Here’s to Braving Yet Another School Year

by Kevin Simpson | Nov 4, 2024 | Blog

Here’s to Braving Yet Another School Year
Sneha Choubey, AIELOC Intern

Now that the season for exams, burgeoning workload and unbelievable stress about our futures has arrived, I would like to say: That’s just school for you. Don’t you just love it?! Because I do.
I’m Sneha Choubey, a Grade 11 student at an international school in Germany, and for me, school has become a place where I can discover myself… however, it wasn’t always like that.

I’m from India and I lived there for the first 11 years of my life, but when COVID struck and my dad’s business in Europe landed in a precarious place, we uprooted our lives in the matter of a week and shifted to Poland, and everything as I knew it changed.
There I was, in an unfamiliar country, far away from home.
My home, a country with the same customs, same rules, same languages as me.
A country where people didn’t look at me weird when I walked on the street and changed the route they were on just because I was near them.
One time, as a stupid joke worthy of my 7th grade self, when an old couple kept changing the way they were walking because of me, I would too. If they went left, so did I. If they went right, I was right there with them. It was funny watching them bounce between two sidewalks just because of me.
It was funny, and it was sad.

It felt like a fever dream at first. Everything was different. I went to a school where most of my classmates were white, where everyone mainly spoke Polish, where people mimicked my accent and made fun of my country, where a teacher repeatedly touched my hair, and where I didn’t feel like I could ever belong. Everything was different and I couldn’t cope with that, so I shut it out.
I put my head down, went to school everyday, came back home and took solace in the online world.
I made some friends, but when I got the opportunity to move to Berlin, I took it immediately.
I don’t do well with change, but I knew I needed one. So, after two years in Poland, I left.
You see, that school didn’t give me anything I could use to grow as a person, so I had to get out.
Even if it meant changing my life… again.

Berlin was a new experience. It was multicultural and fierce. I hadn’t ever seen anything like it.
My new school’s website stated that it housed students from over 70 countries, and I was excited.
I felt like I could finally find my place and find myself. But I was in for a rude awakening.
In this school, discrimination ran rampant, and there were barely any consequences for it. The school’s administration found it all too much to handle, and their efforts couldn’t scratch away more than a percent of the ignorance and inaction persistent in school. There were teachers who fought against it all, and then there were some who allowed it all to happen because they didn’t know how to handle it.
It broke my heart. I really had thought this place would be different.
I felt hopeless and defeated until I saw an announcement about a lunchtime club called the Social Justice Committee (SJC). I joined it on a whim, not knowing that it would change my life.

I met people who were trying to change our community and foster inclusivity at a local and global scale.
I learnt the value of projecting my unique voice and not hiding it, and most importantly, I finally found my safe space where I could learn who I am.
I found a mentor in Ms. Kristina Pennell-Götze, I found my people, and I found myself.
I found the activist inside me. I found the changemaker inside me. I found who I’m meant to be.

After joining the SJC, I also joined the Gender and Sexuality Alliance (GSA) and therein became a part of our school’s forums for student agency, activism, and advocacy. I was later appointed the leader of the two groups in Grade 10.

The SJC comprises a group of students and teachers who are committed to raising awareness about all social and political justice issues, advocating for people and marginalised communities, changing, and fostering an environment where everyone feels valued, empowered, and celebrated for who they are.
The group initially started off as a BIPOC affinity group in 2020 in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, and has since achieved a lot, despite the struggles it faced in establishing itself.

In the past four years, we have released over 30 monthly zines that tackle and myth-bust several societal prejudices and celebrate the diversity in our community, created murals in honour of heritage months, and various learning materials for the school. We’ve organised multiple events, ranging from month-long activities for Black History Month (BLM), Hispanic Heritage Month, and Asian American Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander (AANHPI) Month, to selling bubble tea to raise money, taking the lead in our Wear Red Day in support of the Show Racism the Red Card (SRtRC) campaign, and much more.

We’ve written articles for TIE and InterACT, recorded a podcast with the Unhinged Collaboration, and have attended and presented at conferences with the GSA, such as AGIS’ first student-led DEIJ conference in March 2024 and two of AIELOC’s annual virtual conferences (1 and 2), as a part of their ‘Let them Lead’ series that features student voice and agency. As a collaboration with the GSA, we have also taken the initiative to address the inequities in the IBO through creating a petition to keep LGBTQ+ students safe and hosting an open meeting with over 100 RSVPs to discuss ways of creating meaningful and systemic change in our IB community.

