When I first started school, I thought all the students were the same. We were all white, middle class, two parents and majority of us had siblings or would have siblings.  In my little rural town, everyone knew everyone. I knew all the teachers and often had the same teacher that my older siblings had. Year after year, our class would continue to learn the same things with an expansion of each subject each year. All of the books we read were simple and easy to make connections with in ourselves and our families. This was not something I questioned. The only thing that would change was getting a different teacher each year that we already knew and sometimes a new student.

As I became older some of these new students were white and others were coloured. This allowed the classroom and our town to be more diverse. Our class wasn’t all the same anymore. We had new classmates that had just moved to town that didn’t all look like us. My classmates may have changed over the years, but the books we were reading didn’t really change all that much. There were a lot of books that featured white, middle-class people, or were stories from their points of view. Since moving to the “big” city I have learned more about myself and the importance of learning different perspectives. Learning about different perspectives has opened my eyes on how much of the world I was missing.  I continue to learn and see different perspectives. Living in the city has opened my lens of diversity making me realizing the importance of different perspectives, and has allowed me to learn outside of my comfort zone. Thank you, University of Regina for teaching me more about the world.

Please watch this TED Talk given by Chimamanda Adichie, titled “The Danger of a Single Story.”

Think of: What is your education story?