Teaching Excellence Award winner Rachel Luke uses the Holocaust to inspire students
November 10, 2020
In Grade Two at Thornwood Public School in Mississauga, Rachel Luke knew she was going to become an educator.
That’s because she had a teacher who maintained a healthy classroom environment and was a role model for her students.
Marissa Puglia, now retired, made learning fun and engaging to the extent that Luke didn’t miss a day during the school term.
“She was that teacher who supported students, focussed on our strengths and wanted us all to be successful,” said the Glenforest Secondary School educator who received her undergraduate degree from the University of Toronto and her Bachelor of Education certification from York University. “This was an educator who did interesting things like taking us down to the staffroom and exposing us to different kinds of cultural foods. Her mantra was, ‘Just try it once and if you don’t like it, that’s fine’. She also allowed me to conduct the class at a Christmas concert.”
Knowing her pathway at a young age, Luke simply followed it.
It’s no surprise she’s among 28 Canadians recognized with the Prime Minister’s Award for Teaching Excellence.
Diana Wang-Martin, who teaches Biology, Chemistry and Science at Glenforest, nominated Luke for the most prestigious prize awarded to Canadian teachers.
The University of Waterloo graduate said her colleague is an inspiration and role model of teaching excellence.
“Always positive, cheerful and in good spirits, Rachel is the type of teacher and colleague who lifts the mood of everyone she encounters in the school,” said the 2017 Prime Minister’s Teaching Award of Achievement and 2018 Prime Minister Award of Teaching Excellence winner. “Educators and teachers look up to her as a mentor and seek out her wisdom and advice in both personal and professional situations. She teaches with passion and positive energy and is always willing to share her knowledge, skills and resources with staff and students.”
Vice-principal Georgette Highgate said Luke is a thoughtful educator who knows her students well and knows how to make each of them shine.
“Her daily practice revolves around equity and she actively seeks to empower students,” said Highgate. “She recognizes the needs and strengths of her students and carefully balances addressing their needs while nurturing their strengths. Having sat in her classroom, it’s clear that her students are benefitting, they are engaged and they respect each other.”
Luke has been teaching at Glenforest since 2002. Her specialties are Dramatic Arts, English and English as a Second Language.
“The school environment is very diverse, I really love drama and it’s very hard to become a teacher in that subject area because it’s the kind of field where teachers usually stay in for an extended period of time,” she said. “I am hesitant to move around because I have a full-time drama job with access to a studio and the beautiful space we have here which I held out for. It’s pretty hard to get that in a lot of other schools.”
Rachel Luke
Turned on to theatre at a young age, Luke co-ordinates a school play biennially.
“It’s all about coming up with an idea and just flushing it out,” said the 2018 Peel District School Board Education Week Award of Distinction winner who infuses creativity and technology in every aspect of her teaching. “The sky is the limit with what you can create and develop. Theatre lends itself so beautifully to telling stories. It’s not like Math. It’s not black and white. It’s in the gray and you find and create whatever you want. I absolutely love live theatre.”
Introduced to the Holocaust at age 13 after watching a movie, ‘The Hiding Place’, about a Dutch family who was sent to a concentration camp after being caught hiding Jews during World War II, Luke has incorporated the genocide of European Jews in the early 1940s in her classes.
“That film really resonated with me and I became interested in learning and finding out more about what happened during the Holocaust,” said the product of immigrants from Trinidad & Tobago and Guyana. “I kind of did it on my own as I never learned about it in school.”
After winning the inaugural B’Nai Brith Canada Human Rights Award in Grade 13 for leadership in promoting human rights in her school and the community, Luke chose to be a Holocaust educator.
“It’s a way to teach students about oppression and a human being’s capacity for cruelty and evil and, on the flip side, human capacity for love and compassion,” the Citizens for the Advancement of Community Development board member noted. “Those things are very powerful and I can branch out from the Holocaust to teach about other oppressions that have happened like what Blacks have gone through with slavery and Anti-Black racism and what happened to the Indigenous people in Canada and across the world. I have found that the Holocaust has been a way to try to help students understand human life and human nature.”
