THE “N
ANTI-RACIST CLASSROOM
BY NESSRINE LARA LEMQADEM ALYASS
ot in our school.” This is something I’ve heard time and time again at equity PD sessions and meetings
among the murmurs of my colleagues as they watch videos, hear the stories of racial- ized students or see images that portray rac- ism. You see race isn’t just about skin colour. It’s about colour, culture, religion and lan- guage. We expect racism to be experienced as an overt act, something obvious, not open to interpretation, but often racism is experi- enced as collective and cumulative acts. Take “Nezha” (pronouns she/her, phonet-
ic spelling niz-ha) for example. She is a Grade 2 student. She is from Morocco, has beautiful curly hair and is an English language learner (ELL). She arrives at school and is greeted by her teacher and classmates who don’t pro- nounce her name correctly. As she runs in gym class someone compliments her on her curls and reaches out to touch them. During the library period she searches through the books looking for someone who looks like her in the pictures or a dual-language book in Arabic but finds neither. When lunch time rolls around, she pulls out her mother’s tag- ine only to hear the comment “that looks weird.” Any one of these experiences will sting, but collectively they cut deep. I have the unique gift of teaching in the same board where I was raised. When I look at my class now I see diversity and
the beauty that comes with it. As a student, I was one of the only non-white kids in the school right up until high school. I scarcely saw another person that looked like me, un- derstood my mother tongue or understood the “strange things” in my lunch box. We had Christmas concerts and Easter festivi- ties but scarcely, if ever, spoke of Hanukkah, Eid, Kwanzaa or other days of religious or cultural significance. In speaking with ra- cialized friends who grew up in or around the same area, the consensus is that it was acceptable to be called a terrorist or the “n” word “as a joke” but not to “tattle tale” or get upset. While racial slurs have become more taboo and are less tolerated in society, our education system still suffers from and re- produces racism. I am one of very few teachers and staff
who are non-white at my school in Burl- ington. Although diversity among students and the population in general has increased exponentially, according to “Bias-Free or Biased Hiring? Racialized Teachers’ Per- spectives on Educational Hiring Practices in Ontario” (2020) hiring of racialized teach-
E ELEMENTARY TEACHERS’ FEDERATION OF ONTARIO 19
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