As a vice principal, I have very little power within the board and even less power within the hiring process. I think it's important to address this issue of lack of diversity within our schools because in elementary schools especially, teachers are mostly homogenous group. However, I think when we talk about increasing diversity in school administration, we need to include senior administrations (superintendents) as well. They have more power within the board, and in our board, they make all the hiring decisions. I often find within the school boards, the further up the power chain we go, the more homogenous the group tends to be,

This has been my experience with the local public board. My colleague and I created East Asian Educator Affinity Network at my board to support and network with East Asian educators. The stories shared during our first meeting were heart-breaking. We also felt very invisible as a group within the board. To give an example, the board sends out monthly list of holidays and celebrations from many religious and ethnic groups to all the schools. Yet, they didn't include Chinese New Year, a very obvious but important East Asian holiday.

Given Regulation 274/12 was introduced in 2012, I am curious about how nepotism and favouritism were still allowed to continue when this report was conducted in 2020. When I worked for Peel, teacher hiring was strictly done through seniority list and principals no longer had any input. Even with the Regulation revoked, some boards are still continuing to use the seniority based hiring, not that I am suggesting that solves this issue of teacher diversity. I think lack of teacher diversity comes from a much wider systemic issues.

At least in TDSB and Peel, there were many BIPOC teachers. However, this was not the case for administrators. I always wondered why this was the case. I took my PQP online asynchronously and everyone in my class came from different parts of Ontario (and some outside of Ontario). Yet, the class was not very diverse. In comparison, I am really enjoying how diverse our cohort is for the PhD program where so many different perspectives are brought together because of the diversity. I just wonder what the difference is between these two programs.

At times, this EDI policies feel very surface level to me. At Greater Essex County District School Board, they spent an enormous amount of money on surveys and reports to address anti-black racism but beyond the surveys and reports, nothing more came out of it - similar to how so many projects were unaddressed in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission's 94 Calls to Action.

I am not familiar with this Aspiring Racialized Leaders Mentoring Project but we cannot put the onus of bringing more diverse teachers and administrators to BIPOC...simliar to how Gaudry and Lorenz talked about not requiring Indigenous people to bear the responsibility for change in Indigenous inclusion policy.

I think some of the teacher hiring processes were the results of political and economic climate and its responses from the union. For many years, there were very few teaching jobs which meant that teacher graduates who needed steady income to survive did not stay in teaching. It used to be the case that when teachers were hired at the board, they stayed in the profession for many decades. There was a teacher shortage at the beginning of 2000 when there was a change to retirement requirements (going from 90 factors to 85 factors). So a large number of today's teachers were hired around then where teacher diversity was not considered.

During my master's thesis I learned that I really knew nothing about education system in other provinces. In fact, being an elementary teacher, I really knew very little about what was happening in secondary schools, either. I think this is a disservice to teachers as it encourages teachers to hold a very narrowed view of education. As well, I've learned over the years that the comprehensive and cohesive educational strategies differ not just region to region but swings rather massively based on the political parties and time. For example, for many years, reading was taught through whole language approach and now we are moving back into phonics phase.

Internet is already a non-stop mass "advertisement" that is already so entangled into our every day lives. Think about the number times an elementary classroom might use YouTube and expose students to ads. They suggest to young students who haven't clearly developed their sense of self how they should live, value, buy, eat, exercise, and so on. The focus on consumerism is something we may never get away from and have long term serious consequences to the world.

To be able to quantify someone's contribution to the LLM is a scary thought! And because LLM is using such vast number of texts to train AI without any checks and balances we will never truly understand the influence of all these views and values on people as we move forward.

How should we define view of "average human"? Who gets to make that decision of "average human"? What is "average"? Traditionally, the word average often referred to the largest number. So do we go by largest population number or largest religious beliefs or largest popular beliefs. If so, what happens to everyone else's views?

We are already living in a world where it is not clear where the information we are reading about many of the political topics are coming from and who is behind the information. There's been a lot of speculations about the information manipulations related to elections and politics. AI will only add to that mass entanglement of information and misinformation.

Many young students (who grew up with the internet and constant devices around them) are consumers of the internet where they don't always think about what they are reading and the influence on them. AI based web searches further encourages this by providing only a "snippet" summary of information.

With the introduction of internet, even so called "professional content" is now blurred such that it is difficult to separate facts and truth from fiction. The definition of "experts" have changed and who gets to provide "professional content" has changed. And this was before the inventon of AI.

Somewhat similar to much of existing research data where it predominantly comes from North America and few other English speaking countries. Even with all the advancement of technology and language translating technology, it is very difficult to locate and read other research data not written in English that might be relevant to people who might not fit the norm.

Definition of the word culture has shifted so much since Gramsci wrote about it yet it is still very true that we need to shift culture for change to happen. My understanding is that since culture is shared among a group or a society, it requires consensus which is where Gramsci’s concept of hegemony comes into play. Who is ultimately the decision-maker of this consensus at the expense of what and whom? This paragraph reminded me of Bourdieu’s cultural capital, and how this dominant group uses cultural capital to continue social inequalities and cultural devaluation, and how this idea is only amplified today with AI.