“Open your mind, open your heart, and try to be engaged with whatever initiative is happening around you,” says Claudia Diaz-Diaz, assistant professor of leadership studies at the University of Victoria, of her approach to climate justice and anti-colonial education. For Diaz-Diaz, decolonizing classrooms involves more than intellectualism – it also requires learning about our own connection to places, histories, and people.

“If we aim to bring some decolonizing effort into the classroom, we need to understand we are more than our thinking and talking heads,” she says. “We are holistic human beings who have relationships with each other and with the places we have been.”

Classrooms reimagined

Originally from Chile, Diaz-Diaz completed her doctoral studies at the University of British Columbia’s (UBC) faculty of education. Inspired by Indigenous writers, activists, and educators, she started to reflect on how her relationship with Vancouver, and particularly, the UBC campus, is shaped by colonial history.

“I realized that this place has a history, has different meanings, [and] people’s identities are attached to this place,” she says. “None of these things come up at first because we are immersed …in a colonial project that really [gets] us to think about place as something that is at our service.”

To encourage a similar reflection in her classrooms, Diaz-Diaz uses different teaching modalities, including artistic activities and walking tours. She also leverages storytelling as a reflective tool, inviting students to reflect on how their gender, sexuality, skin colour, abilities, and socioeconomic class shape their lived experience.

“I ask them to not only introduce yourself, but to introduce yourself reflecting on how your positionality…has put you in relationship to other people,” she says. “I’m really looking at the story they have to share and how they reflect who they are in relation to other folks in the community.”

Diaz-Diaz adds that when assessing this assignment, she moves away from using traditional criteria – such as the academic essay structure. She advocates for a similar approach to early childhood education – one that focuses on helping children relate to places through their senses, encouraging them to build respectful relationships with the environment.

“There are so many expectations on young children on this project of mastering their education,” she adds. “The challenge that we have today is really slowing the world as it is and thinking [about] what we need to change.”

Challenges with tokenism

For Diaz-Diaz, decolonizing educational institutions, particularly at the post-secondary level, should include fundamental changes to how the success of students, faculty members, and other staff is measured. Without such change, she warns that efforts of decolonization, such as hiring Indigenous consultants, can be tokenistic.

“There had been many folks writing about this and saying, ‘you want to decolonize institutions; but you don’t want to change anything about those institutions,’” she adds.

She also highlights teachers feeling overwhelmed as another barrier to decolonizing education. In response, Diaz-Diaz offers a self-reflective tool called ‘pedagogical mappings:’ teachers can identify their response patterns to real-world classroom problems, and consider how their response prevents or translates into action.

She also encourages teachers to think of themselves as working in a supportive network of educators, counsellors, and other professionals.

“You are not a superhero, and nobody wants you to be one,” she adds. “Take care of yourself, [and] that is going to give you stamina for the long run.”

Diaz-Diaz’s work has also involved climate justice, centering on a women-led movement in Chile. She notes this bridge from thinking about decolonization to climate change felt natural, as both involve reflecting on relationships with place.

Rather than denying or turning away from a problem that seems hopeless, she invites people to mobilize and act.

“It doesn’t have to happen in a bad mood,” she adds. “It can also be done in joy.”

For more information, see: www.uvic.ca/education/psychology/people/faculty/diaz-diaz-claudia.php