“teaching as �healing justice”

Not a Checkbox: Engaging in a Culture of Equitable Teaching

sarah madoka currie for York University, live version 16 May 2023

hyflex conferencing call-in

In this space, we like to ensure everyone feels invited into the circle.

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I am a digital presence today, and I hope that makes digital attendees of the conference feel validated, seen and heard in space. It is important to ensure that when we “move back” toward embodied spaces of collaboration, we do not do that at the cost of those to whom “moving back” never served – those to whom physical conferences never properly accommodated before apocalypse time forced widespread digitization of participation and increased access/entry rights.

I take up space here to call for more mindful deliberations around how our conferences manifest, and who & how these manifestations serve most. Thank you, DEDI 2023!

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For those of you doing synchronous learning, hello/ bonjour/ ohayou and aanii!

My name is sarah, and I have a lot of opinions about teaching, some of which you may even consider helpful or thoughtful when we think about spaces, students and solidarity. I write nearly everything I am saying today so this presentation can be engaged with multi-format: synchronous, recorded, or as a textual lesson.

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timechecked agenda

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embodied avenues (12 min.)

self-orientation avenues (10 min.)

callback / your turn [all-play] (20 min.)

setting context (5 min.)

digital avenues (12 min.)

context

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ready? okay!

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Let’s start by setting up a context we can agree upon.

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is healing justice a thing?

All justice space is contested space, and different visionary movements across intersectional zones of engagement use these words slightly differently.

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In this space, I will be using “healing justice” derived from emergent storytelling in restorative justice, Black liberation, harm reduction pharmacomedicalization and disability justice community frameworks. That does not mean other movements’ variations of this term are invalid, lesser, or unimportant.

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is healing justice a thing?

When we think about healing justice, we engage in very complicated intersectional pathways of determining what words we use when. As teachers, the words we use, don’t use, or choose to consciously avoid have huge rhetorical power.

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To heal, we think about restoring harm dealt (even if we did not deal it!), welcoming others into our circles (even if we did not intentionally exclude them!), cheering on those who added value to our lives (even if they don’t hear us!) and creating spaces that radically permit discomfort (even if we feel it and don’t want to!).

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Another way we might say this is that to be truly anti-oppressive, we� must hold ourselves, each other, and our allies accountable for harmful� structures, even if we do not feel truly “at fault”. We cannot repair the� past, but we can mindfully reintegrate students left behind into our� futures, and love more radically as teachers.

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So when I am thinking about creating healing in my undergraduate classrooms, I decided to focus my energies on five “elements” of justice-centered direct action. I made a little diagram of it, and I called it cozy space:

Naturally, all of these are important and work symbiotically –

but for our chat together this morning, I would like to focus on:

• mad-positive teaching and
• community-first facilitation.

what are those??

COMMUNITY-FIRST FACILITATION: is a way of being in space that overcommits to team play and mutual aid as a way of drawing attention to (and critiquing) the atomistic nature of higher education and its relationship to deservingness rhetorics.

Under the “traditional” model, every student is a lonely genius who achieves everything “fairly”, with no help from any outside resources, using neuronormative ideas of “intelligence”. To be community-first, we reject this mythology – true radical research is done in community, and learning (and performing!) ethical research is a team sport.

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MAD-POSITIVE PRACTICES: intentionally call into question the neuronormative way of thinking, knowing, adjudicating, facilitating and being-in-spaces where we know not every student (or teacher!) is “normal”. By leaning into abnormality and the discomfort it produces, we can create radical spaces of community building and deep listening/learning.

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My theory is that by leveraging lessons from beloved communities and madness (or ND/mental illness/etc.), we can build more transformative spaces of healing for students.

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digital avenues

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how do we build safe, cozy communities of learning in online space?

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digital spacemaking considerations

We also have to consider use of technologies that better platform being in space with others, rather than single-player models.

dataveillance rejection

It is our responsibility to reduce use of technologies whose primary obligation is the collection and re-presentation of student information.

community opportunity

create reward architectures

Teachers can leverage the power they are given in the classroom to create schemas that reward community learning, mutual aid, and investing in others’ research.

