Rob Vipond teaches political science, including Canadian constitutional matters, at the University of Toronto. He has also been a parent at the local Toronto public school, Clinton Street Public School. One day the principal said to him, You are interested in history, aren't you? and drafted him for a school history project.
Well, it grew. Vipond's recently published Making A Global City: How One Toronto School Embraced Diversity explores a century and more of the impact of urban diversity on one city school, and how that one school has dealt with it over the years. Early in the twentieth century there was "Jewish Clinton." By mid-century there was "European Clinton." More recently it's been "Global Clinton."
Vipond created a research course on Clinton Street School, so his book is data-driven. But he acknowledges he's not a scholar of education, or multiculturalism, or urbanism -- it's still the story of his daughter's remarkable ordinary school as well as a treatise in Canadians dealing with the promise and problems of immigration and diversity. Timely!
