DEIJ

As a future or current revolutionary educator what will you do to ensure that transparency and accountability become an intrinsic part of your values? How will you ensure that all community members feel humanised, seen, and valued? How will you fight for students’ right to discover themselves and be provided the adequate tools to understand their reality so that they do not simply feed into the cycle of oppression?

What do you think is the most influential way of effecting community wide change within international schools and whose voices should be heard? What advice would you like to give to school leaders and educators today?

UNIS is taking a multi-pronged approach to address DEI. The first step was creating a DEI team composed of various constituents to focus on the school culture, curriculum and overall composition of our community.

What can racism look or sound like in an international school that already believes that it is an authentically internationally-minded school?

‘Where do we start?’ ‘Talking about racism and discrimination will upset too many people.’ ‘We do not have that problem here.’ ‘How do you get people of colour to apply to your school?’ These are the statements and questions I have heard over the past two years when discussing how to make a school more inclusive. At the International School of Dakar (ISD), we started with a problem.

The world we live in today has never been so open. Through media and travel we can experience all the world has to offer and become fully immersed in living life and learning how others live their life. The question is, can you do this without preconceptions, judgemental attitudes, and a true sense of openness? 

Anson Wong speaks to Kotoha Kudo. Kotoha Kudo was one of the student speakers at the ISC Research Edruptors Conference. She is co-founder of student-led activist group Reset Revolution and participated in the Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Justice panel discussion. Here we ask her to dig a little deeper on her views about social justice in international schools.