Rethinking Calendar Days and Celebration-Based Approaches to DEIJ

What is the purpose of celebrating special days, weeks, and months in schools? How do schools determine which to celebrate and how?

Across the world, schools engage with a wide range of calendar events connected to identity, culture, history, belonging, and global issues. Some schools draw on calendars produced by international organizations such as UNESCO or the United Nations. Others develop celebrations and awareness events based on different countries, communities, values, and contexts. 

Yet this raises an important educational question. How do schools decide which days to celebrate, and what role should these events actually play in student learning?

Schools will rarely, if ever, be in a position to recognize every identity, culture, nationality, historical experience, or social issue represented within their communities. No calendar can include everything, so decisions about what to recognize inevitably reflect particular priorities. UNESCO, for example, maintains a list of international observances, yet, as with any institutional calendar, not every community or identity is explicitly represented through a dedicated observance day. This illustrates why schools should think carefully about which calendars they draw from, what those calendars leave out, and whether they reflect the school community.

Any calendar day connected to identity or culture carries competing expectations around representation, visibility, neutrality, and belonging. These moments can communicate care, recognition, and institutional values. Yet unlike curriculum planning and academic learning, calendar days rarely come with expectations for progression, assessment, behavioral change, or long-term learning outcomes.

Pi Day and Learning

Let’s explore the use of Pi Day as part of students' engagement with mathematics. 

UNESCO recognizes March 14 as the International Day of Mathematics, and many schools celebrate Pi Day (3.14) on the same day. The celebration of Pi Day can be a fun way to build on previous learning around math and pi. However, no mathematician would argue that students learn trigonometry through Pi Day alone.

Far from being an isolated concept, pi connects multiple areas of mathematics that students will have encountered throughout their schooling. Understanding π requires foundations in number sense, decimals, geometry, measurement, ratio, circumference, and proportional reasoning. Students revisit these ideas over time through carefully sequenced curriculum, explicit teaching, guided practice, questioning, and assessment.

Now imagine if schools only discussed π once per year through a themed celebration. The idea would seem absurd.

We would immediately ask:

• Where is the curriculum progression?

• How are students building conceptual understanding?

• What standards guide learning?

• How are misconceptions addressed?

• How do we know whether students understand the concept?

Importantly, this does not mean Pi Day lacks value. The celebration can enhance learning, generate excitement, and strengthen community engagement around mathematics. It is, however, a complement to learning rather than a replacement for it. 

The same reflection can be applied to identity, diversity, equity, inclusion, belonging, and safeguarding related topics. If schools rely solely on isolated awareness days to engage with complex questions around race, religion, gender, disability, culture, sexuality, identity, or human rights, we should ask whether students are being exposed to ideas or whether they are genuinely learning about them.

Exposure Versus Transformation

Calendar-based events can offer schools meaningful opportunities, but their impact is limited when they remain disconnected from curriculum and everyday school life.

These limitations are not arguments against calendar days themselves. Rather, they highlight considerations for us to resolve. We position resolving these limitations as a movement from exposure towards transformative learning.

Moving Beyond Exposure Through a Pedagogical Lens

Planning should begin with the learning and changes in behavior that the school hopes to see, rather than with the event itself. Schools can then consider the intended learning, the teaching approach, students' ages, and how they will recognize whether the event has made a difference.

Viewed through this lens, calendar days become one possible learning experience within a broader educational journey rather than the journey itself.

Reflective Questions for Schools

For schools seeking to deepen the impact of calendar days and commemorative events, it may be helpful to begin with one event already in the school calendar and ask how it is being approached pedagogically.

Key questions might include:

1. What do we want students to learn, understand, or be able to do as a result of this experience?

2. Are there clear learning standards, curriculum links, or age-appropriate concepts guiding how this day is approached?

3. How does this event connect to a wider progression of learning before, during, and after the day itself, including across year groups, subjects, or sections of the school?

4. How do we know whether students’ understanding, thinking, or behavior has developed over time?

5. How can students and the community in focus contribute to what is being learned?

These questions are not intended to turn every calendar day into a formal unit of study. Rather, they invite schools to consider whether these moments are being used as isolated experiences or as part of a broader learning journey. Schools wanting to take this further may wish to use a belonging or equity framework to consider how calendar days connect to progression, assessment, student voice, staff learning, and whole-school culture in more depth.

From Celebration to Transformation

Calendar days will continue to play an important role in schools. They create opportunities for visibility, recognition, and community building. They can introduce important conversations and help students encounter experiences different from their own.

Yet moments of awareness are not the same as understanding.

As schools continue exploring questions of identity, diversity, belonging, equity, inclusion, and safeguarding, the challenge is not simply selecting the right days to celebrate. The challenge is ensuring that these moments form part of a broader pedagogical approach that supports understanding, critical thinking, empathy, and action over time.

When calendar days become connected to curriculum, day-to-day expressions of behavior, and student voice, they have the potential to move beyond exposure and contribute to genuine transformation.

Perhaps the most important question is not: What are we celebrating this month?

Instead, it may be: What are students learning, and how will that learning continue long after the day itself has passed?