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 identity, history, culture, and healing. Another common one is “Navel-gazing Equity”, engaging in workshops and training on implicit bias and privilege without infusing the work into educational programs of the school: curriculum, counseling, grading, etc. See here for a list of the other nine “traps and tropes” of equity work.

Here are the most common aspects missing from the DEIJ conversation:

• A Power Analysis: Understanding oppression is understanding power. Power in its dictionary meaning is the “ability to act”. When we look at the ecosystem of international schools, who holds power and has the ability to act is important to understanding the barriers to change. When BIPOC educators, alumni of international schools, and white co-conspirators build power together to bring voice and attention to a DEIJ issue, it is an attempt to increase their ability to act in a system that has placed power into the hands of a few for generations…