In August 2013, Luke visited five concentration camps and met Holocaust survivors through a trip facilitated by the Sarah and Chaim Neuberger Holocaust Education Centre.
“That actually changed the way I taught Holocaust education because when I came back, I realized that a lot of times when I would teach, I taught more about Jews being victims,” she said. “I learnt that’s not the best thing to do. What we want to teach students is the Jews are people with families, dreams and goals who had their lives stolen from them. The Jews are people who made many contributions. I do the same thing when I teach students about Black History in Canada.
“I also started to teach in terms of one story. When you tell students things like 11 million people died in the Holocaust, that’s really hard to wrap your head around. But when we start talking about one story and you can help a kid connect to that story, it’s very powerful and they can make connections.”
Two years later, Luke won a scholarship to attend the three-and-a-half week global anti-Semitism seminar at Yad Vashem Israel for English-speaking educators.
That experience was life-altering for the teacher extraordinaire who has spearheaded the Remembrance Day, Holocaust Education and Black History Month assemblies for several years.
“Though there were seminars every day, we got to travel around Israel, including Jerusalem,” the 2018 William Dahlgren Teacher of Excellence Award recipient said. “For me as a Christian, just being able to go to places I read about in the Bible was very powerful and moving.”
Luke, who takes teacher funded leave every five years and has visited nearly 70 countries, also met Hannah Pick who was a close friend of Anne Frank who went into hiding during the Holocaust and journaled her experiences in ‘The Diary of Anne Frank’. The German Jew spent a month in Auschwitz and was later transported to another concentration camp where she died a few weeks before the liberation.
In May 2016, Luke directed ‘The Diary of Anne Frank’ play and her school displayed an exhibition from the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam. All of the proceeds were donated to archiving Holocaust survivor testimonies.
“I invited a few Holocaust survivors to see the play and the exhibit and I remember one of them telling me that the play was amazing,” she said. “What however stood out for him was going to the exhibit and seeing a Muslim girl wearing a djellaba and hijab telling him about the horrors of the Holocaust.”
Luke was the co-chair of the education committee planning Liberation 75 to mark three-quarters of a century since the end of the Holocaust. The three-day international gathering of Holocaust survivors and their descendants as well as educators scheduled to take place at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre from May 31 to June 2 was cancelled because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
An exceptional teacher, said Manar Zaky who graduated last year and is enrolled in Western University Medical Sciences program, has a very significant and lifelong impact on all of their students.
“For me, that teacher is Ms. Luke,” she said. “Not only does she constantly radiate positive energy in the school environment, but she also truly cares about the well-being of her students beyond the school doors. She has been and will continue to be one of the most influential teachers in my life.”
Mackenzie Almeida-Maciocia, a first-year student at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, agreed.
“It is unusual to find a teacher that changes your life forever,” said the soccer player who is majoring in English and Social Sciences. “However, Ms. Luke is one of those teachers. She taught me how to write a strong essay, how to engage my audience and, most importantly, the beauty and significance of language. I can say without a doubt that I wouldn’t be the ‘English-loving’ student I am today without Ms. Luke.”
The outstanding educator collaborated with Indigenous residential school survivor, Theodore Fontaine, to write a high school play based on his memoir, ‘Broken Circle’, and created a unit plan package for teachers to guide students in writing and performing scripts about mental health.
She also founded the Ambassadors for Change Club that allows students to take part in social-justice related forums and partnered with Raptors 905 to offer under-served youths the opportunity to earn their mandatory 40 hours of community service as team attendants for the basketball team.
“Her work with under-served and marginalized youths has helped many realize their potential and to succeed,” added Wang-Martin. “Rachel is an inspiration and role model of teaching excellence.”
