the Spaniards] had in their care have died.” Two years later in Memorial on Remedies for the Indies, he wrote that “of the 1,000,000 souls there were in Hispaniola, the Christians have left but 8,000 or 9,000, the rest have died.” ” (Check out this and more at: https://www.theatlantic.com/…/human-planet…/568423/)

There was no WHO to declare a public health emergency or a pandemic. Indeed, at the time both Europeans and First Peoples did not have today’s understanding of how diseases are spread. The Europeans had nobody to tell them to self-quarantine upon arrival. Neither group of persons knew that there should be social distancing. The microbes were free to “play themself” and they did so with gusto. Furthermore, the exact impact of disease on the numbers of the original inhabitants can never be measured. Disease may have reached groups via their contact with other peoples before the Europeans even reached them.

It seems though that by the time 1918 and the Spanish Flu arrived people knew about strict hand washing, and social distancing, and preventing large gatherings. Apparently people also did not look kindly upon those who refused to engage in these measures. And millions of people died around the world. In spite of the measures that were taken. And maybe partly because some did not see the need to “follow the rules.” (Check out this and more at: https://time.com/…/spanish-flu-pandemic-coronavirus…/…) In those days the world was much less interconnected in terms of travel etc. Moving around the word was much harder, and fewer people did it—certainly nothing like today.

Forget about the fact that we should look at those countries who in 2020 have mitigated the spread of the novel coronavirus by taking extreme measures. People always say that the primary use of history is that we can learn from it to prevent from making the mistakes of the past. While I don’t subscribe to such a limited view of use or importance of history myself, do we really want to find out that we should have listened to the voices of the past to prevent the extent of the unfolding catastrophe around us? Please, let us do what we have to do in T&T until 15 April or whenever the authorities tell us it must continue…or can end.

This post appeared originally [untitled] on Facebook on 29 March 2020.

Photo entitled “Sparrow” by Zoltan Tasi on Unsplash.

In these early weeks of the academic year, students are preparing to submit their first assignments, if they have not done so already. Educators have gone over the ground rules for ethical student behavior. They have explained what constitutes plagiarism, emphasized the importance of not cheating on tests, and made their own plans to use various technologies to facilitate spotting those who do not heed their guidelines. What could possibly go wrong?

One of the perils of the Internet age seems to be the ease with which it facilitates unauthorized “borrowing” of content for use in students’ work. The subject of technology and cheating is unlikely to disappear. One recent article in The Chronicle of Higher Education indicated that increased incorporation of Internet technology into courses, for example online test-taking, is giving birth to ever evolving student ingenuity when it comes to academic dishonesty (see article here) .

So what’s an educator to do? That is the question that continually ran through my mind while teaching last year. One student composed a response to the take-home exam entirely copied from Wikipedia. You heard me, there was no sentence not lifted from that useful source, despite my explicit instructions regarding how to go about doing the exam. It was morbidly fascinating actually, given that the sentences themselves came from different articles AND in many cases were deftly assembled to form paragraphs. I wondered whether for use of time alone she would have spent fewer minutes reading the text and answering the question from scratch! That student was not the last offender for the semester either.

Then there was less obviously egregious flouting of my guidelines for the course, where I gave my students a preliminary assignment for the research paper to submit a very brief prospectus of the topic they intended to tackle. Many, many of the eventual papers were on completely different topics than suggested in the initial assignments – most without my prior approval. Who knew that I needed to specify that this was not allowed? Not me; and because I did not say it from the beginning, I realized I had to let it go. I received at least two papers clearly submitted for another class (one without even an attempt to tweak it to fit our US to 1877 context!), and two others clearly resourced from paper mills (they were so terrible it hurt to read them!). And according to a paper mill writer (see article here) , I am sure I may have had other externally sourced papers submitted to me that I never detected were fraudulent.

