While walking high-schoolers through the Vancouver neighbourhood where the historic Black community of Hogan’s Alley was located, Ruby Smith Díaz sometimes asks the teens to snap a photo of something that resonates with them.

Smith Diaz, an arts-based facilitator, educator and artist, leads those tours as part of her workshop series exploring Black history and the Black Canadian experience with secondary students and fellow teachers.

Once, a student shared a photo of a mosque after their tour had stopped at Fountain Chapel, one of the few landmarks still remaining after Hogan’s Alley was largely demolished in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

She described the mosque as a “safe place” that helped her connect with “why a church might be important for someone of African ancestry that lived in Vancouver at that time,” explained Smith Díaz.

Each February, more Canadian schools are devoting time to Black history and the Black Canadian experience, but what happens for the rest of the year? Many educators, historians, students and community members — like Smith Díaz —are striving to make Black history part of everyday learning.

Whether by taking guided walks through a historic district or silk-screening layered maps of Vancouver’s shifting landscape over time, common threads are discovered when learning Black history, she said. Beyond simply accepting that history exists, students ask: “‘How am I connected to the person that I am seeing here in this textbook, in this photograph?'” 

Teaching the Vancouver School Board’s new course History of African Descent in B.C., Nikitha Fester is inspired by her students’ enthusiasm and feels joy exploring “people who look like me, who have had shared experiences with me.”

The class — open to senior high schoolers across the district and already approved to return next year — has drawn a diverse mix, she said. Among them are Black students eager to learn more about their history, students specifically interested in West Coast history, and some inspired by Black Lives Matter and other social justice movements.

Exploring resilience — not simply focusing on historical traumas for Black Canadians — is key to her approach. In turn, she sees students make critical connections between past and present.

Learning about and finding connections to Black Canadian history is also important for educators themselves, said Toronto educator and writer Greg Birkett.  

Across each province and territory, the school curriculum usually outlines areas of knowledge and skills students are expected to learn in each grade or course. Suggested topics to cover or sample activities are sometimes included. But the exact path taken inside the classroom — which books are read, how lessons are given, what activities undertaken — depends on the teacher.

Even though Black Canadians may be referenced in the curriculum — a settlers section of Alberta’s elementary social studies curriculum mentions Black rancher John Ware, Birkett noted — if the teachers themselves have a gap in their knowledge, that’s a missed opportunity.

In one instance, he chose Lawrence Hill’s The Book of Negroes for a novel study while teaching a senior level English Lit class, rather than the well-trodden The Catcher in the Rye. That first year, a few students questioned Birkett’s book choice. The following year, a white colleague joined Birkett in swapping the novel study title. They heard no student griping at all.

If Black history is a common thread from kindergarten through Grade 12, he said, “students understand that it’s just a part of the Canadian narrative. It’s just a part of our fabric and who we are.”

He’s currently teaming up with his sister, fellow Toronto teacher Coleen Birkett, and educational publisher Nelson to deliver a nine-part professional development series for teachers throughout Canada. The online webinars explore key topics from the 1600s to the present day and include resources and suggested activities.

The mindset that “Black history is Canadian history” has long guided Dalhousie University professor Afua Cooper, from the days her pursuit of master’s and doctorates in Canadian history were met with the remark “Canadian history is so boring!” she recalled, with laughter.

History becomes exciting, Cooper continued, “when you can see how all these histories are woven together. And within these histories, different themes come alive: civil rights, belonging, citizenship, settlement patterns, the whole issue of segregation.”

Black Canadians and the military is just one of their topics. “When you start to dig deep, you see ‘Oh my goodness! Here are all these Black men in the 1837 rebellion,'” Cooper said.