Decolonizing Approaches

Decolonizing approaches center on learning about the colonial histories, ideologies, and contemporary conditions shaped by colonialism, settler colonialism, and imperialism. This approach may also involve de-centring Western knowledge systems, such as by focusing on knowledge produced by Indigenous, Black, global south/global two-thirds/global majority, and/or people from racialized, marginalized, and diasporic social locations, or what Kelebogile Zvobgo calls “historically excluded” and the University of British Columbia calls “historically, persistently, or systemically marginalized (HPSM) groups” (UBC Equity and Inclusion Office).

At an individual level, non-Indigenous faculty can approach the call to decolonize by becoming familiar with the debates and models around doing decolonial work in their field(s) and by engaging with Indigenous peoples, cultures, nations, communities, and scholars. Likewise, faculty can learn more about the various decolonial movements and approaches and how these raise different pedagogical and political concerns, such as Black decolonial approaches. Whether implicitly or explicitly using the language of “decolonization,” a similar approach can be used: teaching about colonization, de-naturalizing Western knowledge systems and traditions as universal, and learning about the lives, experiences, and perspectives of Indigenous peoples and colonized peoples.

Unsettling versus Decolonizing: Indigenous Approaches to Decolonization

While departments, programs, and individual faculty members have worked to incorporate decolonial material and approaches in their courses, Indigenous peoples, nations, communities, and scholars have questioned the relationship between decolonization and colonial nation-states. Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang (2012) critique the turn to decolonization as a metaphoric approach to diversifying curriculum, instead calling for a decolonization approach that centres on land repatriation to Indigenous peoples. Rather than using decolonization as a metaphor for justice, Tuck and Yang call for an unsettling of settler colonialism—a process that makes colonial institutions, like education, incommensurable with Indigenous sovereignty and futures (2012). Similarly, Glen Coulthard (2014) argues that attempts to recognize and accommodate Indigenous peoples within colonial institutions reinforce rather than decolonize colonial systems.

Regardless of the possible limitations of decolonization as an approach to curriculum and pedagogy, the concept of decolonization remains a compelling call to action for systemic change at the institutional level, such as through:

1. Ethical hiring of Indigenous peoples at all levels at the university using Indigenous-led protocols (Lawford and Coburn 2019);
2. Working with local communities around land repatriation;
3. Reparation through designated funding and resource allocation;
4. Requiring training at all levels of the post-secondary institution on the history and contemporary conditions shaping Indigenous peoples – including anti-discrimination and anti-bias training.

Black Studies Approaches to Decolonization

A number of scholars across Indigenous Studies, Black Studies, African Studies, pan-Africanism, Afro-pessimism, Afro-Caribbean and Afro-Latin Studies, Critical Ethnic Studies, and related fields have debated the relationship between the concept of decolonization across Black and Indigenous frameworks (Byrd 2019; Harris 2019; Medak-Saltzman and Tiongson 2015; Sexton 2016), with many scholars arguing that Indigenous and Black peoples have shared yet different legacies of colonial violence (Day 2015; Dei 2018; Karuka 2017; Lethabo King 2019; Maynard 2019; Simpson 2016). For Harris (2019), the connection between Black and Indigenous struggles is articulated through the project of white supremacy and white property, wherein whiteness is “a construct that depended upon the global expropriation of land and labour from Blacks and Indigenous peoples” (222). Jamilah Dei-Sharpe (PhD candidate at Concordia University) draws on George Dei’s 2018 work to argue that epistemic decolonizing must be grounded in community mobilization and activism; the centring of Indigenous and African intellectual traditions in the curriculum through “relationality, sharing, reciprocity, spirituality, agency and communal accountability” (154); and through the incorporation of community learning with Indigenous and African elders and knowledge-sharing with global educators and amongst peers (171). At the root of this work is a critique of the erasure of Black histories and state violence in education and the role of decolonizing curriculum that transforms anti-Black ideologies within education. This area of work calls for building connections between the history and legacy of colonization and slavery in ways that build solidarity between Indigenous and Black liberation struggles.

Debates in Decolonial Frameworks

Despite the strength of building solidarity across decolonial struggles, some Indigenous scholars and communities have critiqued the connections between Indigenous and non-Indigenous struggles, which they argue risk erasing or conflating the specificity of Indigenous experiences and peoples, particularly with regards to land claims, land repatriation, Indigenous resurgence, and sovereignty (Cook-Lynn 1997; Lawrence and Dua 2005). This topic has been most readily debated by Lawrence and Dua (2005) and Sharma and Wright (2008) over the role of migrants, immigrants, and racialized people in the project of settler colonialism. Although further discussion of the debates on this topic is beyond the scope of this guidebook, readers who may be interested in further scholarly discussion in this area can check the Academic Scholarship on Decolonization and Settler Colonialism in this section for appropriate resources and further discussions on decolonial frameworks.

Indigenizing Curriculum and Pedagogy

The Indigenization of curriculum and pedagogy involves centring Indigenous knowledge systems and perspectives from Indigenous peoples, nations, and communities over those of Western and colonial knowledge systems. Rather than rely on Western critiques of colonialism, this approach involves bringing to the forefront Indigenous models and methods of knowledge, education (teaching and learning), research, governance, etc. While non-Indigenous faculty may use the strategy of Indigenizing their courses—by reframing their syllabi and assignments using Indigenous knowledge systems, texts, materials, and perspectives—there are ethical questions about whether Indigenization can happen without a transformation of our universities to center Indigenous peoples as teachers, administrators, knowledge holders, and community leaders. Further, the role of post-secondary institutions and education in both historic and contemporary colonization raises questions about the impact of strategies around Indigenization that risk tokenizing or exploiting Indigenous scholars, thinkers, and community members. Faculty who choose to take an Indigenizing approach to their teaching by reorganizing their courses to centre on Indigenous knowledge and perspectives might do so by incorporating field-specific content that is Indigenous in origin and/or reworking non-Indigenous course content through Indigenous methods and approaches.

Settler Colonialism and White Supremacy

Another approach faculty can take when thinking about decolonization and Indigenization is to complement learning from Indigenous perspectives with learning about colonialism, settler colonialism, and white supremacy (Mackey 2016; Morgensen 2011). These approaches can help non-Indigenous students better understand their own role within systems and structures of historic and ongoing violence through the relationship between institutions—such as the state, education, legal systems, etc.—and systems of power. Understanding white supremacy as a colonial and institutional structure and not simply as a personal prejudice can deepen decolonial pedagogies and help students understand the importance of Indigenous knowledge systems, traditions, cultures, communities, nations, and peoples.

Acknowledging the Indigenous territories we are situated within has increasingly become a standard practice at post-secondary and community events. Beyond simply reading the official territorial acknowledgment of their given institution, faculty are encouraged to understand how and why we give acknowledgement and to develop thoughtful and reflexive acknowledgements when used. However, giving a territorial or land acknowledgement is complicated by the critiques of how these practices have become institutionalized and evacuated of their meaning.

When acknowledgements are given within a university context in a repeated recitation of the institution’s official statement, especially by non-Indigenous members, it can reinforce the settler colonial power structures that shape the relationship between educational institutions and Indigenous peoples and communities (King 2019).

To address the above critiques and limitations of non-Indigenous territorial or land acknowledgements, many groups have suggested more thoughtful approaches to crafting and giving acknowledgement. For instance, according to Theresa Stewart-Ambo and K. Wayne Yang, “settler land acknowledgments are not the same as Indigenous protocols… What kinds of relationships do settler acknowledgments actually name? What impacts do practitioners and advocates for acknowledgments hope these statements will have? What impacts do these practices actually have?” (2021, 28).

Online resources, such as native-land.ca, propose similar questions and offer more detailed prompts for building acknowledgements.

While critiques of land acknowledgements require careful reflection on what role non-Indigenous people play in upholding settler colonialism, Stewart-Ambo and Yang suggest that we reject “formulaic scripts for approaching land acknowledgment … [and] move beyond perfunctory and rote gestures that serve as excuses and alibies for settler institutions” (2021, 42). In doing so, they propose centring “Indigenous relationality, land pedagogy, and accountability to place and Native peoples. Land acknowledgments are not the end; they are a beginning and should lead to greater institutional responsibility” (41).

Strategy: Decolonization and Indigenization

Concordia University’s Centre for Teaching and Learning (CTL) includes a list of specific strategies for decolonization. Faculty who are not already teaching or working from an Indigenous framework can consider how they incorporate Indigenous content in their courses by attending both institutional and off-campus workshops training on decolonization and Indigeneity, and researching educational resources.

You may find the following areas emphasized in gender and sexuality pedagogical contexts helpful in developing your own teaching approach to decolonizing and indigenizing curriculum:

1. Focusing on Indigenous history and contemporary issues in Indigenous society, culture, politics and knowledge – including local Indigenous communities and their history and contemporary society, culture, politics, and knowledge;
2. Learning about gender and sexuality through Indigenous knowledge systems, traditions, and frameworks;
3. Understanding the relationship between settler colonialism and heteropatriarchy;
4. Self-education on how to incorporate relevant and appropriate curriculum and pedagogy in courses that examine the role of Indigenous knowledge systems and settler colonialism by engaging with contemporary research produced by and about Indigenous societies, cultures, and politics and knowledge. Including but not limited to:
   • decolonization;
   • Indigenous resurgence;
   • Indigenous sovereignty;
   • Indigenous cultural production and activism; and
   • Indigenous knowledge systems and traditions (when developed and/or presented by Indigenous communities).

Emphasis should be placed on:

1. respecting the traditions distinct to Indigenous communities (i.e. not universalizing or generalizing knowledge traditions, systems, practices, or histories);
2. drawing on knowledge produced by Indigenous scholars, peoples, nations, and communities whenever possible (rather than drawing exclusively on knowledge produced on Indigenous peoples by non-Indigenous scholars); and
3. prioritizing ongoing and thoughtful engagement with Indigenous peoples, cultures, and histories (rather than tokenizing them, i.e., beyond simply adding an “Indigenous” topic week to a course).

Challenge: Cultural Appropriation & Ethnic Fraud

Debates have emerged about the role of cultural appropriation, self-identification, self-indigenization, and ethnic fraud in post-secondary institutions (Leroux 2019). In many fields, including sexuality studies, a number of scholars and public figures have been at the centre of controversies around accusations of false identity claims and the appropriation of Indigenous cultures, such as non-Indigenous people using the term “Two-Spirit.” Students are often familiar with these debates and have strong views and perspectives in discussing such cases. Further, Indigenous students, staff, faculty, and scholars may be differently positioned institutionally; some might experience these cases as acts of colonization; others may feel their own identity and belonging called into question—especially when considering the legacy of federal assimilationist policies that organized Canada’s relationship to Indigenous peoples through the Indian Act, residential school system, 60s scoop, and child welfare system.

Faculty teaching this material should familiarize themselves with the authors and texts they use as part of preparation for class. This is especially important when faculty choose to use texts by authors who have been publicly named by Indigenous communities as falsely representing their membership, status, or belonging. In these cases, faculty should exercise care and attention to how these texts are introduced in the class by explaining the context around controversies and accusations, explaining why these texts are being used, and facilitating space for difficult discussions in class.

For further discussion on navigating difficult discussions in the classroom, see our section Navigating Difficult Pedagogical Dynamics.

Learning about Violence Enacted on Indigenous Peoples

In many fields, such as social work, history, education, and gender and sexuality studies, learning about Indigenous peoples involves learning about violence. Indigenous students are likely to find themselves in a difficult situation when learning about historic and contemporary violence enacted against Indigenous peoples in classes primarily populated by non-Indigenous students and/or a non-Indigenous professor. In such cases, repeated exposure to Indigenous content as it relates to violence can be harmful to Indigenous students (D’Arcangelis, Gamache, Hrynyk and Lennon 2024). Faculty drawing on this kind of content should consider balancing learning about violence enacted on Indigenous peoples with content that illustrates Indigenous self-determination, governance, culture, and knowledge production.

Resources

Initiatives to bring EDI into post-secondary institutions often focus on gestures such as including EDI statements on hiring job ads, asking job candidates to discuss diversity in their job materials or providing anti-bias training to hiring and search committees. Feminist and Black scholars have critiqued the institutionalization of diversity and related concepts, such as intersectionality, for domesticating the radical and transformative critical work of these concepts. For instance, Jennifer C. Nash argues, “The work of diversity … is not meant to transform social institutions but to insert bodies into existing structures and even to engage in ‘rebranding an organization’” (2019, 24). Similarly, research on racism in higher education illustrates how inclusive strategies risk exposing racialized faculty to forms of institutional betrayal (Dutt-Ballerstadt 2020). Despite critiques over the impact these initiatives have had on the widescale restructuring of our post-secondary institutions, or worse—compounding harm for marginalized faculty and students (see Ahmed 2012; Nash 2019) and simply re-centring hegemonic norms—EDI is currently the primary language used by universities to address systemic inequalities. In this way, scholars have called for us to engage in the institution in continued projects for systemic change and transformation (Wiegman 2016, 93 [PDF]).

EDI in Pedagogical and Curriculum Design

Although EDI achievements in the university sector are often legible through the diversification of staffing or student enrolment in programs, the biggest challenge universities continue to face is the structural forms of exclusion that are embedded in our institutions through minor changes made in individual hiring and recruitment strategies, and little change to the structures of power and governance that maintain hegemonic control over university administration, complaints processes, evaluation, etc. This is reflected in racially homogenous university administrative bodies; disregard for student, staff, and faculty experiences of racism, ableism, transphobia, sexism, homophobia, and other forms of oppression; and the cultural norms that underpin notions of academic collegiality that set marginalized and historically excluded faculty, students and staff as the problem when voicing concerns and complaints (Ahmed 2012). For instance, in Meghan Gagliardi’s (2024) research on racialized students who take on anti-racism work within institutions, she found that Black and other racialized students are made responsible for the work of anti-racism within higher education settings precisely because anti-racism work has not been made a collective responsibility. For Gagliardi, this has resulted in compounding harm for those most impacted by racism.

What does EDI look like in Pedagogical and Curriculum Design?

• conducting curriculum audits to review EDI in academic programs;
• developing syllabi with diverse authors;
• integrating community-based perspectives into classroom learning;
• engaging with knowledge outside of scholarly mediums (e.g. community-based, social movements, social media, etc.);
• developing new courses and programs with historically excluded groups in focus;
• hiring faculty and staff specialized in EDI areas and with lived experience to guide curriculum development and revision;
• using a diverse range of assessment models to meet the different needs and address the barriers that students face;
• teaching from the perspectives of those historically excluded from academic knowledge production;
• integrating student feedback into curriculum design, particularly in areas identified by students as being absent from the program curriculum.

Name Pronunciation

Like respectful practices around gender pronoun use in the classroom (see section Gender and Pronouns), using the proper pronunciation of people’s names is an important component of ensuring inclusive classrooms and addressing some of the quotidian ways that racism can be enacted in everyday interactions in educational settings. Although it can be difficult to pronounce names in languages one might not be familiar with, the key to respectful interactions is to learn the proper pronunciation of names, practice pronunciation, and develop effective strategies for when you make a mistake.

Consider the following points:

• Don’t assign someone a new name or shorten someone’s name to facilitate your pronunciation. Assigning an English name or nickname to a student or colleague can be insulting and a form of racial microaggression.
• If someone shares a nickname or alternative name for you to use, you can use this name; however, most people appreciate the effort colleagues or teachers make to learn to pronounce their actual names.
• If you are struggling with pronouncing someone’s name, use strategies to help yourself practice proper pronunciation. For instance, record yourself or someone else pronouncing the person’s name, and play the recording back privately to help you practice.
• Look for pronunciation guides online and confirm the correct guidelines for the person in question.

If you make a mistake pronouncing someone’s name, apologize and adjust your pronunciation. If you are really struggling with pronunciation, you can also let the person know that you’ll practice pronunciation, thank them for their patience, and invite them and others to correct you if you make a mistake (if they feel comfortable doing so).

Intersectional Harm

The concept of intersectional harm connects the concept of intersectionality, developed by Kimberlé Crenshaw (1991), with an analysis of population-level state violence (Spade 2013). Intersectionality is an analytic framework that understands systems of oppression as co-constituted rather than discrete.

Understanding historic exclusions and systemic inequalities as forms of administrative violence can help identify common sources for different experiences (e.g. students facing financial precarity may experience harm in their capacity to complete their studies in ways that are different from, but might mirror, students with learning disabilities—such as through barriers to accessing safe and quiet space to study in). This approach interrogates how administrative structures and systems (such as educational policies, funding streams, departmental culture, campus security, and service provision) enact harm on a wide scale in ways that may be imperceptible to those in positions of power, including faculty, administrators, and management.

Applying Analysis of Intersectional Harm

Although critiques over the appropriation and institutionalization of intersectionality as a concept must be taken seriously (Nash 2019), when used in an applied context, such as through an analysis of intersectional harm, the concept can help illustrate how individual instances of discrimination or oppression are not simply isolated, but part of institutional systems, structures, and cultures. Identifying the source of administrative violence can help bring longer-lasting transformation beyond individual punitive measures.

For instance, an incident of racism or transphobia in the classroom is usually interpreted as a problem at the level of individuals implicated in the incident, with solutions that focus on the individual(s) involved. However, through a model of intersectional harm, we can see these individual cases as connected to wider university policies that fail to make departments and the institution accountable. For example, simply stating that a course or department is anti-racist and/or trans-inclusive does not mean that faculty, staff, and students have the skill or capacity to put anti-racism and trans-inclusivity into practice.

While traditional university responses to instances of discrimination focus on individual solutions, an intersectional approach to harm would interpret these incidents as illustrations of systemic and structural inequalities within institutions that can be addressed in ways that transform those systems and structures, such as through:

1. challenging the status quo within the institution;
2. creating cultural changes around teaching and interpersonal interaction within departments;
3. creating clear and transparent accountability mechanisms at all levels of the institution;
4. centring the voices and perspectives of those most marginalized at the university in guiding priorities for change; and
5. developing collaborative partnerships that benefit those with the least access to power and resources (e.g. students and communities outside the university).

At an individual level, thinking about intersectional harm can help depersonalize instances of discrimination and inequality in your own classroom through both self-reflection and identifying how a form of harm enacted in the classroom is connected to wider systems and structures. In addition to holding oneself and others individually accountable (see section: Navigating Difficult Pedagogical Dynamics), this approach can help connect individuals to collective processes for bringing about institutional change, such as by engaging your department in training, professional development, education, and policy work. This approach can also help build skills and tools to empower students, faculty, and staff to actively change learning and work conditions within departments and at educational institutions, such as through cultural change in the form of bystander intervention, collective accountability processes, and shifting cultural norms that are implicitly or explicitly exclusionary or discriminatory.

Racial Justice and Sexuality in Intersectional Classroom Learning

Critical scholarship in sexuality studies has examined the interconnected emergence of racial and sexual discourses through the development of scientific and medical models of racial taxonomy and sex dimorphism through the fields of medicine, psychology, anthropology, and the natural sciences (Gill-Peterson 2018; LaFleur 2018; Schuller 2018; Somerville 1994; Stoler 1995; TallBear 2013-2021). This area of sexuality scholarship aims to challenge modern discourses that see gender, race, and sexuality as discrete and natural categories. The emergence of scientific discourses around race and sex difference thus co-constitute models of population control and management starting in the 19^th century through reproductive violence (e.g. eugenics policies, sterilization, coercive reproduction, and compulsory heterosexuality and monogamy), law and criminalization (e.g. miscegenation, buggery, sodomy, and indecency laws), and labour exploitation (e.g. racial segregation, indentured labour, undocumented labour, unpaid and low-waged care labour). Further, scholarship on the history of European colonialism and Indigenous sexualities has illustrated how the introduction of Western sex/gender ideologies—which included anti-sodomy and buggery laws, as well as marriage, property and inheritance laws—was used as part of the colonial project to both regulate colonial populations through civilizational assimilationist policies (i.e. marriage and patriarchal family structures), and eradicate Indigenous gender(s) and sexualities through criminalization, medicalization, and displacement.

Teaching about this history can play an important role in helping students identify and understand the origins of racial and sexual violence, as well as identify larger systems and structures shaping gender and sexuality in the contemporary context, in addition to current forms of racial violence. The work of racial justice in sexuality studies, and vice versa, therefore connects discipline-specific research and scholarship in sexuality studies to analytic approaches on intersectional harm. Other fields can find similar ways of developing intersectional learning by investigating how forms of violence are co-constituted and co-implicated through historic processes. For instance, the co-constitute histories of ableism, eugenics, and reproductive control.

Racial Justice and Curriculum Violence

When teaching and learning about racial violence, images and stories of violence are often used as pedagogical tools, such as showing videos or images of police killings of Black people when learning about the movement for Black Lives, images of the bodies of refugees washed ashore during the Syrian refugee crisis, stories and coverage of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls and Two-Spirit people when learning about settler colonialism, historic images and films depicting slavery, war, and genocide, and even fictionalized scenes of torture or sexual violence in literature, film, media, and fine arts. While there may be important pedagogical and political reasons to show violent images and stories in the classroom, such as to serve historical and critical learning, the pedagogical value and use of these images have been debated. Because the circulation of violent imagery risks objectifying the victims of violence, the use of these images and stories in the classroom may also serve to reinforce and re-enact racial violence. This is what some scholars have called curriculum violence (Jones 2020).

Krista Lynes, Canadian Research Chair in Feminist Media Studies at Concordia, draws on Black scholarship to explain how the circulation of images of racial violence can have psychic costs on racialized viewers and risks reinforcing racism. Lynes argues that images of violence require a frame of engagement that prompts the viewer to act for change. This must be accompanied by acknowledging that these images are “traumatic and potentially potent if, and only if, those images are claimed by those whose vulnerability has been exposed.”

Krista Lynes’ video Can I Look at This: Watching Media of Racial Violence. Hosted on YouTube and made available through the Decolonial Perspectives and Practices Hub.

A YouTube element has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view it online here: https://opentextbooks.concordia.ca/teachingresource/?p=1323

You can find more in Lynes’ video on the Anti-Racism Pedagogy Project page as part of the Decolonial Perspectives and Practices Hub.

Engaging with historic and popular texts that use “charged,” “politically incorrect,” and “violent” language has increasingly become a point of contention in education. Popular debates and even government intervention have emerged in response to demands from students (as well as faculty and staff) to avoid using (and sometimes stop assigning) texts that reinforce or replicate racial violence. The backlash against these demands has been polarizing and has focused on dismissing students for being “snowflakes” or part of a new “woke” culture war. From the faculty side, many faculty unions have expressed concern over the concept of academic freedom, with worries that student complaints will have labour implications on hiring practices, contingent faculty, or censorship of academic research and teaching. The unfortunate consequence has been to debate the right to use violent language, images, or texts rather than develop practical skills and strategies for how to engage with these texts and objects in responsible, respectful, and accountable ways.

Using Contentious and “Charged” Language in the Classroom

Faculty teaching courses that deal with racial violence should take time to consider and reflect on how differently situated students in the class might be impacted by the objects and texts examined in class. For students who have experienced racial violence and trauma, being in a classroom where learning about racism and racial violence happens with student peers who do not share these experiences can be especially challenging. For example, non-Indigenous students learning about residential schools for the first time may be distressed or upset by learning about this history and react with strong emotions in the classroom. While such experiences may strengthen empathy and learning for non-Indigenous students, they may have the reverse impact on Indigenous students by further entrenching the centring of non-Indigenous perspectives, experiences, and standpoints.

Resisting Curriculum Violence

Some strategies for resisting curriculum violence include:

• Using stories of racial violence that are told from the perspectives of those who experienced violence can help anchor learning in approaches that are meaningful to those who have been subjugated.
• When examining a text that uses violent language, consider ways of contextualizing the text to help prepare students for encountering the material (e.g. when reading about eugenics, you might prepare students by letting them know you’ll be reading this text to analyze or understand how biological determinism shaped racial inequality in the early 20^th century).
• Discussing racism and racial violence should not be avoided, but when discussed, consider:
  • balancing scenes of victimization with those of resistance, self-determination, liberation, survival, resilience, and/or celebration;
  • using “content” or “trigger warnings” for this kind of material (see “Trigger Warnings” in Navigating Difficult Pedagogical Dynamics);
  • inviting students who have been directly impacted by this violence to skip certain readings, class screenings, etc. or provide alternative readings that students can choose from.
• Using the “E.H.R.R method: Empathize, Historicize, Remove, then Replace” developed by Jamilah Dei-Sharpe, PhD student in Sociology & Decolonial Hub founder, Concordia University:

Questions to ask yourself:

• Is there another way to learn about this form of violence other than showing images, videos, etc.?
• Who is at risk of being (re-)traumatized by these scenes?
  • e.g. racialized students watching members of their communities being killed and students who have experienced sexual violence watching scenes of assault.
• What preparation work do I need to develop to support student encounters with this material?
  • e.g. providing content warnings, offering alternative material, inviting students to leave, and offering excerpted sections.
• What support do I need to establish after engaging with this kind of material?
  • e.g. staying late after class or setting aside time at the end of class to debrief, starting the next class with a debrief, reaching out over email, offering dedicated office hours to support, inviting a community elder, health or well-being professional, or other support figure to join the class
• How can I provide a structure for supporting students who are situated differently in my course?
  • e.g. offering separate debriefing sessions for white and racialized students;
  • e.g. offering separate times during class to provide background and support for new learning about racial violence that is optional for students from the communities affected to develop collective knowledge without subjecting racialized students to discussion that may re-enact racial violence.

Common Scenarios & Possible Interventions

Common Scenarios and Possible Interventions [Skip Table]

Resources

While there is no comprehensive description or definition of “difficult topics”, the term is generally used to refer to material that raises challenging feelings, disagreements, conflicts, discomfort, triggering experiences of trauma, and connections to systemic inequality and oppression. Some examples include:

• discussing topics relating to lived experiences of oppression, harm, and injustice, such as:
  1. racism and racial violence
  2. sexual violence
  3. war, political violence, torture, detention, and incarceration
  4. ableism
  5. medical and/or psychiatric violence
  6. homophobic, transphobic, and other gender- and sexuality-based forms of violence;

• examining violent content and images;
• disagreements over the concepts, terms, and language of violence, oppression, harm, discrimination, et cetera;
• reactions of defensiveness and/or anger when presented with information that contradicts a worldview;
• discussions of topics that can be perceived as invalidating a person’s experience of harm.

Common Challenges in the Classroom

• Students experiencing discrimination, oppression, and violence may expect their courses on these topics or identities to be spaces for their experiences to be recognized and centred.
• Students who experience discrimination, oppression, and violence may be called upon to justify or explain their experiences in ways that risk being coercive, exploitative, or invalidating.
• New and vanguard discourses around appropriate terminology may not be evenly available to students and faculty or could be contested/under debate.
• Students and faculty who are learning difficult knowledge for the first time may resist accepting a shift in their worldview.
• The intersectional ways that violence manifests may make it difficult to understand or recognize how a familiar form of identity or inequality (e.g. sexuality identity) may look and be experienced differently when connected with other forms of violence (e.g. racism).
• Faculty teaching may encounter new ideas around identity through their students and their classes, which they may not be equipped to understand or discuss (e.g. new gender identities or sexual orientations).
• Faculty and students risk tokenizing the experiences shared by other students in the classroom (e.g. a student or professor uses a classmate’s gender identity as an example in a class discussion).
• Faculty and students may share personal experiences, whether their own or stories about others, as examples or illustrations of learning in ways that may transgress boundaries or violate ethical principles. Consider:
  • Does the person have permission to share this experience or story with others?
  • Who is served by sharing this story? The person who has experienced harm or the person telling the story?
  • Is there a risk that sharing this story will make someone vulnerable?
  • Is there a more appropriate way to convey a similar idea?

Assuming a Common Language in the Classroom

As students learn new concepts, they can develop strong political views and convictions in relation to course materials. When existing knowledge is uneven in the classroom, epistemic power can sometimes emerge in classroom dynamics, especially when knowledge is used to exercise authority in class discussion.

For example, a person who is subject to racism will understand, by virtue of their experience, the system and structure of racial inequality more readily than those who are non-racialized.

While students should be encouraged to apply theories, concepts, ideas, and arguments they have developed both within and outside of the classroom, including through lived experiences, the trend to assume that specialized knowledge, for example, of gender and sexuality, should be universally shared rather than part of learning, can create a learning environment that is challenging for students with less familiarity of these topics. For example, students and faculty new to gender and sexuality discourses may not know about non-binary pronoun use or how to apply respectful language conventions in new contexts. Students and teachers alike who are new to inclusive language practices may pose questions using terms that can come across as invalidating, insulting, offensive, or challenging, and some may resist accepting a worldview that challenges their own attachments to gender and sexuality norms.

These tensions can also arise due to intergenerational and cultural differences in language used to describe identity and experience and the history of words in systems of violence (e.g. using terminology like “f*g” or “dyke” may be offensive to some while empowering to others, discussing a song or text by a Black artist that uses the “n” word). At the same time, students may find themselves sharing their experiences of oppression as part of the learning environment in the classroom, only to have those experiences invalidated, dismissed, or tokenized. In both cases, it can be difficult to navigate the tension between lived experience and learning about power and inequality.

Strategies for Fostering an Inclusive Classroom

Fostering a classroom where students are encouraged to share their epistemic privilege while also making space for respectful learning is important in classes grappling with topics relating to identity, inequality, discrimination, violence, and oppression. The role of the instructor is to help guide and facilitate this process by:

1. reframing student interventions that come across as “difficult” through pedagogical terms to allow for discussion;
2. de-escalating and de-personalizing the framing of a critique by making it applicable to the entire class or to the topic at hand (i.e. deters debate over a person’s experience or identity);
3. validating student experiences and contributions when they bring up or raise “difficult” material to the classroom (e.g. thanking them for sharing, apologizing if you can’t give the topic more time or space for discussion in class); and
4. remind students that we do not come to the classroom with the same experiences or knowledge, and thus, it is important to self-reflect on classroom participation.

Christina Page’s open educational resource, Inclusive Pedagogies (2021), develops further recommendations for inclusive approaches to classroom design, facilitation, teaching, and learning.

Facilitating Difficult Discussions

Students and faculty alike may come to the class with previous experiences with “difficult” learning that are distressing, uncomfortable, or challenging. Defensive reactions and responses are common. When a defensive response comes up, it can help to acknowledge that the topic is bringing up strong reactions and use some of these strategies:

• pause class and discussion to take a few moments to reflect;
• identify if time and space are needed for emotional equilibrium and self-regulation (i.e. do we need to calm down, do a breathing exercise?);
• pause the discussion to return to later, making sure to specify when you’ll set time to return to this discussion (e.g. let’s pause this discussion and take time to reflect, and we’ll return to it next class);
• call for a classroom break;
• acknowledge that the different standpoints and experiences in the classroom are making it difficult to find common ground for discussion;
• acknowledge that the classroom can also act as a reflection of society so that topics cannot be easily resolved in the classroom because they are not easy to resolve in the world;
• acknowledge that the classroom can be a space that reinforces systemic violence and affirm your commitment to helping the class work through an understanding of this or offer strategies for how to transform these dynamics;
• offer opportunities and space for students to share their thoughts and feelings outside of class;
• acknowledge that the classroom cannot be a “safe space” and offer ways for everyone to return to a place where they can ensure their own well-being (e.g. to reflect on their needs vs. wants for engaging in the class);
• identify strategies and ways to foster the participation of all students, especially those who have been historically excluded from the classroom;
• encourage curiosity and openness towards viewpoints and perspectives that are different by learning about what informs these perspectives and experiences.

Discomfort vs Harm in the Classroom

The language of safety can also be weaponized to justify forms of systemic and structural violence; therefore, it is important to identify, interpret, and address concerns around safety through an approach that understands how power and violence shape these encounters. To help identify what is happening in a difficult encounter, consider the following questions:

• Who wields power in this situation?
• How are people’s feelings connected to systemic or structural violence?
• Are feelings of discomfort emerging because power or norms are being challenged or questioned?
• What are the consequences that correspond to expressions of feeling unsafe? (e.g. material consequences like job loss or expulsion from school, emotional consequences like feeling vulnerable or anxious, political consequences like increased hostility towards a group)
• Can feelings of unsafety be alleviated with reassurance and acknowledgement, or are interventions required to ensure accountability for potential harm?
• Is one person or group’s safety being leveraged against another?
• Is there a risk that the language of safety is being weaponized to target a person or group?

Your answers to the above questions can help you determine whether you’re dealing with an issue of safety and harm or an issue of discomfort, conflict, or contestation. Distinguishing between these is necessary because of the danger of weaponizing “safety” when feelings of discomfort are conflated with accusations of harm. For instance, attacks on trans people are often leveraged through claims of “safety” for cisgender people, such as the exclusion of trans people from gendered washrooms. Cisgender people who make these arguments are expressing discomfort with trans people in gendered washrooms, which in turn enacts harm on trans people in the form of transphobic violence and being denied access to basic rights. Similarly, the criminalization of racialized people, substance users, and people facing acute mental health crises is often done in the name of “public safety” or “self-defence,” which is then used to justify issuing fines, incarceration, and the use of excessive force, such as police assaults on and killing of unarmed suspects.

Many students and faculty aspire to see the classroom as a safe space or to create safe spaces in the classroom. Although prioritizing the safety and well-being of students, faculty, and staff is of central importance in the classroom, the assumption that the classroom can be safe raises some key challenges that can undermine the practice of safety. These challenges can include:

• learning that challenges our current values, sense of self, and worldview;
• learning that connects to repressed trauma in unexpected ways;
• learning about topics one may be resistant to knowing (e.g. colonialism, white supremacy, ableism, etc.);
• learning about violence, discrimination, injustice, and oppression;
• being confronted or challenged on our own power/privilege;
• being accused of discrimination or harm;
• being exposed, whether intentionally or not, to harm, discrimination, violence, and/or oppression in the classroom.

Developing a collective approach for how to navigate the classroom can help build a safer space in the classroom rather than assuming safety from the outset. This can be accomplished collectively through class-generated ground rules, class contracts, terms of engagement, and other techniques, as well as through your own policies outlined in the syllabus or other policy documents.

Building Safer Spaces

To help build safety in the classroom, you can draw on a collective approach by working with students, including working through the above questions,  to help build a safer classroom rather than assuming safety from the outset. This can be accomplished collectively through class-generated discussions around differentiating between discomfort and harm, developing ground rules for engaging in difficult discussions, drafting class contracts that outline and make transparent the consequences for harm in the classroom, and developing terms of engagement for how to work through difficult and uncomfortable discussions and encounters, alongside your own policies, outlined in the syllabus or other policy documents.

Recognizing Harm

While the above questions can help you identify potential forms of unintentional harm in the classroom, there are also insidious forms of harm that can emerge in educational environments. Intentionally trying to traumatize or harm people through the classroom is an act of violence, and incidents such as these should be addressed swiftly by:

• interrupting the behaviour,
• holding people responsible for their actions (including our own),
• proposing resolution through apology and change in behaviour,
• seeking accountability both within and outside the classroom, and
• following up with those who may have been harmed after the incident.