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consider: Discord (community) versus Zoom (single-player)

Screen capture from personal server, 2022)

consider: Discord (community) versus Zoom (single-player)

(Screen capture from TakeNote, 2021)

consider: Discord (community) versus Zoom (single-player)

Why don’t we like single-player modelling?

• visual privileging of those who participate “normatively” (see: cameras-on)
• overlay structure of text-based participation, dissuades alt-format or alt-engage
• single-window and single-attention architecture
• surveillance of space and how you perform within that space, or whether that space is sufficiently normative or palatable for other members
• prioritizes functions like “attendance check” over access considerations

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We want spaces that can:

• dissuade cameras-on defaults and surveillance of space/performative space
• offer multiple avenues to stim, engage “abnormally”, participate “after-hours”
• consider ND accomms (e.g. text-first participation, motion reduce, TTS, saved transcripts, collaborative note-taking, colour reduction, multi-input participation)
• accommodate reduced technology interfacing (re: digital divide/ class warfare)
• offer multiple opportunities to see and engage with community members (especially when you are not surveilling space)

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on dataveillance

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I can choose to create healing by committing to using D2L/Brightspace/Canvas/etc. only for functions that I cannot replicate elsewhere, and telling students the extent to which their information is collected on these platforms:

• this includes: login times, login architectures, IP/location (at some schools), page check duration, application use duration, text entry (even deleted text!), discussion board duration, gradebook duration, cross-checking grade values (ALL registered courses - not just yours!), “habit” schedules and “at-risk” impact scoring.
• dataveillance architectures will always punish disabled and mad students, because their ways of interfacing with digital systems will never read as “normal” - and we have created “normal” baselines for them to “fail” (in algorithmic checks)
• but i can go beyond mindful refusal - I can create healing justice architectures that capitalize on difference to create spaces of productive discomfort and meaning.

community opportunity/reward

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Instead of rewarding students for normative structures of “achievement”, I can also choose to create restorative space by creating grade/LO schemas that reward their development as researchers in communities of practice - not repeaters of information.

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Some ways into this include:

• my grade schemas are 50% weighted toward teamplay activities
• I build in metamethodology training in the activities I assign, including: how to present compellingly, how to do “group work”, how to divide tasks, how to make a workable research schedule, how to adjust and assess expectations of others
• I do wellness checks 3 times a term to make the classroom a dialectical space of engagement and more carefully assess which words are connecting (and which aren’t!)

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how can we be more mad-positive in the classroom?

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I know you know more about this!

so let’s do neurodivergence:

mindful rejection of productivity words

re-committing to multiformat and multiresult

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I’ll use lived experience expertise:

I never liked asking for accommodations, but I was very willing to read into any way I didn’t “fit in” or “cohere” as a personal failure.

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As a neurodivergent student, I disliked words like “optimize”, “normal”, “crazy”, “high/low”, “poor”, “inattentive”, “alternative”, “legitimate” and “objective” (non-exhaustively!). It felt less like commentary on my work, and more like commentary about how different I was from other students. Our rubrics, while well-meaning, often subtly sort students into the normal/expected way and the way I am tacitly accepting, but still considering abnormal.

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This rhetoric is basically how accommodation works. We authorize “another way”, but we still use the word “alternative”, which is akin to words like “special” or “abnormal”.

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By authorizing performance in ways we might not recognize as the default classroom orientation, we introduce discomfort for ourselves (because this introduces dynamism!) - but incredibly valuable comfort for students who will never ask for it.

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words to play with

Instead of “does anyone need more help?” or “if anyone needs modifications…”, we can choose our words more carefully to move away from accommodation as <alternative> and toward accommodation as a <default> orientation in our spaces:

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• does anyone need this component/theory said another way?
• if you have thought of a tech to use that I haven’t, please tell your team!
• I liked [x’s] idea about adding scrapbooking as a mode of engagement. I wonder if there are more ways of completing that activity that I didn’t suggest already?
• these investigations only work if everyone feels invited into the circle. If you didn’t feel invited today, can we work on ways to let me know that information?

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Along the same lines, I mindfully reject use of rubrics in favour of assessing students using a combination of their perspective (“ungrading”) and my own (comparative/LXP).

