By Colleen Elep and Chad Mills
“The road to hell,” as the old proverb goes, “is paved with good intentions.” This aphorism—suggesting that our good intentions mean nothing without any real action or change—is nowhere more apparent than in our public education system, especially when it comes to the issue of racism. We may believe we are creating inclusive, “multicultural” teaching environments, all while being completely unaware of the systemic racism that impacts our students’ sense of self-worth and belonging in society at large.
As Black and Southeast Asian teachers who both spent a significant part of our schooling in the Toronto area (Chad is Jamaican, Colleen is Filipino), we are all too familiar with the detrimental impact of a systemically racist curriculum that values white experiences and history above all others. While we made efforts to provide more equitable, culturally sensitive learning experiences for our students, we continued to overlook the fact that our Black students still lacked the same sense of cultural belonging we had also missed in our schooling.
Colleen Elep is an ESL/ELD teacher in one of Canada's most diverse and multilingual school boards with a passion for equity, media literacy, and culturally responsive pedagogy.
Chad Mills is an elementary school educator in Canada's second largest school board. Through his educational training, teaching, and consulting work locally and provincially, Chad has specialized in working in schools and communities deemed "at risk." He is currently in the process of self-publishing a series of books aimed at investigating socioeconomic barriers that adversely impact BIPOC groups.
