Sunlight Through The Canopy

The Pedagogy of Joy: Cultivating Wonder, Connection, and Belonging in Our Classrooms

There is a certain kind of joy that enters a classroom the way sunlight filters through the canopy of an old forest — slow, golden, generous, touching everything in its path without urgency, without needing to prove its brilliance.

It is not the kind of joy that begs to be noticed or performed. It is not curated for selfies, crafted for hot takes, or reduced to a hashtag in a highlight reel. It is quieter than that, deeper than that. It is the joy that grows in the spaces where trust has taken root, where relationships have been tended with care, where the courage to wonder is not punished but praised.

This is not the kind of joy that arrives on schedule or fits neatly into learning outcomes. It cannot be planned into Friday afternoons or confined to bulletin boards. It grows in the margins, in the unscripted moments — when a student’s face lights up with the sudden clarity of understanding, when a question lingers in the air long after the bell, when the whole room exhales in laughter that no one saw coming. This joy cannot be manufactured, because it is not about the performance of happiness – it is about the presence of wholeness.

Too often, joy is misunderstood in educational spaces, mistaken for novelty or noise, dismissed as fluff or frivolity — something to be encouraged during “spirit” days or granted as a break from “real” work. But here’s the thing: 

Joy is not a distraction from learning. 

It is the condition for it. 

It is the emotional and spiritual ecology in which deep thinking, courageous inquiry, and authentic connection can thrive. It is not a bonus or a break; it is the breath of the classroom, the rhythm that makes everything else possible.

To teach for joy is to resist a system that measures worth in productivity and renders feeling suspect. It is to defy the narrative that learning must be hard to be meaningful, that rigour must come at the cost of relationship, that excellence requires erasure. Joy is not the opposite of seriousness — it is the shape that love takes when it is allowed to live in public. It is not a departure from rigour; it is what makes rigour sustainable.

When joy is present, students take risks.

They ask better questions.

They come back after failing.

They begin to believe that they matter not because of how they perform, but because of who they are.

Joy is a pedagogical stance — a way of being with young people that says:

You do not have to earn your belonging here.

It is a form of resistance, a refusal to let school become a place where light is dimmed in the name of order. It is a root system that nourishes not only academic growth, but the spiritual, emotional, and communal thriving of all who enter the space.

Joy, when it is honest and rooted, is not the opposite of struggle — it is what makes the struggle bearable. It is not escapism or naive optimism. It is the sacred act of remembering that something better is possible and choosing to move toward it anyway. The dream — that dream, the one spoken into the bones of this world by those who knew its cost — was never about ease or inevitability. It was about courage. It was about choosing to love this world enough to imagine it otherwise. Dr. King did not speak of dreams as wishes; he spoke of them as legacies and as visions shaped by sacrifice, by faith, by fire. 

When we centre joy in our classrooms, we are not offering children fairy tales — we are offering them evidence.

Evidence that the dream is still alive. 

That justice can feel like laughter. 

That freedom can sound like a question spoken aloud without fear. 

That education, at its best, is not just preparation for life — it is life. 

Joy is the part that makes it worth living.

To centre joy is to remember what we are actually doing here — not preparing students for tests or jobs or some mythical future where they finally get to be free, but building a world where they can be free now. Where they can laugh and cry and create and question and still be held with dignity. Where they can find themselves not in the margins, but in the heart of the story.

This is the kind of joy we live for.

The kind that cannot be faked.

The kind that lingers.

The kind that liberates.

Joy as Resistance: Reclaiming Wholeness in Schooling

In an educational landscape shaped by the weight of standardization, the pressure to produce, and the relentless rhythm of urgency, joy moves differently — not with the intention of rebellion, but with the quiet confidence of something older, something deeper, something that does not need to justify its presence in a room to prove its worth. It is not a break from the work of teaching and learning, but the emotional and spiritual context that allows that work to be done with integrity, with tenderness, and with care.

When joy enters a classroom, it does not interrupt learning.

It expands its possibility.

It shifts the atmosphere from one of control to one of connection and, in doing so, reminds both students and teachers that education is not simply a transactional exchange of information, but a deeply relational process that holds within it the power to shape not only what we know, but how we see ourselves, each other, and the world around us.

Too often, joy is mistaken for a distraction, reduced to something playful and fleeting, a reward offered when the “real work” is done, but the truth is that joy is not supplemental — it is structural. It is not what we offer students to keep them compliant, but what emerges when students feel safe enough to be curious, to take risks, to express themselves fully, and to learn in a space where their humanity is not an inconvenience, but a cornerstone of the learning process.

As Thich Nhat Hanh teaches us, “The present moment is filled with joy and happiness. If you are attentive, you will see it.” In a classroom where joy is centred, attention becomes more than a tool for classroom management — it becomes a form of care, a way of attuning ourselves to the subtle but significant shifts that tell us how our students are doing, whether their shoulders relax when they walk through the door, whether their laughter comes easily or not at all, whether the questions they ask are rooted in wonder or in fear of being wrong.

Joy does not erase hardship — it does not pretend that the world outside our classrooms is not heavy, or painful, or unjust — but what it does is create space within that world where something else is possible, where students can experience moments of levity, connection, and belonging that remind them they are more than their trauma, more than their test scores, more than the expectations that have been placed upon them by people who have never really seen them.

To teach with joy is to believe, fundamentally, that education should not require us to leave parts of ourselves behind in order to succeed within it. It is to recognize that joy is not the opposite of seriousness, but the condition under which seriousness can be held with compassion, with softness, and with the kind of honesty that is not afraid to say: This work is hard, but we do not have to make it harder than it needs to be.

Joy shows up in the way a teacher looks up from their lesson plan to follow a student's line of thinking that leads somewhere unexpected and beautiful; in the way students laugh together in a moment of collective recognition, not because the content was funny, but because they felt, if only for a moment, the safety of being understood; in the way a child who usually keeps their head down decides to raise their hand, not because they are sure of the answer, but because they are no longer afraid of what might happen if they’re wrong.

