Willow Samara Allen, MPPA, PhD is a white Ashkenazi Jewish settler living on the lands of the lək̓ʷəŋən People. She is an adjunct professor in Educational Leadership Studies at the University of Victoria and a facilitator in anti-racism. Her research investigates the subject-making of white women, processes of settler colonial socialization, and antiracist and decolonizing pedagogies and leadership in informal learning sites. Her current SSHRC-funded research explores the reproductions and possible disruptions of settler colonialism in public sector work on Coast Salish and Treaty 6 territories.
Amanda Gebhard is an assistant professor in the Faculty of Social Work at the University of Regina and lecturer in the Faculty of Education. She is a second-generation white settler living on Treaty 6 territory in northern Saskatchewan. Before completing doctoral studies in education, Amanda was a classroom teacher, and she credits her young students' passion for social justice for inspiring her university teaching and research program. Amanda’s research investigates whiteness in the helping professions, racism and educational exclusions, the school/prison nexus, and anti-racist pedagogy and practice.
Fritz Pino is an assistant professor in the Faculty of Social Work at the University of Regina. A first-generation Filipinx, she completed a PhD in Social Justice Education and a master’a degree in Social Work from the University of Toronto. She has worked with settlement workers in school as outreach worker for LGBTQ newcomer immigrants and families. Born and raised in the Philippines, her research focuses on the intersectionality of aging, race, sexuality, gender, and migration.
For newcomer students, inequities exacerbated by COVID-19, including racism, unfold within their educational landscapes. School settlement workers perform a critical role in newcomer students’ educational trajectories. COVID-19 has intensified the importance of school settlement work, yet school settlement workers remain an under-researched and under-recognized group of professionals. Anchored in an anti-racist, multidisciplinary framework, our article traces how COVID-19 measures in schools have magnified inequities for school settlement workers and newcomer students. Our data, drawn from a community-based project, consist of virtual focus groups held with school settlement workers located in a Canadian prairie province during the height of the pandemic, and the findings emerge through a critical approach to the methodology of appreciative inquiry. We illuminate systemic realities to contradict discourses that the pandemic does not discriminate and demonstrate how COVID-19 protocols are used to justify and obfuscate schooling exclusions along racial lines. We analyze themes of (in)visibility of settlement work, whiteness and racism, and resistance through Sara Ahmed’s (2012, 2017) metaphor of the brick wall to animate the tensions of settlement work in schools during COVID-19. We conclude with school settlement workers’ recommendations to increase recognition of their critical role and to support their work during and beyond the pandemic. We call on institutional wall makers to respond to settlement workers’ recommendations and actualize institutional commitments to newcomer students and families.