KITCHENER -- A teacher at Kitchener-Waterloo Collegiate and Vocational school wants to bring more BIPOC representation to history classes.
Chris Ashley has been at the school for 16 years and said he noticed a lack of representation in the content available.
“This has been a smouldering fire within many years within my profession as a history teacher, always injecting little bits about Black history, Asian history, and Indigenous history," he said.
In an effort to expand Black history education beyond Black History Month, Ashley helped start the African Heritage Club at his school alongside his colleague Carol Pinnock.
“One of the things that we wanted to do with this club was really empower students,” said Pinnock. “It’s vastly important. It’s important to our students, it's important to their families.
Seeing that there was still a gap in examples of the contributions of Black Canadians within the current curriculum, last spring Ashley decided to reach out to the school board and the Ontario Secondary School Teachers' Federation.
According to Ashley, the goal to take the lesson from the African Heritage Club and expand it into every classroom through an online resource hub for teachers called Canadian Black Lives.A statement from the union representing high school teachers reads in part, "As Black experiences and realities have been excluded from Ontario curriculum, we hope that this resource will serve as a toolbox to supplement the current evolution within Ontario curriculum."
The work Ashley is doing is extremely important, said Teneile Warren, the Equity and Inclusion officer for the Waterloo Region District School Board.
"We should be a part of every element. We’ve contributed to math and science and music and art. So our history, our futures our present should be a part of all learning," she said.
Ashley hopes to have the Canadian Black Lives resource available through the Ontario Secondary School Teachers' Federation website by early next year.
