{"id":902,"date":"2021-08-25T10:26:55","date_gmt":"2021-08-25T18:26:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dev.wordpress.kpu.ca\/tlcommons\/?p=902"},"modified":"2021-08-25T10:26:56","modified_gmt":"2021-08-25T18:26:56","slug":"now-is-the-time-to-be-brave-pedagogy-for-a-world-in-transition","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dev.wordpress.kpu.ca\/tlcommons\/now-is-the-time-to-be-brave-pedagogy-for-a-world-in-transition\/","title":{"rendered":"Now is the Time to Be Brave: Pedagogy for a World in Transition"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

For many of us, the last 18 months have been a time of transition and turmoil as we have faced a global pandemic, a growing climate emergency<\/a>, increased racial violence<\/a>, and the impacts of historical and ongoing colonization<\/a> (to name just a few of the issues that have arisen in 2020-21). As a university community we have pivoted online<\/a>, worked hard to care for students and each other<\/a>, and implemented frameworks<\/a>, Task Forces<\/a>, committees<\/a>, and projects<\/a> to address historical and ongoing injustice and imagine new ways of teaching, researching, and engaging with community. This work is ongoing, and as we enter the 2021-2022 academic year, so much feels tenuous and uncertain to me. It\u2019s hard to imagine what this year will hold, and what everything \u2014 our classrooms institutions, societies, and environment \u2014 will look like in another 12 months.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But despite my considerable trepidation, I also find myself feeling resolute, and I know I\u2019m not alone. Many of us pushed ourselves into new and uncomfortable places over the last year, taking on new roles, adopting new practices, and committing ourselves to difficult and uncomfortable work to make change. Watching my students and colleagues build better, more just worlds as our current world faces so many challenges has been the great joy of the last 18 months, and I\u2019ve been in awe of small acts of courage and kindness. As I plan my courses and think about my work this coming year, I find myself reflecting on those acts and reminding myself again and again: \u201cnow is the time to be brave.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For me, pedagogical bravery means being willing to be let go of my ego and embrace discomfort by learning and unlearning, decentring myself,<\/a> and re-thinking and re-designing when something isn\u2019t working. It means committing to inclusion and justice in my classes and preparing myself so that I can ethically and knowledgeably talk to my students about difficult topics as they arise: climate grief<\/a>, genocide<\/a>, racism<\/a>. It means re-imagining what my classroom could be and inviting my students to experiment with me via an assignment or approach. It means pursuing Jessica Zeller\u2019s vision<\/a> of a \u201cvital pedagogy\u201d that \u201cis impassioned and joyous and nerdy. It refuses to measure what is not legitimately measurable. It does not make objects from subjects. It pushes back against any policy that seeks to silence, falsify, or diminish. Failure is critical, as is self-reflection; it loves these processes\u2014it thrives on them.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Fundamentally re-imagining how I teach has not been an easy process. It is labour-intensive, and it stretches me emotionally and mentally. For that reason, whenever I talk with other faculty about making changes I advocate for small steps. Bravery is important, but we\u2019re only human after all. I also recommend seeking out tools and community as support, and looking for spaces of alignment and overlap. For example, as I\u2019ve thought about anti-oppressive teaching, I\u2019ve noted that self-reflection, transparent communication, a commitment to using the right terminology<\/a>, and the inclusion of diverse voices, methodologies, and perspectives feature strongly in Critical, Anti-Racist, LGBTQ2S+, and Decolonial pedagogies. Similarly, when I\u2019ve thought about ways to encourage greater engagement among diverse learners, I discovered that Open Pedagogy, Universal Design for Learning, and Appreciative Inquiry all promote offering information in different (and sometimes multimodal) ways, providing assignment options so that students can share knowledge in ways that are meaningful to them, and encouraging self-reflection. For me, bravery has meant exploration; it has encouraged me to think less about fidelity to particular methodologies and frameworks and more about the messy spaces of interaction. It has invited me to focus less on critique and more on ways to make things work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Thinking about bravery has also made me more willing to fail. Some of the approaches I\u2019ve adopted in the last year have been dismal failures<\/a>, and others have been surprisingly successful.<\/a> I\u2019ve been trying to accept both in equal measure, and recognize them as part of the process. I often remind myself of the stakes when I take on something new. If it goes wrong, will I harm someone? Sometimes, the answer is yes, because I might not know enough to be an ethical and informed educator and facilitator. In that case, I try to step back or seek out someone with greater expertise. But more often than not, the answer is no; if something goes wrong, it might result in a slight delay, a shifted deadline, a call to IT, or a need to introduce a new resource. I can live with these failures, and I\u2019ve been gratified to receive compassion and encouragement from students and colleagues when I\u2019ve had to suddenly make a change or correction due to a technological glitch, miscalculation, or oversight. Sometimes talking through these failures has led to stronger relationships and collaborative problem-solving, or to discovering a new tool. Bravery doesn\u2019t mean doing it all alone, and as Appreciative Inquiry, Critical Pedagogy, and Reflective Practice remind us, failure and self-reflection are key to learning.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When I think about ways to be braver, more engaged, and more just I find myself increasingly motivated and less anxious. I start seeing spaces of opportunity; I\u2019m more willing to take on challenges because they have purpose. We are all being forced to transform, so my hope is that we can transform in ways that centre care and justice, that foster creativity, and that invite a greater sense of responsibility to each other and our world. If that is the future we want in our classrooms, institutions, and societies, now is the time to be brave.  <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For many of us, the last 18 months have been a time of transition and turmoil as we have faced a global pandemic, a growing climate emergency, increased racial violence, and the impacts of historical and ongoing colonization (to name just a few of the issues that have arisen in 2020-21). As a university community…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":566,"featured_media":903,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"_kad_post_transparent":"","_kad_post_title":"","_kad_post_layout":"","_kad_post_sidebar_id":"","_kad_post_content_style":"","_kad_post_vertical_padding":"","_kad_post_feature":"","_kad_post_feature_position":"","_kad_post_header":false,"_kad_post_footer":false,"_kad_post_classname":"","iawp_total_views":29,"footnotes":""},"categories":[265,10,158,252,50,251,253,84],"tags":[193,268,269,270,187,267,117,168,186,266,36,271,137,60,41,85,46],"class_list":["post-902","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-bravery","category-education-leadership","category-inclusive-pedagogy","category-inclusive-teaching","category-intercultural-teaching","category-learning-technologies","category-reflective-practice","category-universal-design-for-learning","tag-appreciative-inquiry","tag-brave","tag-bravery","tag-inquiry","tag-instructor","tag-kindness","tag-open-pedagogy","tag-pedagogy","tag-professor","tag-reflect","tag-reflection","tag-success","tag-teacher","tag-teaching","tag-udl","tag-universal-design-for-learning","tag-university"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.wordpress.kpu.ca\/tlcommons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/902","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.wordpress.kpu.ca\/tlcommons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.wordpress.kpu.ca\/tlcommons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.wordpress.kpu.ca\/tlcommons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/566"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.wordpress.kpu.ca\/tlcommons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=902"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/dev.wordpress.kpu.ca\/tlcommons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/902\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":904,"href":"https:\/\/dev.wordpress.kpu.ca\/tlcommons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/902\/revisions\/904"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.wordpress.kpu.ca\/tlcommons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/903"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.wordpress.kpu.ca\/tlcommons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=902"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.wordpress.kpu.ca\/tlcommons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=902"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.wordpress.kpu.ca\/tlcommons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=902"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}