Rodney Clifton
Rodney A. Clifton is Professor of Sociology of Education at the University of Manitoba, where he has been teaching since 1979. He was born in Jasper, Alberta, and he taught at Memorial University for six years before moving to Manitoba. Dr. Clifton has a B.Ed. and a M.Ed. from the University of Alberta, a Ph.D. in Sociology of Education from the University of Toronto, and a Fil.Dir. in Comparative Education from the University of Stockholm. Over the last thirty years, he has published more than ninety research articles and five books and monographs. Dr. Clifton has won a number of research awards: the Spencer Fellowship from the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement; the R.W.B. Jackson Research Award from the Canadian Educational Researchers' Association; and both the Edward Sheffield Award and the Distinguished Research Award from the Canadian Society for the Study of Higher Education.
Bio last updated April 30th, 2018.
Articles by Rodney Clifton
My Indian Residential School Experience
By Rodney Clifton
June 1, 2016
In the late 1960s, Rodney A. Clifton spent a year working at a residential school in the Northwest Territories. His experience there paints a markedly different picture than what we’ve been hearing from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission reports
The final report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) on the history and legacy of Indian residential schools (IRS) reminded me of a letter I received in August 1966 while I was boarding at Old Sun, the Anglican residential school on the Blackfoot reserve in southern Alberta It is now obvious that some children were abused in the residential schools, both by other students and by staff members As hard as it is to believe, some children arrived at Stringer Hall wearing the same school clothing they wore when they went home in the late spring, not having bathed or changed in the interval For example, at Stringer Hall, two of the six supervisors were young Inuit women, Annie and Lucy, who, contrary to considerable testimony in the TRC report, spoke to the young Inuit children in their mother tongue