TDSB and ETFO target anti-Asian racism in schools
The document was created by educators of Asian descent who wrote it based on lived personal and professional experiences, with the hope of making learning spaces more inclusive
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Jason To may have grown up in Toronto, but he never really saw his Chinese-Canadian culture reflected in school.
The Toronto District School Board high school teacher said he didn’t learn about Asian issues or history in class when he was younger, despite living in a multicultural city.
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“There was a part of me that didn’t see myself in the curriculum,” he said. “I grew up in the High Park area, but lived above a convenience store my family had run. I was socio-economically and ethnically different from a lot of kids I was going to school with.”
To is one of eight co-authors of Addressing Anti-Asian Racism: A Resource for Educators, a 98-page resource for students from kindergarten to Grade 12.
It is designed to help teachers address anti-Asian racism, which has seen a spike during the pandemic, according to the TDSB and Elementary Teachers’ Federation of Ontario, which partnered to produce the document.
The guide, available on the TDSB website, provides background on Asian-Canadian identities, “myth of the model minority” and terminology. Building on that, it provides a framework for building anti-oppressive learning environments and talking about violence.
Created by educators of Asian descent, it’s based on personal and professional experiences. To said he wishes such a resource was available to teachers when he was a kid.
“If I had teachers teaching me in the way we’re suggesting in this resource, I think it would have made the learning much more richer,” he said. “It would have made me feel like I belonged more in my classroom.”
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Canada’s anti-Asian racism reaches back to the 1880s when thousands of mostly Chinese men came to Canada in search of gum san — Gold Mountain — a reference to a better future in the North American mining industry.
However, almost 20,000 of them died while performing back-breaking labour involved in the construction of a transcontinental railway. Around that time, the Canadian government enacted a Chinese head tax to stop Chinese immigrants from coming into the country, and later in 1923, a similar Chinese Exclusion Act was passed.
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Other moments of anti-Asian history include Japanese internment camps during the Second World War, and hundreds of Sikhs on the Komagata Maru being denied entry on the B.C. coast. More recently, Canada and other countries have seen the rise of a “China Virus” stereotype during COVID-19.
In October, the Chinese Canadian National Council reported 26% of more than 600 reported anti-East Asian racism incidents in Canada took place in Toronto since mid-March, and involved targeted coughing, spitting or physical violence.
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