U of T alum John Dias is addressing Canada’s shortage of French teachers by changing how it’s taught

John Dias and his start-up Dias Learning are growing out of the Sam Ibrahim Centre for Inclusive Excellence in Entrepreneurship, Innovation and Leadership. Photos by Andrew Rock.

This year’s True Blue Impact Day, U of T’s annual entrepreneurship expo, was bittersweet for alum John Dias (BA 2015 UTSC) – he was there on the two-year anniversary of his father’s death, working to grow the business they started together, Dias Learning.

“The last thing I ever said to my father was, ‘I’m going to do this. I’m going to lead this company,’” says Dias. “Through what he’s taught me and how he guided me, we can continue to help all sorts of other people.”

Dias Learning is an education platform making learning French more engaging and accessible for students, and teaching French less daunting for instructors. He and his father started the company in part because of the severe shortage of French teachers across Canada, despite an almost 80 percent rise in demand for French and French Immersion schooling over the last two decades.

Dias himself hated French classes growing up, it was only after his mother insisted he study it throughout high school that he grew to love the language, going on to earn his specialist in French and a minor in English at U of T Scarborough, becoming a French Immersion teacher in the York Region District School Board where he saw that most students dropped French long before they could develop a similar passion.

“A lot of kids develop a negative attitude towards French. I realized, if we make it interactive, we make it fun, we make it relatable and connected to real-life experiences, children can learn so much more,” says Dias.

It was estimated that in 2021, Canada needed an additional 7,000 to 8,000 French teachers to meet demand, which Dias says leaves many students to learn from teachers who themselves only have a tenuous grasp on the language. He also recognized a serious disparity in education quality between students who could afford private tutoring and those who could not. 

“It creates such a big discrepancy between families who have money and those who don’t,” Dias says. “A lot of the time teachers who are not experienced in French end up teaching French classes, some can’t speak French at all. At the very least if they have resources and lesson plans, they’re better able to teach the lessons.”  

Dias set out to create interactive French lessons and programs that would engage students who may find the standard French curriculum stale or hard to follow, and particularly resonate with students that have non-traditional learning styles. The company has since made a suite of interactive resources, from games and books, to lesson plans for teachers, study tools, and listings of free French-focused online resources. It also provides tutoring, and educational programming, events and workshops, brought in by organizations like summer camps, libraries, schools and more. 

Dias Learning’s heavyweight resource is its interactive magazine, each edition packed with activities that give the French curriculum a colourful and often bodily-kinesthetic spin. Many incorporate learning through play and the arts.

Several of these activities are co-created by undergraduate students with the support and revisions of a certified French Immersion teacher, as part of two U of T Scarborough course for aspiring French teachers. Working with Dias Learning, the students hone their teaching skills at the company’s free community events.

“We have a lot of people here who would be interested in teaching, but they don’t want to teach French the way they were taught French,” says Dias, who earned his teaching degree from the Ontario Institute of Secondary Education and a master’s in French in 2019 from U of T.

Dias’ father, Frank, didn’t know French – he knew business, and had an MBA and an unwavering support for his son. Dias didn’t think he’d need to know about entrepreneurship, since he could lean on his father for help with monetizing their company. Then, in 2023, Dias’ father died.

“My circumstances changed drastically when my father died, I realized that I’d have to learn all these things,” says Dias.

But Dias found support through his long-standing relationships at his alma mater, returning 10 years after completing his undergrad, with U of T Entrepreneurship and one of U of T Scarborough’s business incubators, the Sam Ibrahim Centre for Inclusive Excellence in Entrepreneurship, Innovation and Leadership (SICIEEIL) (formerly The Hub). With help from the incubator's Level Up program, Dias says he’s getting a wide array of skills that help entrepreneurs thrive, like brand building, securing funding, and scaling new business assets he says, “would normally be expensive for an entrepreneur.”

Dias aims to continue getting Dias Learning’s programming and resources to more students. 

“I saw the difference French made in my life, job opportunities, my career path,” Dias says. “If we change French education, especially in such a way that includes non-traditional learners and kids with learning disabilities, it could be something to be really beneficial to society.”

Originally published by University of Toronto Scarborough