This also allows much greater scalability of multiformat assessments and “alt” completion.

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self-orientation avenues

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Now we have to do the real work, in order to show up for others.

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let’s think about how to show up better.

all we are and be and do in the world, according to intersectional practice.

our immediate people, our allies, our teaching partners and students.

our greater circle that we use to make sense of the world.

self

our inner circle, our school, our department or geographical region.

community

other

discourse community

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so we start with the self & healing justice.

All justice space is contested space, and different visionary movements across intersectional zones of engagement use these words slightly differently.

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I need to know how I am situated - and I need to be able to engage with this information non-tokenistically and non-defensively. When I put these ideas back in conversation with healing justice, I need to know how to repair or restore harm dealt toward me in order to show up for harm dealt (by myself or others) to people I care about.

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This means that it is my responsibility to prioritize collective care above my own immediate needs when I am required to, and have safe pathways to deal with my harm in spaces that can handle and properly honour it.

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so we start with the self & healing justice.

I’ll use myself as an example, but pathways to healing are iterative and continual. Your pathway will look different, and your kaleidoscopic lens is both valid and valuable however it manifests today. You need to be intimately familiar with how your kaleidoscope renders information.

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I think about the ways I have been called upon to survive or create harm (systemically, personally and geographically):

• My whiteness, my education level, my linguistic ability, my Canadian heritage can HARM and impact those to whom these systems never served or helped.
• My madness, my multiculturality, my community service, my multinational experiences, my multilingualism can HELP provide spaces of warmth and coziness for those who are struggling with these systems.
• My experiences with sexism, racism, overt violence, abandonment, classism, ableism, sanism and institutionalization are powerful HARMS committed against me, and I need to spend extra time choosing my words in ways that honour my lived experience expertise AND the pathways of others who struggle.

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student suicidality

In order to pre-empt and counter harm, you have to have tough conversations with yourself about why we’re in higher education, what we teach, and who those conversations consistently leave behind (even if we are not solely at fault).

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Last year, I found 47 on-campus suicides at North American higher education institutions.

We know that this data is not properly tracked and graphed (especially in Canada), so the “true” number is likely much higher.

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No one at our institutions “wanted” students to die, but students are dying and our “student wellness” solutions are consistently defensive, rather than proactive. We create responsibility absolution (with avenues that show faux-support modelling) rather than radically changing conditions at our universities, in our faculties, and in our classroom spaces.

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teaching as healing justice

This year, I want less students to die.

I want to argue much less over who is responsible, or who should be. These arguments ultimately create accessibility apology – not radical access.

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I want more healing arguments: what can we implement now, today?

• Reduce the use of dataveillance systems in your classroom.
• Leverage your graded outcomes toward community development and social skills.
• Consciously reward efforts that de-atomize student “achievement”.
• Relentlessly interrogate “normative” classrooms - and who they leave out.
• Try to reduce use of “productivity” centered words in lessons, rubrics and outcomes.
• Prioritize assessments that can be completed in multiple ways.
• Reorient word choices to make “abnormal” the default, not the accommodation.
• Spend time with the self in relation to healing justice outcomes.
• Critically assess your intersectional matrix: where do you help, and harm?
• Prioritize student survival, including advocating for the tracking of student suicides on your home campus.

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your turn!

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also see: “oh my goodness she is finally done soapboxing”

ALL PLAY ACTIVITY: synchronous version

here’s the jamboard. now you try!

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JAMBOARD LINK:

https://jamboard.google.com/d/1AdJCLUsHWLeGneF0ZbL5ugW8HKFQaYmiUb8Cb8gs-D0/edit?usp=sharing

thank you/arigatou :)

for both synchronous and asynchronous learners, you can follow up with me via the avenues below! �I love when you call back with your own remixes:

DISCORD / mochaccino#6732

TWITTER* / @kawaiilovesarah�* please note DMing me is extremely slow!

E-MAIL / sarah.madoka.currie@gmail.com

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Por favor, conserva esta diapositiva para atribuirnos

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CRÉDITOS: Esta plantilla para presentaciones es una creación de Slidesgo, e incluye iconos de Flaticon, e infografías e imágenes de Freepik