DEIJ missteps and how to get back on track towards liberation.

A racist incident, a social media post, a global Black Lives Matter movement.

One of these events may be the reason why your school has made a DEIJ statement, formed a task force, or implemented unconscious bias training. Along with Wellness, Assessment, Project-based learning, and Internships, DEIJ is now being piled on as another initiative that educators need to engage in and tackle; another box on the flowchart, another new initiative that a small group of teachers/leaders are driving.

The fact that this work has ignited and is being picked up by international schools and organizations alike is no small feat. Far from being the result of one incident, this movement symbolizes decades of labor of predominantly educators and students of color who have been asking for a reckoning from the history of European and American hegemony and colonization that blankets the international school arena. In fact, it often does not stem from one incident, but symbolizes the collective harm that a community has experienced over hiring inequities, western-centric curriculum norms, and white saviorism.

Dr. Jamila Dugan, describes the equity traps and tropes that schools can fall into when engaging in DEIJ work on a surface level. For example, “Doing Equity”: when equity and justice work is treated as a series of tools, strategies, and compliance tasks versus a whole person, whole systems change process linked to…