How Do We Make Our Classrooms Feel Like Home to Each and Every Student

Kwame Sarfo-Mensah portrait

Written by Kwame Sarfo-Mensah

Kwame Sarfo-Mensah holds a Bachelor’s degree in Mathematics and a Master’s Degree in Elementary Education from Temple University. For nine years, he served as a middle school math teacher in Philadelphia, PA and Boston, MA. Currently, he is the founder of Identity Talk Consulting, a global educational consulting firm. Throughout his 17-year career as a classroom teacher, author, and consultant, Kwame has earned numerous accolades for this work. His newest book, "Learning to Relearn: Supporting Identity in a Culturally Affirming Classroom", will be coming out Fall 2024.

For context, I’m a first generation Ghanaian American who has spent all but three years of my life living outside of Ghana.  While I mostly understand my family’s home language, Twi, I grew up not really being taught the language by my parents.  We learned a few Twi words here and there but English was the main medium of communication in our household and every other environment we found ourselves in. Growing up in the United States, I felt like an outsider.  I thought those feelings would change when I moved to Ghana at 12 years old and lived there for 3 years.  Even while living there, I felt like an outsider. 

I’ve never been a clean fit in any of my worlds. I’ve always been different.  My whole life has been spent living outside the margins of the dominant culture.  In more ways than one, I’ve received harmful messages and mistreatment to remind me of that reality.  The following traumatic scenario, which I’ve played out in my mind for the last 10 years, is a prime example of this predicament.

Okay, let me set the stage…

Imagine yourself on an airplane that is heading to the Kotoka International Airport.  As the plane makes its descent towards the airport, your anxiety heightens because you know the course of events that are about to follow. The minute you get off the plane, you know you’ll have to go straight to the immigration booth, which means that you’ll have to hand over your American passport to a Ghanaian immigration officer for visa inspection. By all means, what I’ve mentioned thus far is standard protocol but this is where things take a left turn. So you hand your American passport over to the immigration officer, he turns to your bio page and discovers your name, “Kwame Karikari Sarfo-Mensah”. For a brief moment, the officer looks at you and then looks back at your passport.  At this moment, you have two options for a response.  You can either…

  1. respond to the officer in English, leaving yourself subject to questioning from the officer as to why you have this strong Ghanaian name and are not speaking to them in Twi.
  2. respond to the officer in Twi, leaving yourself subject to ridicule and harsh criticism as to how you could be Ghanaian and not be able to speak Twi fluently.

Unsure of how to respond, you freeze in panic because you know what’s about to happen next.  The officer will either call you an oburoni and crack jokes about you with their co-workers nearby or look at you in disgust and shame you for not being able to speak Twi fluently.

While this story is specific to my experience, I can assure you that others who grew up as third culture kids or immigrant students have dealt with a similar scenario to the one I just described. Whether you teach abroad in an international school or in a K-12 school within the United States, chances are you’ll have a few students within your classrooms who are struggling to make sense of their identities or searching for spaces where they are welcomed, accepted, and fully embraced for who they are. A space where no one is interrogating them or invalidating their lived experience.

These students I’m referring to are your multilingual students, students with IEPs and 504 plans, immigrant and migrant students, neurodiverse students, students who are disabled, students who practice non-Christian faiths, students who are BIPOC, students who are LGBTQ+, etc. Although they may enter your classroom with vastly different lived experiences, they are two things they all have in common:

  1. They find themselves outside the margins of white dominant culture.
  2. They all deserve to be in a classroom that feels like HOME.

Understanding that every student defines home differently, how can we make our classrooms feel like home for each and every student?  We can start by thinking about our own homes. When you’re in our homes, we’re in spaces where……

  • we feel a sense of psychological and emotional safety and comfort
  • we can express ourselves unapologetically
  • we receive support and care from loved ones
  • we belong and feel welcomed,valued and accepted
  • we thrive off of routine and stability 
  • we’re connecting intimately with our loved ones
  • cherished memories and family history are held near and dear to our hearts

Regardless of who we are and where we come from, we all want to experience that feeling of home as I’ve described above. We deserve that feeling because it’s a human right, as recognized by the United Nations. In this world where government officials across the globe are shutting down DEI programs, censoring and banning culturally responsive and identity-affirming curriculum in schools, and pushing anti-LGBTQ+ legislation, it is more imperative than ever for us, as educators, to create classroom spaces of inclusion and belonging that feel like home for our most vulnerable students.

