Diversity in the classroom

Wanda Thomas Bernard may spend a lot of her time in classrooms on campus, but her social work courses take students on a voyage well beyond the university grounds.

For some students, it's a journey built on sharing intimate personal stories they never imagined they'd open up about in front of a classroom full of people. For others, it's an adventure into a local community to carry out primary research.

For all, it’s a trip through Dr. Bernard’s own experiences and the lives of those she’s met along the way as part of her research on diversity, education and social work.

"I probably have a story for every lecture and not by choice. A lot of the stories are difficult stories," says Dr. Bernard, who joined Dal 25 years ago in the School of Social Work as the university's first full-time tenure-track African Nova Scotian professor.

Now, Dr. Bernard has been named the inaugural recipient of Dal’s new Award for Excellence in Education for Diversity for her skill in guiding students through such challenging terrain and for her broader role in advancing diversity in her department and at Dal over the years.

Educating for change

Dr. Bernard’s impact on diversity can be measured, in part, through curricula changes she has helped bring about.

In 1995, she created a course called The Theory and Practice of Anti-Oppressive Social Work, which became the first required course on diversity in Dal’s graduate program in social work.

Dr. Bernard says she uses this foundational course to engage students in innovative assignments that give them a safe space to explore issues of oppression and privilege from their own experience and that of others.

“It’s important for social workers to understand how they can do that work from a critical perspective where they don’t add to the oppression that someone’s already experiencing,” Dr. Bernard explains.

She also developed an elective course on Africentric Perspectives in Social Work in 1999, which continues to be the only elective on that topic across 35 social work programs in Canada.

Dr. Bernard consistently seeks out new ways to use the course to take her students into the African Canadian community and to bring the community into the classroom. When the course is held in the Winter term, for instance, she opens her lectures up to the community during African Heritage Month in February. At other times, she brings in guest speakers from those communities or sends students into the communities.

“It is simply marvellous to see how willing my students are to ‘try something new’ and also how willing the African community is to help me on the educational journey,” she says.

Unlearning prejudices

Getting students to venture outside their comfort zones can be a challenge, but former student Andrew Childerhose says Dr. Bernard engenders trust in people by sharing stories from her own experience.

Giving students the opportunity to lead the class discussions also helps, he says, noting that students tend to talk about their lived experiences in a more blunt and honest way in Dr. Bernard’s classes than they do in other courses.

“Dr. Bernard is willing to work with students and go from that realization that we all make mistakes, we all have prejudices, but what does it look like when you start to unlearn those and work through them,” Childerhose explains.

While Dr. Bernard consistently wins praise for her teaching skills, her administrative work as director of the School of Social Work — from 2001 to 2011 — has also been instrumental in enhancing diversity in the department and at Dal more generally.

Changes in governance, hiring practices and student recruitment and retention implemented during her time as head of the School resulted in a more diverse faculty, staff and student body.

Under her direction, for instance, the School expanded its affirmative action policy around student recruitment to include members of the LGBTQ communities.

"We boasted about the fact that we no longer had to recruit for diversity, as people from diverse and marginalized communities sought us out, especially students," she remembers.

Dr. Bernard has played a key role in setting up diversity training programs for staff and senior administrators across Dal campus through her work with the Equity Office. She was also involved in the creation of the Diversity Training Institute in the Faculty of Health Professions, which ran a series of training conferences for a number of years.

Dr. Bernard says while some progress has been made — there are more voices, more credibility, better scholarship and a deeper commitment to change  — there’s still work to be done. She says she continues to find critical hope to carry on with that mission by witnessing the “deep desire” for change in her students.

It’s that omnipresent sense of hope that makes Dr. Bernard so “incredibly inspiring” to students such as Childerhose.

“It’s a very beautiful thing to have somebody talk to you about all of these oppressions and struggles, but then have this incredible strength and hope,” he says.

This article is part of a series highlighing some of the recipients of Dalhousie's university-wide teaching awards. See the full list of award winners for 2015.