As bell hooks enlightened us: “There can be no love without justice.”

As love calls us toward justice, so too does joy.

Joy that ignores injustice is not joy at all — it is denial dressed in comfort.

Joy that exists only for some is not joy — it is privilege.

And justice that asks us to harden ourselves to keep going will never be justice that heals.

Inspired by the wisdom of bell hooks, we are reminded that justice is not only systemic; it is deeply relational. It lives in how we love, how we listen, how we teach, and how we choose to show up for one another.

There is no joy without justice.

There is no lasting justice without the sustaining presence of joy because without joy, we grow brittle; without joy, we burn out; without joy, we forget why any of this matters in the first place.

When we centre joy, we are not indulging in sentimentality — we are grounding ourselves in a pedagogy that understands that healing is not a detour from learning, but a condition for its possibility; that beauty is not a distraction from justice, but one of its most powerful expressions; that laughter is not a disruption, but often the clearest sign that trust is alive in the room.

And so we design for joy — not after we have met the benchmarks, not as a reward for doing things right, but from the very beginning, as the soil we plant in, the water we offer freely, the sunlight we trust will find its way through — because we know that joy is not what happens after learning, but what makes learning possible. It is what draws students back to the classroom, not just in body but in spirit. It is what anchors teachers when everything around them feels fractured and uncertain. It is what transforms a room of strangers into a community, a curriculum into a conversation, a routine into a ritual that reminds us who we are.

Joy is what softens the edges of survival and makes room for something more than endurance. It is what lets a child feel beautiful in their becoming, even if no one has told them they are. It is what allows a teacher to weep quietly in the staffroom and still return the next day, not because they must — but because they believe.

Joy is the breath between questions, the hush before wonder, the rhythm beneath belonging.

It is not a strategy.

It is not an afterthought.

It is not a luxury.

Joy is not a frivolous extra.

It is freedom work.

The Ecosystem of Joy: Students, Educators, Families, and Support Staff

Joy, if it is to be sustained in schools, must be understood not as a lightning strike, but as an ecosystem — something alive, something interdependent, something that breathes. Like the wetlands that filter and nourish or the mycelium beneath the forest floor that connects trees across generations, joy depends on the health of the whole system.

It cannot be forced to grow in one corner while being denied in another.

It cannot live for students if it is absent for teachers.

It cannot flourish in a classroom if it is absent from the hallways, the staff rooms, the conversations at dismissal, the way we speak to the custodians, the way we listen to the families, the way we hold one another in the quiet.

As bell hooks writes, “True resistance begins with people confronting pain…and wanting to do something to change it.” In that way, joy is not merely a feeling — it is a communal response, an act of recognition. It is what happens when the parts of a school begin to see each other as vital, when we confront the ways joy has been denied or unevenly distributed, and when we begin the slow, loving work of restoring its roots.

No single tree makes a forest.

No single educator makes a school.

No single program creates belonging.

Joy, like any ecological system, requires balance, reciprocity, and deep listening to what each part needs — not so we can fix or manage each other, but so we can begin to understand that joy is not a private experience, but a shared responsibility.

It is how we honour the humanity of the people who walk through our doors every day. 

It is how we protect the conditions that allow learning to feel like home.

For Students: Joy as Voice and Agency

For students, joy begins not with approval, but with recognition — the quiet, steady recognition that their voices are not disruptions, but inheritances; that their presence is not something to be managed, but something to be honoured; that their curiosity is not a detour from the learning, but the evidence that learning is already underway.

It is not the joy of distraction or reward, but the joy of being met in the fullness of who they are — culturally, emotionally, intellectually, spiritually — without being asked to make themselves smaller in exchange for belonging.

It is the joy of breathing without bracing.

Of speaking without scanning the room first.

Of asking a question not because it is permitted, but because it is real.

Joy emerges when students no longer have to trade in parts of themselves to be deemed “successful,” when they are not asked to flatten their language, quiet their questions, or suppress their brilliance in order to be labelled “appropriate,” “focused,” or “on task.”

It grows in the moments when learning becomes an act of becoming rather than assimilation — when students are not asked to perform the appearance of knowledge, but are invited to shape it from their own lived experiences, to locate themselves within it, and to carry it in ways that feel natural, rooted, embodied, and free.

It grows when the expectations are not written against them, but with them.

When the classroom ceases to be a stage and becomes, instead, a garden — wild, interdependent, alive.

As Maya Angelou wrote,

“It is time for parents to teach young people early on that in diversity there is beauty and there is strength.”

If we take that wisdom seriously, we must ask:

• How often do our classrooms truly reflect this belief?

• How often do students feel that their cultural knowledge, their home language, their questions, their way of being, are sources of strength and beauty — not liabilities to be corrected or hidden?

• Do they see themselves reflected not as footnotes or themed months, but as the foundation of the curriculum itself?

• And if not, what do we think they are learning?

When we centre joy in student learning, we are not creating escape from rigour — we are creating the conditions in which rigour becomes meaningful. Joy arrives when learning is anchored in something real, when students are not just recipients of knowledge, but co-constructors of it, and when their lived experience becomes the starting place for inquiry.

It arrives not to lighten the load, but to make the load worth carrying.

What if joy looked like a classroom where a Social Studies unit becomes a living archive of community memory, where students are invited to interview Elders and grandparents, neighbours, and family members — gathering oral histories that have never been written down, weaving them into digital storytelling projects or community podcasts that allow families to hear their stories echoed back through the voices of children? What if joy was in the moment where a student played their grandmother’s voice for the class, and the entire room paused — not out of obligation, but reverence? What if the project wasn’t measured by how polished it sounded, but by the silence that followed it — the kind of silence that comes only when something true has been spoken?

What if a science unit on climate and environment began not with a textbook, but with the changing patterns of the river behind the school or the quality of the air near the bus loop? What if students tracked real data over time, rooted in the land they live on, and linked it to stories told by those who have watched these changes across generations?