We may not be able to solve all the world’s problems but there are a few key things we can do to make our students feel comfortable in our classrooms:

In the end, no student should ever feel the way I felt during my childhood.  By making our classrooms feel like home for our students, we’re committing ourselves to normalizing and embracing the beauty of difference, as informed by the intersectional nature of our respective identities.  And finally, we’re committing ourselves to building learning spaces where joy, love, and acceptance are living parts of our classroom culture. 

by Hannah Wilson

The Hypocrisy at the Heart of Racist Riots

Dr Nilufar Ahmed portrait

Written by Dr Nilufar Ahmed

Dr Nilufar Ahmed is a multi award winning Chartered Psychologist, Academic, and Accredited Psychotherapist. She works as an academic at the University of Bristol where her research and pedagogy focus on Inclusion and Engagement. Her work is situated in an antiracist and Intersectional framework. She is regularly invited to comment in the media on all things psychology and has delivered training, keynotes, and consultancy services across sectors including HE, business, and Government.

Originally published by The Conversation on 9/8/24

When news broke that a 17-year-old male had stabbed a number of young girls in Southport, misinformation swiftly followed. First, that the perpetrator was an asylum seeker or refugee who had come to the UK on a boat. This was discredited and information emerged that the individual was British-born. But the circulation of disinformation, including a fake, Arab-sounding name, led many to argue it must have been a Muslim male.

Though the perpetrator has no known links to Islam, violent, far-right rioters still mobilised to attack mosques. Islamophobic violence spilled onto the streets in the worst race riots Britain has seen in years.

The fact that this misinformation was so readily believed can be partly explained by psychology, and how we think about people who look like us, and about others who don’t.

People are conditioned to identify with their in-group – others who are like them on a range of markers such as race, gender, class or nationality. The maintenance of this shared identity largely requires “us” to be different (meaning better) than “them” by making negative inferences about them.

This automatic psychological response explains how people can see the self and the in-group as complex and fluid (for example, not all white people are criminals) but frame the out-group as homogeneous and fixed. This can lead, as we’ve seen, to some people casting all black men as dangerous, Muslims as terrorists, asylum seekers as opportunistic and refugees as “taking” jobs and healthcare resources, justifying the dislike and even hatred of the out-group.

The racism of this public reaction to a horrific attack on children is stark when you compare it to other recent events.

When a white male killed a 14-year-old black boy named Daniel Anjorin with a sword in May, protesters did not mobilise around the country to “protect children”. Neither were white men as a group deemed a threat to the safety of children.

Whenever crimes, however heinous, are committed by white perpetrators, they are more often viewed as the acts of an individual who was at fault because of mental health issues or falling in with the wrong crowd. There is a long history of disparate treatment of criminals in the media linked to race.

People are socially conditioned to think heinous acts are committed by outsiders. There are a number of cognitive biases at play here, including contextual bias, where decisions are influenced by background information rather than the crime itself, and affinity bias, where people prefer others who are like them.

These biases are present in individual cases, but also across the judicial system. Inequalities in sentencing perpetuate the narrative that people of colour are more dangerous and disposed to crime.

A study commissioned by the Crown Prosecution Service also found that people of colour are significantly more likely to be prosecuted than white people for the same crimes. Such inequity results in overrepresentation in prisons and with convictions. This then feeds the narrative that people of colour are more likely to commit crime – when in fact they are simply more likely to be prosecuted.

The Blame Game

In times of scarcity, this in-group/out-group bias can become simplified and exacerbated to justify withholding resources from the out-group, who the in-group perceives as “undeserving”. Out-group scapegoats offer an easy and reliable way of deflecting responsibility by those with power.

This is what has happened over the past 14 years in Britain. While the Conservative government created an unstable economic climate and deep poverty through cuts to public services and economic turmoil, it is politically convenient to suggest the reason for scarce resources is a small number of asylum seekers.

The previous government used the negative attitudes towards refugees and immigrants as a core pillar of its election campaign. Politicians used increasingly inflammatory language in relation to immigration, blaming immigrants for things like the housing crisis and depleted health resources as a way shifting attention from their cuts in spending.

Anti-racist counter-protests have organised all around the country. Simon Dack News/Alamy

Over time, the scapegoats have been boiled down to one homogenised group of people who are not white. This is apparent in the differential treatment of asylum seekers from Ukraine, who were welcomed to the UK and allowed to work and be housed.