We’re a team. We work with each other, and many advocacy groups in and outside of school, such as the GSA, Green Team, Sunflower Club, our staff’s DEI team, other international schools, and even organisations such as AGIS and AIELOC. We’re blessed to be supported by so many people.

Support, in fact, is all we ask for from our school. Yet, we don’t receive as much of it as we need.
Recently, students had their access to email out to all teachers restricted, which has proved to be a severe roadblock for the SJC and GSA because we send out a steady chain of notices, updates, and zines weekly.
A new rule that was meant to declutter inboxes has ended up interfering with student voice, since we’ve lost our ability to email our teachers collectively and talk to them about something important.
We’re trying to manoeuvre our work around this block, but our alternative plan of asking teachers to forward our messages along in their emails isn’t working either. Ultimately, we think that a school that prizes student voice and agency so much should employ another method of organisation that doesn’t cut students out of a vital communication channel and silence their voices more than they already are.

That’s the SJC boiled down in a paragraph or two.

Now, the GSA has been standing strong since 2007 (even before I was born!) and has always been a safe space for queer folk and allies to thrive and be themselves. Every weekly meeting consists of sharing personal anecdotes and memes, listening to queer music, and giving each other queer art and literature recommendations. But that’s not all we do. We celebrate and spread awareness about internationally recognised queer celebrations, such as National Coming Out Day (we displayed pride flags outside [OUTside, coming OUT, get it?] of windows or classroom doors), Transgender Day of Remembrance, International Pronoun Day (we sold pronoun pins in over 20 languages!) and the Day of Silence for IDAHOBIT. We’ve hosted several GSA Movie Nights for PYP students with the theme of inclusivity, diversity, acceptance, and love in all its forms, and have hosted a ‘Rainbow Room’ centred on expressing yourself through art for the PYP Cultures Day. We’ve also held presentations and panels on gender, sexuality, discrimination, and the importance of being an upstander for all MYP students (which didn’t go well at all…). We’ve spearheaded Pride Month in our school through scheduling activities throughout the month (arts and crafts, love graffiti, book read-alouds, a genuine mini-Pride Parade, you name it!) and have had the honour of being selected as the PTA grant winners, which allowed us to take a Queer Walking Tour around Berlin-Schöneberg. We’ve had a lot of fun, but there’s also been times of tragedy.

When Nex Benedict was assaulted and murdered last year, we were all at a loss of words.
They were a student going to the washroom, just like us. And they died as a result of their assault wounds.
We felt unsafe. Honestly, we always have. We hid it behind witty banter and sarcasm but we felt scared.
And angry. We know homophobia and transphobia persists in our world, but this was a stark reminder that schools were no different. Not that we forgot that, of course. We just tried to avoid it.
We’d had enough. We sent out an email blast to all of our teachers, expressing how unsafe we felt and urging them to take action, as our teachers and as global citizens.

We barely got a response. They didn’t care. We felt unsafe in school, a place where one learns and grows and flourishes into who they will become, and teachers didn’t care that some students were put in danger.
I’m tearing up as I write this. It is heartbreaking and enraging that nothing has changed since then.
We raise our voices because we need to disrupt to be heard. We want change, need change, and demand change, yet those who should care are deaf to our pleas and cries. It gets to me. It gets to all of us.
Since our teachers and leaders weren’t willing to listen to us, we went about it another way. Inspired by the NOH8 campaign and the Coming Out Monologues, we decided to create a Call to Action video (find attached the script), and all GSA members came together to share our thoughts and feelings, and hoped it would reach those who haven’t taken action and used the power they have good yet.

Again, no one cared. One teacher even suggested we provide training/learning materials and lead more workshops with staff so they could learn about it. So that they could learn about something they should’ve already known. So that they could receive more support than the ample amount we’ve already sacrificed our privacy and feelings for. So that they could start to do something we’ve begged for for YEARS. Once, we were approached with the task of writing down all the microaggressions and discrimination we’ve faced as scenarios for the teachers so they feel more connected with learning about them and how to face them. They wanted us to harvest our emotional experiences and traumas for distant adults so they could experience catharsis: “Oh my god, I had no idea this was happening in our school!”
Well, you would’ve known if you listened to us, or to anyone, really.

We’re students – literal children – and just because we do a lot of social justice work, that doesn’t mean it is our job to teach the adults about how to be compassionate teachers. It isn’t our responsibility, it isn’t something we owe them. We shouldn’t have to put in so much work to try to be safe in school.