This is a subject to which my mind returns frequently, musing over the problem, sure that it is bigger than just the availability of various technological routes to cheating on exams. Technology in education is here to stay, barring the advent of a post-apocalyptic world in which we return to doing homework with a quill pen by candlelight. Nostalgia for the old days is pointless and destructive. It presents with rose-colored lenses a view of the past that never was given the almost detention-camp rigor within which I sat examinations each semester during undergrad almost twenty years ago.

A few weeks ago I was listening to a radio program on the general issue of cheating (see transcript here). Dan Ariely, the guest, is a Duke professor and bestselling author. He has done extensive research on unethical behavior covered in his recent book The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty: How We Lie to Everyone – Especially Ourselves. I thought that he made some interesting points, eminently applicable to education’s perennial quandary of why it happens and what do about cheating.

Cheating within the education system (at whatever level), undermines the system as a whole and casts doubt on the validity of eventual educational qualifications awarded. In a time when educational reform is being considered in many countries and universities are being slammed for the quality, relevance, and applicability of the education they provide this is no small matter.

According to Ariely, the more distance between us and our actions, the easier it is for us to be dishonest. Everything about the Internet places distance between us and our actions, and between us and those who suffer from our actions. Hence my theory about things like identity theft by people who would otherwise not ever break into somebody’s home, or steal an old lady’s bag. But that is another story. Furthermore, most people think in terms of short term consequences, not the implications of their actions over the long-term. There is the belief that the end justifies the means. As such, simply creating harsher and more elaborate punishments without making the infraction more proximate in perpetrator’s minds will not reduce crime. And I hazard a guess it will not reduce cheating in education either. So again, is the prospect for reducing the incidence of cheating in education (and in the society as a whole) totally hopeless?

It would seem then that the answer is to create proximity between actions and consequences. In the moment that a student cheats, she must know that she is directly violating some guideline to which she should be held. Not some words that were thrown at her days or weeks before, often with a vague promise of repercussions that are often not elaborated.

Ariely found that when we have fuzzy rules and guidelines, we don’t know where we are. But when we have strict rules and guidelines, we keep them. One of his studies looked at the effect of classes on ethics on cheating. Students at different institutions were required to do a test. At MIT and Yale, they were required to sign the honor code immediately before doing the test, stating that they understood that the survey was being governed by the same. However, MIT and Yale have no actual honor codes, yet the result was that there was no cheating.

On the other hand, Princeton has a strong honor code, and freshmen are grounded in it via an intense crash course. Researchers waited two weeks after this strong honor code training to test the Princeton students. When they signed the honor code before doing the exam, they did not cheat; when they did not sign the honor code, they cheated. Getting them to sign just before was the key.

Somehow it seems that the key to dealing with cheating is to have students operate consistently with the understanding that whatever they do is governed by an “honor code” that prohibits that dishonest behavior. It might be untenable to have every assignment, every scrap of homework, or term paper be preceded by the signing of a physical statement. The key then has to be that this code of right conduct must be ingrained internally.

As Ariely’s research would show, intense courses on ethics alone can achieve little in and of themselves if students are not immediately confronted by ethical principles in situations in which they may be tempted to cheat. One wonders too about the effectiveness of some of these courses. I once sat through a lecture on Moral Leadership in which the purported moral leader indicated that we each have to decide for ourselves what is moral and ethical. Not that each of us would have deal with our own moral dilemmas. He was saying that each of us decides what the rules are. Clearly there are students who do not see certain kinds of cheating as wrong, like the one who felt it was acceptable to cheat on tests for a required course because it was outside of his major (see article here). There must be universal values upon which we all agree—otherwise why would plagiarism and cheating on school tests still be seen as infractions? As C.S. Lewis (1898 – 1963) said, “Education without values, as useful as it is, seems rather to make man a more clever devil.”

This article about technology and academic integrity was first published on the BrightPath Foundation website on 14 September 2012.
Source: http://brightpathfoundation.org/article/swimming-with-the-technology-tide

Photo by Rishabh Agarwal on Unsplash