What if joy grew from seeing that knowledge is not only collected — it is remembered, inherited, lived?

What if the learning made them feel closer to where they are, rather than further from who they have been told to be?

What if we allowed students to communicate in the ways that feel most natural to them — not only through written text, but through drawing, movement, gesture, sound, and quiet? A student with limited verbal language may begin to express understanding through art and, instead of asking them to adapt to the standard, the classroom adapts to them — introducing visual response circles, collaborative murals, and storytelling that includes rhythm and image alongside words. Over time, the classroom itself becomes more multilingual — not just in language, but in modality. The entire room begins to shift from a space of translation into one of transformation. Communication becomes less about mastery, more about meaning.

What if we made space for students to write multilingual poems, to translate ancestral proverbs, to build zines that reflect the layered beauty of speaking more than one language at once? What if they were never asked to choose between their identities but were trusted to bring the whole of themselves to the page, to the group, to the room? What if their stories didn’t need subtitles to be understood? What if understanding was no longer the only goal — but relationship?

What if joy was not measured by smiles or participation points, but by presence — by how willing a student is to take a risk, to ask a question they have been holding for years, to stay a little longer in the space because it finally feels like somewhere they belong?

What if our data included the moment a child decided to show up again tomorrow — not because they had to but because they wanted to?

This is not sentimentality.

It is not idealism.

It is what happens when we begin to teach not for compliance, but for connection.

When we understand that students do not need to be entertained to learn; they need to be seen.

And to be seen without condition is the beginning of all belonging.

As Toni Morrison once wrote, “When you get these jobs that you have been so brilliantly trained for, just remember that your real job is that if you are free, you need to free somebody else.” What if we took that as our invitation? What if the work of teaching is not just about preparing students for the world but about creating spaces where they already feel free enough to imagine it differently? What if joy was not an outcome but the atmosphere in which imagination takes its first breath?

Joy is not what happens after students master the content. It is what lets them believe they are capable of shaping it. It is what rises when students realize their own brilliance has been with them all along — not because someone gave it to them, but because someone finally stopped trying to take it away.

Joy is what happens when a child walks into a classroom and knows they won’t have to leave themselves at the door.

It is what happens when they speak and the room listens — not just out of politeness, but because their voice carries something worth holding.

It is what happens when a teacher says, “Tell me more!” and means it.

It is what makes learning feel not like a performance, but like a return.

A return to the body.

A return to breath.

A return to the possibility of being known without needing to disappear.

Joy is not a distraction.

It is the heartbeat of what education was always meant to be.

And still, there is more to say.

Joy does not end at voice — it lives in the trust that the voice will be held with care. It lives in the pause after a student shares something vulnerable and nothing in the room rushes to fix, or correct, or move on. It lives in the way a teacher stays present in that moment, not with control, but with reverence. Not with redirection, but with breath.

Joy deepens when students do not have to wonder if their joy is permissible. When they are not taught that celebration must be quiet, that curiosity must be contained, that learning must be endured. It deepens when we do not flinch at their brilliance, when we do not pathologize their energy, when we do not reward their silence more than their song.

It deepens when classrooms feel less like preparation for some distant life and more like life itself — messy, relational, beautiful, and real. When students do not have to pretend they are anything other than becoming.

We might say we want students to thrive, but do our classrooms let them arrive in wholeness? Do our systems make room for joy as a valid measure of learning? Not joy as a product of success, but as its condition — as its North Star — as the evidence that the space itself is safe enough for growth to happen.

Joy does not require ease.

It requires honesty.

It requires the slow, sustained commitment to building spaces where students are not reduced to outcomes, but invited to become. That becoming cannot be rushed, standardized, or graded — but it can be seen.

And when it is seen, it can flourish.

Imagine the power of a school where joy is part of the planning document, the reflection tool, the staff meeting, the report card. Where a child’s face lighting up mid-lesson is noted as data. Where the metrics of belonging matter just as much as the assignments completed. Where joy is not extracted, but protected — because it is what keeps the spirit tethered to learning.

Joy is not an accessory to education.

It is the evidence that we have not forgotten what education is for.

It is what reminds us that knowledge alone cannot nourish.

It must be offered in love.

What good is curriculum without connection? What good is a standard if it costs a child their voice? What good is knowledge if it cannot be held with wonder? To teach for joy is not to soften the work — it is to return it to its deepest intention.

To teach for joy is to say:

Your aliveness matters to me.

Your questions matter.

Your story matters. 

When a student hears that — not once, not in passing, but again and again, through your planning, through your posture, through the way you look up when they walk in — something shifts. The room expands. The roots deepen. The light softens. And the learning becomes a place they do not have to leave to be whole.

They begin to believe that school is not where they come to be shaped — it is where they come to be seen.

Joy, when it is nurtured in students, does more than light up a moment — it reclaims what education was always meant to be: a practice of liberation, a choreography of becoming, a promise that the world can be different than what it has been. When students learn in spaces where their joy is protected, they do not just absorb information — they awaken to their own power.

They begin to understand that they are not waiting for the future to begin.

They are already shaping it. 

The joy they carry with them is not just a memory of what was — it is the seed of what could be, growing quietly in every question they are no longer afraid to ask.

For Educators: Joy as Purpose and Connection

There are days when you stand at the edge of your own classroom and wonder how you got so far from the reason you ever began.

You look around and see the anchor charts, the unpaid hours, the dozens of emails you haven’t opened, and you try to remember the version of yourself who once believed this work could be something beautiful.

You’re still in there somewhere — beneath the meetings that could have been documents, beneath the daily calculus of who gets your energy and who just gets a nod, beneath the exhaustion of trying to meet needs so layered and urgent they wake you up at night.

And still, somehow, you return.

You return not because of duty or guilt or habit, but because something in you refuses to stop believing.

Something in you still watches a student light up and feels it like electricity.

Something in you still finds a way to laugh at 10:15 a.m. on a Tuesday when the lesson flops but the kids find joy in the mess anyway.

Something in you still reads their names aloud like they matter, even when no one is watching.

Something in you still stays.

Maybe no one taught you that staying would feel like this. That staying would mean carrying other people’s grief while pretending you’re fine. That staying would mean hearing praise that lands hollow because it never comes with relief. That staying would mean walking into meetings where your questions are framed as resistance, your care as inefficiency, your humanity as unprofessional.

And still, you stay.

Not out of martyrdom. Not because you believe suffering makes you noble. You stay because, despite everything, you know this work is not about perfection. It is about presence. It is about the sacredness of showing up for children in a world that keeps disappearing on them. It is about knowing their joy matters. Their agency matters. Their questions matter.

And for that to be true, your joy must matter too.

You cannot teach for freedom from a place of self-erasure.

You cannot call students into their power while quietly losing your own.

You cannot sustain love when your own heart has gone quiet.

So we return to joy — not as a performance, not as a coping strategy, but as a reclamation. Joy as the moment when you slow down long enough to hear your own voice again. Joy as the space between bell times where someone tells you the poem they wrote and it cracks something open. Joy as the quiet pride in a lesson you know landed. Joy as the tears you let fall after the door closes, not because you failed, but because you loved that hard.

Maybe joy looks like building a ritual into your mornings — not one you post, but one that grounds you. Three minutes of stillness. A quote taped to the desk. A student-led question. A moment that belongs to no one but the people in the room. Maybe joy is in the way you let a lesson wander because the conversation got real. Maybe it’s in the experiment your students designed from a community problem you didn’t plan for. Maybe it’s in the way they laughed today — really laughed — and you felt like you were part of something worth staying for.

Joy does not erase the weight — it reminds you who you are underneath it.

It reminds you that you are not a deliverer of content — you are a cultivator of space. A designer of possibility. A keeper of the flame. And though the system might never thank you for that — though it will flatten your role, measure your worth, and ask you to do more while calling it “resilience” — joy is what lets you resist the reduction.

Not every day will feel good, but there is still good in every day that you do this work with your whole self intact.

This is the joy that makes it worth returning.

This is the joy that cannot be faked.

This is the joy that saves us.

And still, you stay.

You stay even when the system confuses your survival with strength. You stay when every email that says “just one more thing” presses heavier on your spine. You stay when people romanticize the labour but never reduce the load. You stay when joy feels like a memory more than a practice, because something in you still believes that showing up matters — even if no one says thank you, even if no one sees the cost.

You have taught through grief no one knew you were carrying. You have smiled on days your body was screaming for rest. You have held the rage of injustice in one hand and the softness of a child’s question in the other. You have sat in circles and told the truth with your eyes when your words were not allowed to say it. You have closed your door not to shut the world out but to make a world inside that is a little more kind, a little more curious, a little more just.

And in that world, even for a moment — you are free.

You are free to centre wonder over compliance. Free to ask a question you didn’t already know the answer to. Free to pause the lesson because the room needed breath more than content. Free to say, I don’t know, but let’s find out. Free to teach as if what you are fostering is not just understanding, but belonging.

Because it is.

You are not just delivering curriculum — you are stewarding memory. You are shaping the way someone will one day remember themselves. You are making possible the version of adulthood where they believe they are enough.

And what about you?

Who makes that possible for you?

Who reminds you that your care does not need to be curated to be meaningful? Who sees you when your energy is low but your presence still holds? Who grants you the radical permission to be tired, to be unsure, to be real? Who tells you that your spirit is allowed to grieve what this work takes?

This is where joy returns — not as a prize for getting through but as a birthright reclaimed in the very act of staying human. Joy does not arrive to erase the pain but to cradle it. Not to patch over the cracks but to pour light into them.

Joy does not demand performance.

It invites return.

Joy is what reminds you that even when the lesson derails, the moment was still sacred. That even when the feedback stings, the intention was still love. That even when no one else notices, the thing you built was still beautiful.

Joy is what lives in the unmeasurable spaces — where a student says something that stops you, where the classroom hums with energy you never planned, where you catch yourself smiling and realize it wasn’t for anyone’s approval. It is in the gesture you never documented, the conversation you cannot replicate, the quiet miracle of a child choosing to try again.

You are still here.

Still showing up.

Still choosing to believe that the work matters because you do.

And that belief — that sacred, stubborn belief — is not weakness.

It is what will save this profession.

It is what will save us.

When what surrounds you becomes mechanical, you remain human. When the language of data falls short, you speak in care. When the mandates multiply and the pressure mounts, you find ways to teach the things that matter between the lines. You protect the spirit of the work in the smallest moments — when you greet them by name, when you pause to listen, when you stay just a little longer so they know someone sees them.

This isn’t about slogans or saccharine hope. It’s about trust. The kind that says: I still believe in something better and I’m willing to build it slowly, breath by breath. It’s about the quiet faith that this work, when done with love, leaves a trace — that long after the tests are forgotten, a student may still remember the way your classroom made them feel possible.

Real joy, when we honour it, is not the reward for endurance. It is the thread braided through each ordinary day, quiet but strong, frayed but still holding.

It is not the proof that everything is fine.

It is the reminder that you are still here.

Still loving.

Still refusing to become numb.

As bell hooks once wrote, "When we choose to love, we choose to move against fear... we choose to be free." In classrooms where love is a daily act — exhausted, imperfect, but offered anyway — joy becomes a kind of freedom. Not loud, not performative, but steady. The kind that allows you to exhale in the in-between. The kind that says: even here, I can be whole.

You are not just keeping the fire alive, you are carrying it forward — tending to it in quiet ways, shielding it from the wind, offering its warmth without needing recognition. You are the living proof that this work, done with care and integrity, can still hold beauty and that even in the hardest moments, joy is not lost.

Joy is always waiting — for breath, for presence, for someone like you to remember it back into being.

So if no one has said it lately: thank you.

Thank you for showing up when it would be easier to shut down.

Thank you for making space for joy in a world that often forgets its worth.

Thank you for bringing your whole, complicated, beautiful self into a role that asks so much.

You are not invisible.

You are not alone.

And you are more powerful than you know.

Not because you do everything — but because you do this: you care.

Still.

You care when it’s quiet, when it’s hard, when no one is watching.

You care with depth, with consistency, with grace.

This is no small thing.

It is the thread that holds so much together. It is the quiet structure that holds so much together — the heartbeat beneath the expectations, the steady current that allows others to find their way back to themselves. It is the soft, steady rhythm that makes it possible for others to rise. 

It is everything.

And you — yes, you — are the reason it still lives in our classrooms. 

You are the pulse, the presence, the grounding rhythm that steadies the room. 

The reason it feels possible again. 

The reminder that joy is not gone — it’s just been waiting for someone like you to carry it forward.

Thank you for carrying it. 

Thank you for being a bearer of joy, a keeper of what matters, a light in places that have forgotten how to glow. 

You are not just part of this work – you are its heart. 

The world is better because you are in it.

Because of your presence, classrooms feel a little more human. 

Schools feel a little more whole. 

And students, whether they say it or not, feel a little more free.

For Families: Joy as Trust and Partnership

For families, joy is not found in one grand gesture — it arrives in the small, steady moments that say, your child is safe here.

It lives in the spark of a child coming home with a story they can’t wait to tell, in the shift of a parent’s shoulders softening as they realize they no longer have to brace for harm, in the quiet confidence that their child is not just learning facts, but being seen in the fullness of who they are.

It is the knowing — sometimes hard-earned, sometimes fragile — that school is not a place where they must leave their identity at the door, but a place where it might actually be welcomed in.

This kind of joy cannot be reduced to character limits or framed in photos for social media. It lives between the lines — in the pause before a teacher mispronounces a name and takes the time to ask again, in the warmth of a principal’s greeting that feels more like community than compliance, in the way an invitation to a school event feels less like obligation and more like belonging.

Families find joy in seeing their children succeed, yes — but even more so, they find joy in seeing their children belong.

Belonging, for many families, is not a given. It is something they have had to fight for. Something they have watched be denied to others who look or speak or worship like them. Something they notice missing in the silences between conversations, in the curriculum that does not name their histories, in the policies that do not reflect their realities.

When a school chooses to centre joy in its relationship with families, it is not doing something extra.

It is doing something essential.

It is saying: We see you.

Not just when something goes wrong.

Not just when we need a signature or a donation.

But always.

When schools build relationships with families rooted in reciprocity rather than performance, when they honour parents and caregivers as knowledge holders, not just recipients of information, when they invite — not inform, include — not appease, listen — not audit — then joy becomes more than a feeling. It becomes a bridge. A bridge between school and home. Between the future we say we want and the community we are practicing into being.

Imagine if school events didn’t just showcase student work, but invited families into it. Not as spectators, but as co-learners. Imagine if homework sometimes asked students to interview their elders, to gather stories instead of worksheets, to bring in recipes, sayings, memories — pieces of home that became part of the lesson. Imagine if a parent walking into a classroom didn’t feel the quiet edge of being out of place, but felt a room shaped by shared care — walls adorned with student work in multiple languages, family photographs alongside learning goals, joy journals tucked next to achievement data.

Imagine if joy looked like a classroom reading circle that paused for a grandmother’s voice to echo through a recording. If it sounded like the laughter of students teaching their peers a phrase in their home language. If it tasted like a lesson drawn from the spices of someone’s lunchbox — not to tokenize, but to tell a deeper story about migration, memory, and what we carry.

As Dr. Gholdy Muhammad reminds us through her work, when students and families are supported in knowing their histories, cultures, and identities, they come to understand their brilliance — not as something to earn, but as something already alive in them. When schools recognize that brilliance as part of the curriculum — not beside it, not after it, but as it — then joy becomes the learning environment itself.

To build joy with families is not to add one more initiative. It is to remember what school was always supposed to be: an extension of the village, a continuation of home, a shared space where the growth of a child is not isolated from the people who know them best, but nourished by them.

When schools and families walk alongside each other — not with suspicion, but with solidarity — something sacred happens. The child learns that love is not something they have to divide. That who they are in their family and who they are in their classroom do not need to be different people.

That joy can travel between spaces and still feel whole.

So to the caregivers who show up even when the invitation is late or unclear, to the grandparents who share stories that have never made it into the textbooks, to the parents who hold both pride and worry in the same breath, to the families who have been told too often that their presence is too much or not enough: thank you.

Thank you for trusting your children to a system still learning how to be worthy of that trust.

Thank you for staying in conversation, even when the words have fallen short.

Thank you for your brilliance, your advocacy, your unwavering care.

Thank you for the joy you carry and the legacy you protect.

You are not visitors in this story.

You are co-creators.

You are not outside the circle. You are alongside us in it.

And we are better — our schools, our classrooms, our communities — because of you.

Joy does not begin and end at the classroom door — it travels home in stories, in drawings, in the way a child walks taller at the end of the day. It lives in the shared glances between caregivers and educators who both know how much this work takes. It lingers in the laughter that starts in the hallway and is remembered again at the dinner table. It grows strongest when families feel not only informed, but included. Not only respected, but essential.

The truth is: schools become more whole when families are not treated as guests, but as co-creators of the space. 

When their questions shape the conversation. 

When their wisdom is trusted. 

When their presence is not managed, but welcomed. 

When their stories are not just acknowledged, but also held with care.

Joy deepens when families know their children are not just succeeding, but being loved in ways that honour who they are and where they come from. 

When learning feels like an extension of home, not a departure from it. 

When trust is not requested once, but cultivated over time.

When that kind of joy takes root, what grows is not just achievement or attendance, but something far more enduring.

It is true belonging.

It is a sense of belonging that is felt across thresholds, trust that travels in every direction, and the quiet knowing that a child does not walk alone between school and home, but is carried by all of us, together.

As Maya Angelou once said: 

“You can never leave home.

You take it with you.

It's under your fingernails.

It's in the way you smile…

It's all there, no matter where you go.”

For Support Staff: Joy as Recognition and Community

There are people who move through our schools with quiet constancy — rarely on the stage, but always in the story.

They are not always named at assemblies or featured in newsletters but they know the rhythm of the school more intimately than anyone else. They are the ones who unlock the building in the morning and lock it again at night. Who clean the floors long after everyone’s gone home. Who know which student needs a second breakfast and which one will not speak until they have been waved to by the bus driver they trust. They are the educational assistants who translate the world into something a child can hold. The lunchroom staff who notice when a student is sitting alone. The adults who carry the heartbeat of the school in their steps, even when others forget to listen for it.

And still, they smile. Still, they listen. Still, they know students by name. Still, they remember birthdays. Still, they create safety without spectacle, joy without performance, community without condition.

Joy grows in schools where these relationships are not seen as “extra,” but as essential. Where support staff are not just thanked, but included. Where they are invited into conversations, into classrooms, into community — not as guests, but as co-creators of culture. When joy is felt by everyone, it begins to shape the air.

I remember one high school I taught at where we were creating a dedicated space for Indigenous students — somewhere that felt warm, inviting, like a place to exhale. The kind of room that held you. It was the facilities team who made that dream real. After school hours, with no fanfare and full of heart, they searched the building for the best chairs and couches — not the ones no one wanted, not the leftovers, but the kind of furniture that said: You belong here. They arranged them so the room felt like a gathering place, not a storage closet. They made sure it was ready by Monday, not because it was urgent for them, but because they knew it was sacred for us.

Sometimes joy looks like a couch someone found for you after-hours so that a child would feel welcome before the week even began.

At another school, it was the caretaking team who showed up in quiet solidarity as our students navigated the pain of racism. They didn’t offer solutions or perform allyship — they simply made space. They saw the late-night club meetings, the after-school debriefs, the hallway conversations that stretched into evening hours, and they didn’t flinch. They didn’t rush us. They didn’t remind us of closing time. They just let it happen and, in doing so, they became part of the rhythm. Part of the after-hours hum of community. Part of the joy.

Sometimes joy sounds like a hallway buzzing with laughter at 6:30 p.m. and someone sweeping nearby who never asks you to stop but joins in the magic of the moment.

And then there are the behavioural support workers — the ones who are often called in when things begin to unravel, but who, if we are being honest, are the reason so much stays together in the first place. I remember one behavioural support worker at a high school where I worked who not only mentored me as a new teacher, but was a safety hub for students across the school multi-generationally, whose presence was so constant, so trusted, and so quietly foundational that none of our success would have been possible without her. She wasn’t just support, she was a bridge: between students and staff, between home and school, between a moment of crisis and a moment of care. She knew which students needed a soft landing before anyone else noticed they were slipping. She held stories no one else had earned the right to hear. She helped shape the emotional rhythm of the school — not through command, but through connection.

Sometimes joy isn’t loud — it’s the steady presence of someone who sees what others miss, and stays anyway.

These moments never made it onto a data tracker, but they made the school feel alive.

What if we began to see these acts for what they really are — not extras, not accidents, but essential threads in the fabric of belonging? What if we documented care the way we document compliance? What if we remembered that a student’s relationship with the educational assistant, the bus driver, the lunch supervisor, might be the one safe relationship they have at school?

What if an educational assistant’s quiet encouragement was the reason a student stayed in the building one more day? What if the way a bus driver greeted a child determined how they walked into first period? What if the space a custodian keeps tidy is not only safe and clean as an environment but sacred — because it makes room for something to happen?

These are not small things.

They are the architecture of joy.

Support staff do not orbit the edges of education. They hold its centre — quietly, steadily, without asking to be seen. Every secretary is an oracle and the smile that greets you at the door. They carry the unsaid weight of the school day, noticing what others overlook, showing up when no one else can and holding space not because it is easy, but because they understand what it means to be needed.

They are not defined by their tasks, but by their tenderness. Not remembered for their schedules, but for the way they made someone feel safe. Not listed on the leadership teams, but leading all the same — in laughter, in compassion, in constancy.

The truth is, the joy in our schools — the real kind, the sustaining kind, the kind that makes a student come back tomorrow — often lives in the people who are least credited for it.

And still, they give it freely.

This is not a footnote. This is the foundation.

They have always been here — not waiting to be acknowledged, but choosing to show up with the kind of quiet consistency that keeps a school from unraveling. Long before the bell rings and long after the lights dim, they are present — in the rhythm of the hallways, in the trust of students who feel seen by them, in the countless small gestures that hold more impact than any headline. Their work is not defined by tasks completed but by the sense of safety they create, the belonging they cultivate, the way they make a building feel like a place worth entering.

To recognize the people who make this possible is not only to offer praise — it is to align our words with reality. A school’s strength has never lived solely in its policies or programs, but in its people — and it is these people who have been holding the foundation all along.

They are the ones who make joy possible in the first place.

The more we honour that — not through performative gestures, but through our everyday choices — the closer we come to building a school culture where everyone, truly everyone, gets to belong.

You are the reason so many students come back the next day. 

You are the reason the school holds together.

And for all the ways you show up — seen and unseen — we are endlessly grateful.

From Soil to Bloom: Practices for Cultivating Joy

Joy cannot be mandated, measured, or managed…but it can be nurtured.

Like all things that grow, it requires conditions that are often invisible to those who do not rely on them: psychological safety, cultural responsiveness, trust, spaciousness, and a deep respect for the many ways learning moves — through emotion, through relationship, through movement and memory, through the stories we carry and the connections we build along the way.

Joy does not thrive in urgency, nor does it bloom in classrooms governed solely by control, efficiency, or the constant pressure to produce. It grows slowly and relationally, in places where students feel seen, where their identities are affirmed, and where their questions are treated not as interruptions but as openings. It emerges when the environment says, in every possible way: you matter here — not because of what you achieve but because of who you are.

To cultivate joy is not to layer one more initiative onto a system already straining under the weight of too many expectations. It is to pause, to listen, and to ask what needs to be composted — what beliefs, what habits, what assumptions must be returned to the earth in order for something more beautiful to take root. It is not a softening of rigour, but a return to purpose. It is not a break from learning — it is the condition for deep learning to occur.

To speak of cultivating joy without cultural responsiveness is to miss the heart of the work, because joy is never neutral — it rises from the stories that are centred, the languages that are honoured, the ways of knowing that are welcomed and woven into the learning itself. When a student must silence parts of themselves in order to participate, when their histories are framed only in units or months, when their brilliance is only acknowledged through the lens of assimilation, then the conditions for joy are compromised from the start.

Cultural responsiveness is not an add-on to pedagogy — it is the soil from which everything grows. It ensures that joy is not reserved for those already reflected in the dominant narrative, but extended to every student as a birthright, as a possibility, as a way of being that requires no translation.

As Dr. Zaretta Hammond reminds us, “Cultural responsiveness is not a practice; it’s what informs our practice so we can make better teaching choices for eliciting, engaging, motivating, supporting, and expanding the intellectual capacity of ALL our students.” Cultural responsiveness is not simply something we do — it is the lens that guides how we teach, how we build trust, and how we make joy possible in the first place.

These practices are not formulas or checklists. They will not guarantee joy, nor should they; however, they can help us pay closer attention to the conditions we create and to the ways we either honour or inhibit the full humanity of the young people in our care. They are not strategies to control joy, but invitations to make space for it — to tend the soil, to offer the water, to remove what keeps the roots from reaching deep. They are gestures of commitment to the relationships we are tending — slowly, intentionally, and with the kind of care that honours aliveness, restores connection, and makes room for joy to grow.

They are, quite simply, ways of being.

Story-Rich Learning Environments

In classrooms where joy is present, stories are not treated as distractions from content — they are the content. They are how we make meaning, how we connect across difference, how we remember who we are. When students are invited to share the narratives that live in their names, their families, their neighbourhoods, and their imaginations, the classroom becomes less about transmission and more about transformation.

Story-rich environments do more than validate identity — they expand what counts as knowledge. They teach us that wisdom doesn’t only live in textbooks, but in migration stories, in recipes, in resistance, in rhythm, in the silence between generations and the language that bridges it.

When we make space for storytelling, we offer students a mirror and a megaphone: a way to see themselves reflected and a way to be heard on their own terms. We signal that their lives are not sidebars to the curriculum — they are the curriculum.

In doing so, we make joy possible — not because everything is easy, but because everything is connected.

This might look like:

• Students creating digital story maps tracing ancestral migration, interwoven with current events that matter to them.

• A poetry unit grounded in oral traditions, bilingual verses, or neighbourhood soundscapes.

• Family interviews that become the basis of inquiry — not just as artifacts, but as anchors.

• Zines, podcast episodes, or collaborative memoirs that treat everyday life as worthy of study.

Story-rich classrooms say: You belong here. Your truth is welcome. And what you carry is enough to begin.

Sensory and Somatic Experiences

Joy is not just felt in the mind — it lives in the body.

It arrives through rhythm, through movement, through breath. It shows up in the way sunlight spills across the floor during silent reading, in the beat of music pulsing through a lesson, in the exhale that comes when someone finally feels safe enough to stay.

Too often, schooling has asked students to disconnect from their bodies in order to be deemed “focused.”

Still hands.

Quiet feet.

Eyes on the front.

Joy doesn’t thrive in stillness imposed by fear.

It grows in movement that feels like freedom.

When we invite sensory and somatic experiences into our classrooms, we are not “adding engagement” — we are restoring relationship.

Between learners and their bodies.

Between bodies and the land.

Between emotions and the nervous system that holds them.

This might look like:

• Starting the day with walking reflections, where students move in pairs while answering open-ended prompts.

• Bringing the outdoors into the learning through classroom gardens, local nature walks, or just opening the door and letting fresh air shift the room.

• Integrating rhythm into lessons whether through percussion, clapping patterns, dance, or even shared playlists that anchor the energy of a task.

• Honouring rest as a part of learning through body scans, breathing exercises, or simply protecting moments of pause.

When students are allowed to move, to feel, to rest, and to return they don’t simply stay regulated — they stay present.

And presence is where joy begins.

Celebrations of Learning

Joy deepens when we pause to notice what has been created, discovered, or become — not only at the end, but along the way.

When we honour the learning process as worthy of celebration in its own right, we shift the culture from performance to presence, from perfection to participation, from “what did you get?” to “what did you make possible?”

Celebration does not mean spectacle. It does not require glitter or grand productions. It can be quiet, reflective, communal. A way of saying, we see what you’ve done — and we see who you are becoming through it.

In classrooms where celebration is woven into the rhythm of learning, joy is not reserved for the “finished product.” It is found in the unfolding. It is found in the gallery walk where students pin up drafts and witness one another’s growth; in the open mic where a single sentence lands and the room breathes together; in the moment a student says: “I didn’t think I could do this…and now I have.”

This might look like:

• Hosting student-led exhibitions, zines, or showcases that centre voice and process, not just polish.

• Creating time for peer-to-peer celebration circles, where students name what they have noticed in each other’s work.

• Inviting families and community members into the learning, not as observers, but as co-celebrants joining in the inquiry, the questions, the joy.

• Framing assessments as moments of reflection and storytelling: What did you learn? What surprised you? What will you carry forward?

To celebrate learning is not to distract from rigour — it is to make the rigour visible. To say:

You did this.

We did this.

And it matters.

Relational Rituals

Joy takes root in repetition — not in the rigid sense of routine, but in the sacred sense of rhythm.

When we create rituals that centre connection, we remind students that school is not just a place of instruction — it is a place of belonging.

A place where they are known.

A place where they matter.

Rituals are not about control, they are about anchoring. They offer predictability in uncertain worlds and make space for the pause before the learning begins and for the breath before the leap. They become the heartbeat of the classroom: not loud, not flashy, but steady and felt.