So, in a nutshell, that’s us. The SJC and GSA. We’re people who go through this every day.
We get frustrated, discouraged, and silenced. We feel stressed, aggravated, and very tired.
Despite that, we don’t give up. We persevere. We stand through another day, and we stand together.
We stand because we want to and because we have no other choice: If we don’t fight, who will?
If we don’t fight, who will look after those who experience one injustice after the other?
If we don’t fight, when will change be brought about? How will we break old patterns and start anew?
If we don’t fight, how will we all move forward in a better direction?
So, we fight.

I’ve changed a lot since I’ve joined the SJC and GSA. I used to be scared and sheltered, and liked to repress all the things that made me different, which didn’t make me feel comfortable with myself at all.
I used to be scared of all the things that made me different from those around me, but now I cherish them and I couldn’t be prouder of them.
And as for what my hopes and dreams are? That’s hard. For now, it’s to make it out of IBDP alive.
But I know I want to be a part of the change. I want to tear down and rebuild our world, to whatever degree I can. And it all starts here at school. This is where I learn how to do it.

School has become a place for discovery. I was thrust into this unsafe and prickly environment, and I expected to experience hell (which at some points, I did), but I found my community, my passion, and myself. Each heartbreak, breakdown, burnout, fight, and want to give up has taught me something vital. There is a reason why our parents say there is a lesson to be learnt in all experiences, good or bad…

To all international school students, I imagine you face the same issues we do and you’ve had enough.
I understand how hard it is. I know how it eats away at your sanity. I feel you, which is why I’m here to say that we’re all here. You’re not alone. Even if we’re across the globe, please know that there is someone who feels the same way you do and is fighting the same fight you fight every day.
We’re all here. And we’ll make it out and enter the world as better people (while maybe angering all the bigots who come across our path while we go about it…).
So, without any further ado, welcome back to another school year! We have a lot of hurdles and obstacles in front of us, so stretch a bit and get your head in the game, because we’re going to win it.
You’re going to do great, so just have faith and continue fighting. We’re all right here with you.

How Do We Make Our Classrooms Feel Like Home to Each and Every Student? (AIELOC)

by Kwame Sarfo-Mensah | Jul 31, 2024 | Blog

For context, I’m a first generation Ghanaian American who has spent all but three years of my life living outside of Ghana.  While I mostly understand my family’s home language, Twi, I grew up not really being taught the language by my parents.  We learned a few Twi words here and there but English was the main medium of communication in our household and every other environment we found ourselves in. Growing up in the United States, I felt like an outsider.  I thought those feelings would change when I moved to Ghana at 12 years old and lived there for 3 years.  Even while living there, I felt like an outsider. 

I’ve never been a clean fit in any of my worlds. I’ve always been different.  My whole life has been spent living outside the margins of the dominant culture.  In more ways than one, I’ve received harmful messages and mistreatment to remind me of that reality.  The following traumatic scenario, which I’ve played out in my mind for the last 10 years, is a prime example of this predicament.

Okay, let me set the stage………

Imagine yourself on an airplane that is heading to the Kotoka International Airport.  As the plane makes its descent towards the airport, your anxiety heightens because you know the course of events that are about to follow. The minute you get off the plane, you know you’ll have to go straight to the immigration booth, which means that you’ll have to hand over your American passport to a Ghanaian immigration officer for visa inspection. By all means, what I’ve mentioned thus far is standard protocol but this is where things take a left turn. So you hand your American passport over to the immigration officer, he turns to your bio page and discovers your name, “Kwame Karikari Sarfo-Mensah”. For a brief moment, the officer looks at you and then looks back at your passport.  At this moment, you have two options for a response.  You can either……

1. respond to the officer in English, leaving yourself subject to questioning from the officer as to why you have this strong Ghanaian name and are not speaking to them in Twi.
2. respond to the officer in Twi, leaving yourself subject to ridicule and harsh criticism as to how you could be Ghanaian and not be able to speak Twi fluently.

Unsure of how to respond, you freeze in panic because you know what’s about to happen next.  The officer will either call you an oburoni and crack jokes about you with their co-workers nearby or look at you in disgust and shame you for not being able to speak Twi fluently.

While this story is specific to my experience, I can assure you that others who grew up as third culture kids or immigrant students have dealt with a similar scenario to the one I just described. Whether you teach abroad in an international school or in a K-12 school within the United States, chances are you’ll have a few students within your classrooms who are struggling to make sense of their identities or searching for spaces where they are welcomed, accepted, and fully embraced for who they are. A space where no one is interrogating them or invalidating their lived experience.

