Message from our Director, Margaret Macintyre Latta
Classrooms are increasingly foregrounded as sites to address civil, racial, ecological, and social tensions and concerns, and inspire transformation and reconciliation. The Okanagan School of Education (OSE) continues to invest accordingly, embodying inclusive pedagogies and practices. Race, racialization, and racism in educational contexts matter, and all OSE programs are concretely exploring ways to build more equitable relations among different racialized groups. Sexual orientation, gender identity, and mental health shape individual and collective well-being, and OSE programs invest in the creation of learning contexts that invite all learners to grow their potential –learning with, from, and through each other.
The Okanagan School of Education faculty and staff have developed a shared statement on the School’s anti-racist commitment.
Anti-Racist Commitment
Faculty and staff of the Okanagan School of Education are committed to fostering genuine dialogue around issues of racial injustice in education with educators, students, colleagues, and the greater community—bringing to bear policies and practices in our local and global institutions. We aim to empower educators and their students to dismantle patterns of racism and injustice in school and community settings, and invest in developing more democratic and more just societies.
Our hopes calling us to actions are to:
- Realize more sustainable intellectual, ecological, and cultural diversity, and more appreciation for gender identities, sexual orientation, peoples of colour, and the natural world
- Gain greater conscientiousness about inequalities that arise from social class differences and social stratification
- Transform patterns of intolerance (including but not limited to intolerance towards different intellectual and political viewpoints/traditions), exploitation and homogenization, towards patterns of respect, appreciation, and diversities
- Foster interdependent, caring relationships between humans and the natural world, and between diverse individuals and communities
- Learn from the past, stay alert in the present, and continuously create a just and sustaining world, for the children now and for future generations; for peoples to be