Not all Educators are Teachers


Karine Coen-Sanchez, University of Ottawa

There is a need to decolonize the post-secondary curriculum and promote space for diversity, equity, and inclusion for racialized students pursuing higher education in Canada. Inclusivity will ensure the academic success and retention of racialized students. The current academic structure needs a place-based education that provides a safe space for racialized students to succeed with the absence of daily harms and barriers and help restore cultural knowledge for all students to triumph academically. Learning and education are not just about the formal curriculum that you see on the syllabus. They are also about the informal curriculum - things not expressed in the syllabus -but which are part of the learning experience. There is an entire social curriculum that happens outside and beyond the classroom. In this article, I present preliminary research on racialized students in four Ontario post-secondary institutions to examine the role of systemic racism and how power centers are linked to maintaining the status quo to the disadvantage of racialized students. The data was collected through five focus groups composed of racialized students across Ontario post-secondary institutions. Canadian University systems for racist incidents (i.e., reporting mechanism) and racial attitudes within and outside of the classroom were investigated. The findings suggest that racism and existing values are ingrained in the colonial structures of Canadian educational systems. Subsequently, a series of recommendations outline avenues to address systematic racism in higher learning.

This paper will be presented at the following session: