Workshop 3 - Teaching In Context: Why And How Location Matters (Presented by the Teaching Section)

W313 - Workshop 3 - Teaching In Context: Why And How Location Matters

Date: Jun 4 | Time: 01:45pm to 03:15pm | Location:

Chair/Président/Présidente : Katherine Boothe (McMaster University)

Discussant/Commentateur/Commentatrice : Clare McGovern (Simon Fraser University)

“At least we’re not as bad as the US”: The politicization of EDI in Canadian academia: Fikir Haile (Acadia University), Stéfanie von Hlatky (Queen's University)
Abstract: Recent attempts by academic institutions to address longstanding systemic inequities and foster inclusion are increasingly coming under attack. Efforts to diversify, Indigenize, and decolonize the academy broadly and the social sciences specifically have begun to elicit sharp pushback, not only in our neighbor to the south, but also here in Canada. While not as sensationalized as the discourse in the United States, the debates around recent efforts to promote inclusion and belonging within academia are also polarized in Canada. The criticism of Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) efforts has gone from the fringes of the Canadian media and political landscape to the center. Recent years have seen Canadian think tanks, political commentators, and scholars questioning the value of these efforts and calling for the removal of EDI considerations in hiring, curriculum design, and funding allocation. The paper analyzes the implications of this growing pushback to EDI in the Canadian context. It contends that the increasing politicization of the discourse around EDI has implications for what is considered ‘real’ research and scholarship, positioning work that focuses on what is broadly deemed to be in the EDI realm (i.e. focusing on gendered, racialized, classed, and colonial power relations) as less legitimate. Moreover, the paper argues that as detractors of EDI not only target research areas but also researchers themselves, the ongoing debates affect scholars’ sense of belonging and inclusion, especially those located at the intersection of multiple marginalized identities. The paper concludes by calling on Canadian institutions and scholars to pay attention to these developments and proactively work to protect the minimal gains that have been made in terms of fostering belonging and inclusion in our academic community.

How does prison education differ from university education with respect to the learning experienced by both the instructor and the students?: Peter Lindsay (Georgia State University)
Abstract: To backtrack: when I speak to groups about my eight years of teaching in prisons, people often ask me, “what doyou get out of it?” Over the years, I’ve come to see the answer has something to do with why I’m able to teach university courses time and time again: as each generation of students reads the ancient political texts through a different lens, the issues and ideas keep coming back at me in new and different ways, ways that force me to continually change my views, and that, in the process, reinforce (to me ) the vitality of these texts. I confess, though, nothing about this phenomenon prepared me for prison education. What students in prison classes do with those texts is unlike anything I had experienced in a university. It makes sense: if you’ve been sentenced to prison for life, without the possibility of parole (as many of my students have), you have a different take on what a good life is or what justice entails or what it means to do the right thing or, well,most topics of political thought. In short, prison classrooms, I’ve come to see, are radically different spaces from university classrooms; they alter learning in ways I’m only beginning to understand. In this paper I’ll discuss those differences and explore what pedagogical, social and political factors might account for them.

Individual Context as Motivator for Learning: Creating space for the expression of students’ interests and passions can drive skills learning: Fred Cutler (UBC)
Abstract: Few political science courses are primarily or exclusively defined in terms of skills development. Typically, we allow students’ interests and passions to find their way into assessments related to the course learning objectives defined in terms of content. Over the last six years I have taught a team-based learning course whose primary learning objective is the curation and presentation of information relevant to public affairs. In this paper I document and explain the course design, revision, and student reactions, to substantiate the claim that allowing students to embed their learning in their individual contexts results in gains in both skills and knowledge learning. By allowing students to select and shape the subject matter of their term-long team project, work on which (not final the product) makes up 90% of their final mark, students are internally motivated to learn by discovery, collaboration, and iteration. This internal motivation that comes from the students’ individual contexts powerfully drives the skills development (collaboration, professional writing, information curation, editing, etc.) in this loosely scaffolded project-based learning environment. Moreover, in this course the indirect content learning objective -- getting a ‘feel’ for how the totality of forces come together to generate and implement public policies -- is achieved by stealth, as the students discover these forces as a consequence of their personal, contextual interest in how the policy affects themselves, their families, their communities, and the causes they care about.