These students I’m referring to are your multilingual students, students with IEPs and 504 plans, immigrant and migrant students, neurodiverse students, students who are disabled, students who practice non-Christian faiths, students who are BIPOC, students who are LGBTQ+, etc. Although they may enter your classroom with vastly different lived experiences, they are two things they all have in common:

1. They find themselves outside the margins of white dominant culture.
2. They all deserve to be in a classroom that feels like HOME.

Understanding that every student defines home differently, how can we make our classrooms feel like home for each and every student?  We can start by thinking about our own homes. When you’re in our homes, we’re in spaces where……

1. we feel a sense of psychological and emotional safety and comfort
2. we can express ourselves unapologetically
3. we receive support and care from loved ones
4. we belong and feel welcomed,valued and accepted
5. we thrive off of routine and stability 
6. we’re connecting intimately with our loved ones
7. cherished memories and family history are held near and dear to our hearts

Regardless of who we are and where we come from, we all want to experience that feeling of home as I’ve described above. We deserve that feeling because it’s a human right, as recognized by the United Nations. In this world where government officials across the globe are shutting down DEI programs, censoring and banning culturally responsive and identity-affirming curriculum in schools, and pushing anti-LGBTQ+ legislation, it is more imperative than ever for us, as educators, to create classroom spaces of inclusion and belonging that feel like home for our most vulnerable students.

We may not be able to solve all the world’s problems but there are a few key things we can do to make our students feel comfortable in our classrooms:

• Pronouncing student names correctly
• Using correct gender pronouns for students
• Incorporating translanguaging practices in our daily instruction
• Recognizing and honoring non-Christian holidays
• Adopting a restorative approach to discipline and relationship building
• Understanding that social emotional learning must be done with an antibias, antiracist (ABAR) lens.
• Planning lessons and employing instructional techniques that account for the learning styles of neurodiverse learners.
• Making our classrooms more accessible to students with physical disabilities

In the end, no student should ever feel the way I felt during my childhood.  By making our classrooms feel like home for our students, we’re committing ourselves to normalizing and embracing the beauty of difference, as informed by the intersectional nature of our respective identities.  And finally, we’re committing ourselves to building learning spaces where joy, love, and acceptance are living parts of our classroom culture. 

Heart stories and community

by Samira Vance | Jul 25, 2024 | Blog

Samira Vance, Director of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion at King’s College International School Bangkok

As I journey into the next chapter of my life and career, I am finding myself taking stock and feeling gratitude for many things. As I intentionally work to engineer this next phase, I want to share one aspect that I have come to realise is essential to build and find. A community of ‘my people’.

To clarify, by ‘my people’ I don’t necessarily mean BIPOC folx but rather individuals and groups that endow me with a sense of true belonging and vice versa. The people with whom you truly and fully unmask and allow space for them to do the same. At the start of this year, I attended two incredible conferences (AIELOC and DEIx24) and I was overwhelmed at the power of community. I have since set up the Thailand DEI Hub to provide a similar sense of community and peer support after being inspired by both conferences. Whilst I have found ‘my people’ along my professional journey, it was a positively overwhelming to be around so many that could potentially be ‘my people’ all in one place. It is a great thing to find, witness and be amongst the souls that nourish one another.

One of the things that was consistent was the level of vulnerability shown by attendees. At DEIx24, Margaret Park asked us to consider what constitutes a safe place. Is a statement to that effect all that is needed for the feeling of safety to be felt by participants? Many of us have felt the disconnect between being told that it is a safe place when our body and gut tell us otherwise. Yet, in these instances with strangers, online ‘friends/connections’ and acquaintances, the level of vulnerability very clearly indicated the sense of safety felt by many.

A fellow attendee, Nadia Ellis spoke of wanting to connect people with ‘similar heart stories’. Heart stories. The phrase stuck with me. After some pondering, I have decided that heart stories are those defining, poignant stories of our lives. The ones that make us who we are and the ones that describe our journey through life. Are they what bind us? Do heart stories recognise each other? What is the effect of meeting someone with a similar heart story? Indeed hearing my stories and those of my loved ones spoken back to me without my uttering a single word made me feel heard. Seeing the raw emotions through vulnerability that mirrored my own, moved me to connect. I recognised the heart story because it was similar to my own. The snapping of the fingers, the head nods and the mmms also told me that the speaker and I were not alone. Those moments, conversations and experiences moved me to make space in my life for these strangers. We could speak truth to our stories where we were understood. No need to sugar coat, no need to watch our phrasing and no need to finish our sentences.

