These Canadians are helping Black history become part of everyday learning in schools

While walking high schoolers through the Vancouver neighbourhood where the historic Black community of Hogan's Alley was located, Ruby Smith Díaz sometimes asks the teens to snap a photo of something that resonates with them. 

Smith Diaz, an arts-based facilitator, educator and artist, leads those tours as part of her workshop series exploring Black history and the Black Canadian experience with secondary students and fellow teachers.

Once, a student shared a photo of a mosque after their tour had stopped at Fountain Chapel, one of the few landmarks still remaining after Hogan's Alley was largely demolished in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

She described the mosque as a "safe place" that helped her connect with "why a church might be important for someone of African ancestry that lived in Vancouver at that time," explained Smith Díaz.

Each February, more Canadian schools are devoting time to Black history and the Black Canadian experience, but what happens for the rest of the year? Many educators, historians, students and community members — like Smith Díaz —are striving to make Black history part of everyday learning.

Whether by taking guided walks through a historic district or silk-screening layered maps of Vancouver's shifting landscape over time, common threads are discovered when learning Black history, she said. Beyond simply accepting that history exists, students ask: "'How am I connected to the person that I am seeing here in this textbook, in this photograph?'"  

The empathy created in that moment is important for students to carry with them as they grow up, Smith Díaz said.

Teaching the Vancouver School Board's new course History of African Descent in B.C., Nikitha Fester is inspired by her students' enthusiasm and feels joy exploring "people who look like me, who have had shared experiences with me."

The class — open to senior high schoolers across the district and already approved to return next year — has drawn a diverse mix, she said. Among them are Black students eager to learn more about their history, students specifically interested in West Coast history, and some inspired by Black Lives Matter and other social justice movements.

"I'm seeing the eagerness and the interest that they have," said Fester, who teaches at Vancouver Technical Secondary. "They're hungry for this information." 

Exploring resilience — not simply focusing on historical traumas for Black Canadians — is key to her approach. In turn,  she sees students make critical connections between past and present. 

"They're able to look at these situations, critique the systems that are in place and the laws that have been made, the decisions and the power dynamics, but also recognize that folks are overcoming [obstacles] every day."

Learning about and finding connections to Black Canadian history is also important for educators themselves, said Toronto educator and writer Greg Birkett.   

Across each province and territory, the school curriculum usually outlines areas of knowledge and skills students are expected to learn in each grade or course. Suggested topics to cover or sample activities are sometimes included. But the exact path taken inside the classroom — which books are read, how lessons are given, what activities undertaken — depends on the teacher.