Creating Community With a DEIJ School Newsletter

Schools serve as places of exploration, learning, change, and growth. As educators, we encourage our students to discover what intrigues, inspires, and challenges them. However, schools can also function as institutions that unintentionally perpetuate inequitable systems. Many such institutions, international schools included, began to go through a self-reflection process during the spring of 2020. Ours, the International School of Brussels (ISB), was no exception.

In the spring of 2020, Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) members of our teaching community sought each other out for support, but also to ascertain how we could work together to create and support sustainable social change in our school community. This is where the idea for a newsletter focusing on diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice (DEIJ) was born, and we created the ISB DEIJ Newsletter.

How It Started:

“This is a space for members of the ISB to share content, practice and ideas centered around social justice, antiracism and anti-oppression education. This is an open forum for all to learn and engage with various materials to help expand our understanding and share our progress as we do the work.” -DEIJ Newsletter mission

This quote opened our first edition of the DEIJ Newsletter (at that time named the Social Justice Newsletter) published in March 2021. Our goals were to help our community grow together while providing educational opportunities and resources. Initially, we did not have any particular theme to our editions, but rather sought out colleagues who had expressed interest in our concept to contribute written pieces. These pieces ranged from opinion pieces to examples of lessons or units. Simultaneously, we focused on gathering resources, mostly in English, to provide others with support for amendments to lessons, units and/or teaching styles in an effort to integrate more social justice action into our school community.

Upon the release of the first few issues of the newsletter, we received positive feedback. Emails were sent thanking us for providing resources as well as articles written by colleagues that share the goings on in different sections of the school. One place where we had room for expansion, as pointed out by a French-speaking colleague, was the appetite for more articles and resources in different languages. This colleague stated that the newsletter’s incorporation of a few articles written in French was the first time she felt included, a callback to our school mission of, “Everyone included, everyone challenged, and everyone successful.”

We realized that there needed to be more of an effort to seek out videos, articles, and teaching materials in the national languages of our host country, as well as such materials in the other languages spoken within our community. While English is the “working language” of our school, it can also serve as an unintentional excluder. We wanted our newsletter to be a place where everyone could feel represented and have access to content.

Notifications of roundtable discussions, DEIJ team updates and resources (theme related) for readers to engage with. (Photo source: ISB)

How It’s Going:

We are now in our third year of curating and publishing the ISB DEIJ Newsletter. Over the course of the last few years, we’ve learned and refined a few things. During the first year and half of publication we did not have any guiding themes for our issues, rather just a collection of various contributions and resources. We recognized that if we wanted to have more people contribute to the newsletter, we needed to give them something to work with ahead of time. Thus, we decided to publish upcoming edition themes with the release of each monthly newsletter in an effort to give community members transparency and an opportunity to submit their own ideas.

We have begun including more student submissions with each edition. Our feedback surveys and analytics indicate that student submissions are the most popular and bring the most engagement with articles. In response to this information, we have made efforts to ensure that we have at least one, if not more, student pieces - articles, videos, or artwork - in every edition.

Some other changes we have made over the last few years have been using the newsletter as a space to post our school’s DEIJ team updates. This is an effort to aid with transparency regarding the team’s efforts and initiatives. The DEIJ Newsletter has also been a place to promote our school’s monthly roundtable sessions. Through the newsletter, we have been able to share resources for these discussions with the community beforehand.

What We’re Still Working On:

As previously mentioned, multilingualism is a key part of social justice and DEIJ work. We have consistently made efforts to include pieces from our ISB community in various languages. However, we still struggle with being able to find or receive submissions of resources in different languages, particularly teaching materials and academic research articles. While we do reach out to our multilingual colleagues for support (and bless them for helping us when they can), this struggle has left us wondering - do these materials exist in the international teaching community? If so, where can we more easily have access to them? Or is this an area of international education that has room for more development?

Five Key Things for Getting Started:

If your school is looking to start a similar type of newsletter, we’ve consolidated five suggestions to help you get started:

1. Be clear with your mission, vision and purpose. As with any organization or initiative, understanding the “why” is crucial.
2. Semester or yearlong planning helps with thematic organization, as well as connecting with others to help contribute.
3. Student submissions and/or co-creation supports community, inclusion and engagement.
4. Make an effort to be as multilingual as possible. Language inclusion helps us all feel like we belong.
5. Be consistent with communication and release dates.