In classrooms where relational rituals live, joy doesn’t have to be summoned. It arrives through consistency, through care made visible, through practices that say: You are not just one of many. You are held here. You are remembered.

This might look like:

• Greeting every student by name, every day — not just as a formality, but as a practice of recognition.

• Opening each week with a grounding ritual: a poem, a quote, a moment of stillness, a shared intention.

• Keeping joy journals, community gratitude walls, or reflective rituals that help students mark the moments that matter to them.

• Protecting time for art, for play, for conversation — for the things that don’t always fit in the margins but that shape the meaning of the day.

Rituals remind us that belonging is not a one-time welcome — it is a continuous gesture. Joy is what grows when those gestures are trusted, repeated, and real.

Radical Attunement

To cultivate joy is to pay attention not in passing, but with intention. It is to notice the small shifts: the spark in a student’s eye when they are onto something, the quiet withdrawal before it becomes disconnection, the way the energy in the room bends toward a question that was not on the lesson plan. Attunement is not about control — it is about presence — and joy grows in classrooms where presence is practiced, not as perfection, but as care.

Radical attunement asks us to release our grip on what should happen, and instead ask: What is happening? What is this moment inviting? What is this student trying to show me with their silence, their rhythm, their resistance, their light?

It requires us to trust that our plans are not more important than our people.

This might look like:

• Pivoting mid-lesson because the students are leading somewhere more alive than the slide deck.

• Making space for a question that veers off-topic but opens something true.

• Adjusting the pace of the day not to accommodate behaviour but to honour energy.

• Noticing when a student needs movement instead of redirection, quiet instead of correction, conversation instead of consequence.

Attunement is not about abandoning structure — it is about allowing structure to serve the humans in the room. It is not about lowering expectations — it is about listening closely enough to raise the right ones.

Joy doesn’t always announce itself: sometimes it enters quietly, asking only that we be still enough to receive it.

Radical attunement is how we learn to listen.

Sometimes, the change is barely visible. A student lingers after the bell to finish a sentence they weren’t sure they were allowed to write. A classroom that once felt heavy hums a little softer, not because everything is easier, but because something feels safer. You notice a quiet voice growing steadier. A group that once resisted working together leans in — not perfectly, but willingly. The lesson plan didn’t go as planned, but no one wants to leave yet. You let the moment stretch. You let it hold.

No one hands you a certificate for that.

There’s no checkbox for “the room felt whole today.”

And yet, that is where joy lives.

Not in the scripted outcomes or polished deliverables, but in the unscripted return when students come back, when trust deepens, when someone says “this feels different and good” and can’t quite name why.

Joy does not shout its arrival. It grows slowly. It roots quietly. It reshapes the atmosphere one moment at a time.

When we commit to making space for it — not just once, but as a way of being — something shifts. The room opens. The air lightens. The learning expands. School begins to feel less like something to survive and more like something we are creating together on purpose, with love, from the ground up.

When joy is tended with intention, school does not only prepare us for life.

It becomes a place where life begins.

Reflective Questions to Nourish Joy

Like any good garden, cultivating joy requires reflection.

Joy is not a static feeling — it is a relationship we return to, a choice we make again and again in the face of exhaustion, pressure, and urgency.

To centre joy in our practice is not to chase ease or avoid complexity, but to remember that learning — real learning — requires care.

Requires breath.

Requires space to become.

So before you move on, pause here. 

Take a breath.

Then another one.

Then one more.

Sit with the following questions and allow them the space to linger. 

For Educators:

• What are the moments when you feel most alive in your classroom?

• How do your daily routines invite wonder, laughter, and belonging?

• How do you attend to the joy of your colleagues and co-educators?

For Leaders:

• Is joy a visible and protected value in your school culture?

• What systems or policies inadvertently sap joy from students or staff?

• How might you create conditions where joy is not the exception, but the expectation?

For All of Us:

• What stories of joy live in your school right now?

• How might you tend to them with more care, visibility, and intention?

The kind of joy we are speaking of is not fleeting or performative — it is ancestral, relational, earned through care and held in community. It is the kind of joy that can weather hard seasons, that can live alongside grief, that can keep us tethered when everything else begins to fray.

It is not a reward for those who get it right.

It is a practice. A presence. A way of being.

If we choose to tend to it — with intention, with humility, with love — then joy doesn’t just visit.

It stays.

It grows.

It changes everything.

The Light That Lives Through the Leaves

Joy does not need permission and it does not wait for the perfect moment.

It asks only for space — space to move, to breathe, to return.

It is not something we manufacture or display.

It is something we make room for through the daily, imperfect, generous act of showing up.

It does not arrive all at once and it does not ask to be noticed. Joy is quiet like that. It filters in through the canopy — slow and steady, golden and ordinary — touching everything we have taken the time to tend. It lives in the spaces where trust has been cultivated, where care has been practiced, where community has been shaped not by compliance, curation, or conformity — but by connection.

This is not the kind of joy that can be posted, packaged, or performed. It is not interested in looking impressive. It is interested in staying, in lingering, in reminding us that learning is not a transaction, but a relationship. That school can be more than a place we pass through — it can be a place where we remember ourselves to one another.

To centre joy is to believe that something sacred is still possible, even here. It is to offer a different rhythm in a world obsessed with speed, shallowness, and superficiality. It is to trust that sunlight will find its way through, even if we cannot always see it.

Let us teach for joy.

Let us lead with joy.

Let us return to joy again and again — not as a break from the work or an escape from our lives, but as the very soil it grows from, the canopy that holds it, and the light that reminds us we are still becoming.

Real joy is not the light we shine outward — it is the warmth that lingers in the soil long after the sun has set, the pulse that remains when the performance is over, the quiet knowing that something beautiful took root and never asked to be seen to matter.

And in that quiet, without applause or audience, joy becomes what it was always meant to be…

True, untamed, and entirely our own.

In the rhythm with breath, with purpose, with joy,

Ms. K