Asylum seekers from the rest of the world are not allowed to work on arrival and receive just £49.18 a week. This feeds the narrative that white people work, while people of colour don’t (though somehow are simultaneously “taking our jobs”).

The relentless scapegoating dovetails with the psychological biases we are all socially conditioned to fall for, creating an “us” and “them” environment that can easily turn violent. The events of the past two weeks have awakened much of Britain to the consequences that can arise when society is defined this way.

by Hannah Wilson

The UK Race Riots, Summer 2024 - The Aftermath

Diverse Educators Logo

Written by DiverseEd

Diverse Educators started as a grassroots network in 2018 to create a space for a coherent and cohesive conversation about DEI. We have evolved into a training provider and event organiser for all things DEI.

It has been a difficult summer for many people across the UK as hate has manifested itself online and on the streets of our country.

The loss of innocent lives have been used as an excuse to riot, with those enacting civil disorder and violence under the cover of protesting and the right to freedom of speech.  

Protests quickly became riots. Riots escalated into acts of terrorism.

And let’s not forget that the spate of racist, islamophobic, anti-migrant incidents took place during South Asian Heritage Month.

Many pupils, educators and parents/ carers will be returning to school in the coming weeks scared and traumatised by what has happened, by what they have experienced and by what they have witnessed. There will also be a number of these groups who are also emboldened in their attitudes, beliefs and behaviours. So, how do we challenge this? 

Some questions for us to reflect on and to discuss as part of our DEIB strategic approach:

  • How prepared are we to create safety, to offer support, to protect our communities?   
  • How will we take an anti-racist stand as a profession, as organisations and as leaders? 
  • How will we review all aspects of school life moving forwards through an intersectional lens? 
  • How will we ensure our approach to supporting our school communities is trauma-informed?
  • What training have your different stakeholders had, and what further training and support do they need?
  • How are we supporting the wellbeing of your DEIB leader/ working party as they manage the emotional tax of doing the necessary work that is likely to be triggering for their own lived experience?
  • Do we have staff briefings ready and are assemblies, tutor activities and PSHE lessons prepared?   

It is important to ensure that these questions move from being words to become actions.

In our work at #DiverseEd we encourage people to consider how we are developing consciousness, confidence and competence in ourselves and others. We also encourage our network to look in the mirror before we look out of the window – we need to do the inner work alongside the outer work to make sure what we do is authentic, considered and not performative.   

We appreciate that:

  • There is a lot to process. 
  • There is a lot to do. 
  • There is a lot of overwhelm. 

We need to learn the lessons from the Anti Racism work schools jumped to in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder – it is important for us to take action but it is more important to think about what needs to be done in different school contexts. How do the incidents this summer feed into our ongoing DEIB work? How do we commit to proactivity instead of reactivity?

Let’s learn from the mistakes made in the aftermath of George Floyd’s death. Let’s not be silent, but let’s consider who is doing the talking and presenting to each stakeholder group. Let’s be mindful of who we have consulted, which voices have been listened to to frame the message and how it is delivered and how it lands. 

Let’s also consider how we are working with our local community. What does a connected community look and feel like for all community members? How are we building bridges, creating safe spaces, carving out opportunities to listen and nurturing collaborative partnerships?

Below we have collated resources and we signpost support that has been shared by our network to help navigate the next few weeks as we return to school.

As an anti-racist school leader we can show our support by undertaking the following key reading and actions to get started:

Some free training events as term starts which you may wish to attend/ share with colleagues:

Some organisational statements in response to the riots to read and consider your own public messaging as an organisation:

Some thought-provoking posts by individuals in response to the riots to read, reflect on and discuss with colleagues: 

Some next steps to consider getting involved in:

Some further resources to review and share:

  • PSHE Association – Belonging and community: addressing discrimination and extremism
  • Spark and Co – Standing Together Against Racist Violence: Support for Communities of Colour in the UK 

Some further reading to read and discuss with colleagues:

  • Dawn Butler – There’s a huge difference between free speech and hate speech
  • Nafeez Ahmed – Exposing the Real UK Race Riot Instigators: The Key Players and Transatlantic Network Around Tommy Robinson
  • Torsten Bell – Despite appearances, Britons are more tolerant than ever
  • Zahra Sultana – ‘People Aren’t Going To Forget What’s Been Said, And How They’ve Been Made To Feel’ 

Some final resources and supports from us at Diverse Educators:

by Hannah Wilson