It felt like a metaphorical hug. An embrace signalling safety, joy, sadness, a spectrum of emotions all at once but safety in being able to share in those emotions with others. It said:

I see you, even as you hide

I hear you, even though you haven’t spoken

I know you, although we’ve never met

I am you, or at least that what my heart thinks

I feel your heart story

At AIELOC, Katrina Jihad spoke about safe spaces in relation to indigenous practices, specifically that of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation and roles of different members of the tribe. We were always meant to live in community as human beings. As BIPOC folx in particular but other minoritised groups too, spread across the globe, are we all yearning for places where we belong? Not in the future we are working to create, or a future we may not really get to see but right now. Here. In the present.

So many of us work to create equitable and inclusive spaces with the aim of fostering belonging for all within our school or professional communities, including ourselves but … What about right now? What is the cost of existing in spaces not designed for us? What is the cost of continuing to mask day in, day out? I am very fortunate in that I have been able to find the people in my professional life with whom I can exist as my authentic self but the reality remains that for minoritised groups, this is consistently not the case outside of these relationships and spaces. Whilst we are working on systemic change and equity and belonging and diversity and inclusion, it is vital that we find our communities.

As I move back to England (which I consider my home in many ways), I do so with the recognition that I am a member of both visible and non-visible minority groups. I will continue to work in the DEI space but I think about the communities, ‘tribe members’ and safe spaces that I will need in personal and professional settings to both support my mental health and allow me to sustainably carry on with the work that I do.

If you have made it this far down my post and know of any amazing communities in the south east of England or ones based online for black women, mixed-race women, people of south-asian heritage, neurodivergent people/parents, parents of black children, DEI professionals and/or not-so-fit basketballers please do share. The word underpinning my vision board this year was ‘nourish’ and I can absolutely see the power of communities to provide spiritual, mental and sometimes intellectual nourishment and strength.

Samira Vance

https://www.linkedin.com/in/samiravance/

AIELOC Summer 2024 Newsletter

by Kevin Simpson | May 29, 2024 | Blog

Click here to read the full newsletter AIELOC Summer 2024 Newsletter (5)

Taking a Sabbatical

by AIELOC Team | Mar 23, 2024 | Blog

Statement of Support for Sudan & Congo

by AIELOC Team | Mar 9, 2024 | Blog

We, as global citizens, and the AIELOC community stand in solidarity with the people of Sudan and the Congo, especially the vulnerable young children, who have been gravely affected by the devastating conflicts happening in both countries. The conflicts have brought unimaginable suffering, displacement, and instability, leaving a profound impact on the lives of countless individuals across both nations. We recognize the urgency of addressing the dire humanitarian crises and the critical need for immediate assistance to alleviate the plight of those most affected.

Our thoughts are with the children of Sudan and the Congo, who are enduring the brunt of these crises, robbed of their childhoods and basic rights to safety, education, and a promising future. The trauma and hardships they are facing are a stark reminder of the urgent need for a concerted effort to ensure their protection, well-being, and access to essential services.

We call upon the international community to join hands in providing vital humanitarian aid, including food, shelter, medical care, and psychological support to the affected population, particularly the young children who are the most vulnerable and in need of special attention. It is imperative that we prioritize their safety and well-being, shielding them from further harm and offering them a chance to rebuild their lives in an environment of peace and stability.

We also extend our support to the schools in Sudan and the Congo that have been adversely affected by the ongoing conflicts and upheavals in their regions. These schools play a vital role in promoting educational excellence, fostering cultural exchange, and nurturing a global perspective. We urge the Sudanese and Congolese armed forces to cease-fire and prioritize the future generations of their respective countries. We also urge all other stakeholders, including governments, non-governmental organizations, and international bodies, to prioritize the protection and restoration of education in Sudan and the Congo. Investment in the rehabilitation of these schools will help in securing the future generations of both nations.

We call upon the global community to redouble its efforts to provide humanitarian assistance and support to schools within Sudan and the Congo, ensuring that they have the necessary resources, infrastructure, and funding to continue their critical mission. Together, we can rebuild these educational institutions, restore a sense of normalcy for the students and educators, and pave the way for peace and prosperity in both nations.

We stand in solidarity with the people of Sudan and the Congo, emphasizing the need for a sustainable and inclusive peace process that prioritizes the welfare and rights of every individual, regardless of age, ethnicity, or social background. We urge all parties involved to engage in constructive dialogue and work towards a lasting resolution that ensures the protection of civilians within both nations.

Together, let us reaffirm our commitment to supporting the resilience and strength of the people of Sudan and the Congo, especially the young children, as they strive to overcome the challenges imposed by the conflict. Our collective efforts can make a significant difference in restoring hope, dignity, and a sense of normalcy to their lives, enabling them to envision a future of peace, stability, and prosperity for themselves and their respective nations.