However, in many circumstances in the classroom, harm is an unintentional consequence of power inequalities. In these cases, the person who has harmed others may not be aware that their actions have harmful consequences or may have difficulty recognizing this harm due to feelings of shame, defensiveness, or dissonance in their sense of self (e.g. but I’m a good person, I didn’t mean to offend you, etc.). In these cases, it can help to depersonalize the harm by identifying the connection between the individual action and wider systemic forms of harm and encouraging the practices of apology, accountability and responsibility.

While faculty are not trained to respond to psychological and emotional distress, the classroom can be a space that brings up charged responses, especially when discussing topics that relate to lived experiences of violence, injustice, and oppression. While faculty should direct students who experience distress to access support from trained professionals—such as through campus wellness centres, psychological services, peer support services, sexual violence support services, and culturally relevant support services—faculty can also play a pivotal role in how emotions are navigated in the classroom. In our research on trigger warnings in higher education, my co-investigators and I found that requests for trigger warnings often had more to do with desires to have emotions taken seriously in the classroom rather than an expectation that uncomfortable or difficult topics should be avoided (Dyer et al. 2024). Given that emotions do arise in the classroom, sometimes in unexpected ways, developing strategies for addressing the emotional dynamics that can emerge in the classroom can help equip both faculty and students with better tools for navigating and responding to difficult emotions like anger, sadness, fear, and shame when they arise.

Although few people in universities are trained to respond to emotionally charged situations, classrooms can benefit from both students and teachers developing and learning foundational skills in communication and conflict resolution through de-escalation, accountability, and apology. For instance, many difficult encounters in the classroom can be resolved quickly by accepting responsibility for our actions and apologizing in meaningful rather than superficial ways; conversely, a small encounter can spiral into a major conflict when emotions are met with defensiveness, aggression, or denial/avoidance. Learning how to be accountable, how to apologize, and how to facilitate this process can go a long way in fostering an engaged learning environment that allows students and faculty alike to work through conflicts and difficult emotions that emerge.

Strategies for De-escalation and Acknowledgement

1. Ensure you are feeling emotionally stable enough to facilitate a difficult class encounter. If you aren’t, you can always pause the class and commit to revisiting the discussion at another determined time. However, it is important that difficult encounters in the classroom are not avoided indefinitely. This can compound and escalate harm and discomfort.
2. Sometimes it is okay for difficult emotions to come up during class. Acknowledge this. Sharing that this is normal and okay can help students grapple with difficult feelings. If you feel comfortable, you can share your own experience of grappling with difficult feelings and how you came out of it.
3. Encourage empathy, encourage students to talk with trusted friends and loved ones, and encourage them to do something kind for themselves after a difficult emotional encounter.
4. Interrupt a situation where escalating emotions risk disrupting learning; offer a time-out and space and time outside of class to continue the discussion, follow up, etc.
5. Depersonalize the conflict by connecting the individual circumstances to wider systems and structures; help to illustrate how the current situation is part of larger systems and can be challenging to address within the limited space of the classroom.
6. Turning to course learning, material, texts, and concepts can help anchor the interpretation and analysis of difficult emotional experiences beyond personal feelings.
7. Validate the emotions and feelings of all parties without staying neutral on the analysis/interpretation of those experiences. The reactions people are having are their own, and it is okay to feel difficult emotions; however, validating emotional experiences is not a validation of an interpretation or understanding of that experience.
8. Remind everyone that while it’s okay to react emotionally, we have a responsibility to translate our reactions in the classroom in a way that fosters communication and collective learning. Sometimes we learn things that challenge our emotional experiences and reactions.
9. Affirm that it’s okay for emotions to become overwhelming and normalize taking space, both individually and as a class. Encourage students to take space and time to find grounding and self-regulate or gain equilibrium when difficult emotions emerge in ways that might disrupt participation in class.

Acknowledging harm

Invalidating the feelings and emotions of people who are feeling distressed will likely escalate a situation, even if emotions are not aligned with the circumstances. If you do not agree with the perspective(s) being shared, consider validating feelings rather than thoughts/ideas. You can return to engaging with thoughts/ideas once they have regained emotional equilibrium and can approach a conversation more openly.

While some students may welcome support, others may want to resolve conflicts independently, with loved ones, or with community members. You can gauge if a student requests space by offering support and options, respecting their decision rather than instructing them on what to do.

How to Apologize

Incorporating skill building in accountability and apology into your curriculum can be one way of developing the collective capacity to tackle difficult encounters in the classroom more easily. There are multiple resources available outlining the process of an effective apology which are easy to read, accessible, and freely available. (See Navigating Difficult Pedagogical Dynamics Resources for a list of some of these available resources.)

1. Apologizing should involve saying “I’m sorry” and should come from a place of reflection. An apology should also illustrate an understanding of the harm done and explain how the person apologizing will take steps and actions to do differently moving forward, including what actions they commit to in making these changes.
2. An apology cannot be forced or coerced, and apologizing may be difficult in a cultural context where competition is prioritized over cooperation and vulnerability. In a context where someone refuses to take responsibility, accountability, and/or apologize for causing harm, steps may have to be taken for there to be consequences for harmful behaviour to ensure the safety and well-being of others. For example, removing the person’s access to others to avoid continued harm or seeking help from colleagues or university services to intervene.

“Trigger warnings,” also referred to as “content warnings” or “classroom warnings,” are a practice whereby a warning is given in advance of reading or viewing content that includes graphic descriptions or depictions of violence. These warnings may appear in the syllabus and may be announced in or prior to class. The function of the warning is twofold: first, to help students prepare for encounters with violent content, especially in the event that such encounters trigger post-traumatic stress responses (PTSD) or distress that may interfere with learning, and second, to give students autonomy to determine whether or not, and in what context, they choose to view or engage with content that depicts violence.

Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality programs have engaged in various practices of warning for many years, particularly coming out of work on gender and sexual violence prevention and responses. In recent years, however, trigger warnings have gained popularity across disciplines and have come under political debate on higher education, with critics arguing that trigger warnings are a form of censorship or are infantilizing. Some research on trigger warnings has shown they are ineffective (Boysen 2017; Bryce et al. 2022). However, other research suggests that trigger warnings are more about the politics they signal to students, than the effect of the warning itself; for instance, by illustrating consideration over student wellbeing and the effects of learnings about violence (Bedera 2021; Carter 2015; Dyer et al 2024; Kouri-Towe 2023).

Faculty who are not already using trigger warnings in their classes may encounter students who request warnings in a class in advance of engagement with violent material, or they may react to violent material with demands for instituting warnings in the future. Further, some have advocated for using trigger warnings beyond depictions of violence to also include warnings before engaging with a text or content that is invalidating the lives and experiences of oppressed groups (e.g. transphobic content or texts written by “TERFs” – Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminists), or depictions of oppression more broadly.

Regardless of your own views on trigger warnings, faculty across disciplines are now in a position where we must reflect on what strategies we use in our teaching when grappling with content that may be difficult. Rather than arguing for a universal model of giving or refusing trigger warnings, consider how potentially difficult material is incorporated into your courses and identify strategies you can use to help your classes navigate these challenges. Reflect on what strategies you’ll use early on; talk with colleagues to determine disciplinary norms, common strategies, and areas for change; talk with students about their needs and requests; and share how and why you might be experimenting with different models and approaches to solicit feedback on how effective they are. Sharing that you are trying to learn how to deal with difficult material in the classroom can invite students to collaborate in that process.

Challenges in Applying Warnings

The use of warnings may appear to be a best practice in some contexts; however, there are contexts where warnings may not be appropriate or where warnings bypass more effective pedagogical approaches, such as:

• cases where warnings about encountering material discussing systemic violence and oppression cause privileged students to avoid learning from those materials (e.g. white students leaving a class that discusses racism; non-Indigenous students choosing not to read at text on residential schools; people dismissive of sexual violence);
• where offering warning functions to exclude people who have been traumatized from learning (e.g. victims of violence are told to leave the classroom rather than creating an environment where their experiences of violence are taken into consideration in the classroom);
• where calls for warnings are used to censor or silence discussion of systemic violence and oppression (e.g. under the pretense of religious freedom, a student says they should not be required to learn about homosexuality);
• situations where giving a warning serves as a justification for using or showing material that is explicitly violent with little pedagogical purpose (i.e. another text, material, example, or object would help with learning just as easily);
• contexts where the university has failed to address and change publicly known conditions of systemic violence within the institution and where warnings are likely to be interpreted as complicity with institutional betrayal (e.g. the university has failed in its commitment to sexual violence prevention on campus).

While psychology research on trigger warnings has found that they are ineffective at preventing post-traumatic responses in students because triggers are highly specific to each individual or may be unpredictable (e.g. a smell or sound can trigger a post-traumatic response) (Boysen 2017), psychoanalytic approaches may provide helpful insights into the use of warnings.

In the area of psychoanalysis, the idea that one can avoid a traumatic response by preparing for it fails to understand how trauma functions (Saketopoulou 2023). Instead of expecting people to master their emotions in the classroom, psychoanalytic approaches to education scholars, such as Deborah Britzman (1998), propose an approach to education that recognizes the role of discomfort in learning. Rather than working to prevent difficult feelings from arising in education, this kind of approach acknowledges the potential for difficult emotions and trauma that can arise in spaces like the classroom and welcomes them as part of the learning environment. Although managing and facilitating charged emotional dynamics is not easily incorporated into most teaching approaches, acknowledging something difficult in a learning environment can go a long way in helping those in the classroom work through challenging classroom dynamics.

Other scholars argue that more than just giving students an option for accommodation, calls for warnings signal a need for trauma-informed (Bedera 2021) and disability-justice-based (Carter 2015) approaches to education.

Rather than focusing on the warning itself, Bedera argues that faculty and educational institutions should work to prevent institutional betrayal, which includes the “refusal to take proactive steps in preventing or addressing victimization, responding inadequately to claims of trauma, minimizing the severity of a victim’s experience, making it difficult to report traumatic experiences, punishing victims in some way for coming forward, and creating an environment in which similar traumatic events seem more likely” (Bedera, 268). This suggests that rather than focusing exclusively on warnings in individual classrooms, faculty can contribute to institutional change by helping to address the pervasive forms of violence that shape post-secondary educational contexts and advocate for institutional accountability beyond the classroom itself.

Strategies for Warnings or Navigating Difficult Content

Academic Freedom, Institutional Power, and Conflicts in the Classroom

Recent debates on trigger warnings, difficult material, call-outs, and other challenging classroom dynamics have linked these issues to questions of academic freedom (Curtis 2021). Academic freedom, a scholarly principle introduced in the modern university system in the mid-20th century, protects faculty and students pursuing research and inquiry on topics that may challenge dominant paradigms or political interests (e.g., protecting people from being fired without cause, imprisoned, etc.)

When arguments over academic freedom position students and faculty as opponents in debates over new discourses and norms in education, it is helpful to consider how institutional power is at play and whether repression is being exercised. You can use the following questions to help identify if you are facing a threat to your academic freedom, are being called to account for potential harm you have caused, or are caught up in a conflict you are unprepared for. How you respond might be more effectively determined by reflecting on what is happening rather than your first reaction to a charged or difficult interaction.

Questions to ask:

Differentiating between these two scenarios will help you choose what course of action to follow in cases where a call-out is more than just a form of disagreement or conflict in the classroom.

Resources

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Making Accessibility an Ongoing Practice

Given that our role as educators positions us within the infrastructure of the university, there isn’t one model for addressing ableism in our classrooms. In addition to following your institution’s policies on access and accommodation, you may also want to consider how you’ll address ableism beyond official policies in relation to your own capacity and ethical approach both inside and outside of the classroom.

Perhaps you are part of a disability justice group, or you have developed strategies to work towards transformative models of disability justice beyond your classroom. However, for those with less experience in disability justice and accessibility work, introducing these principles into your teaching can be part of a process, such as by:

• incorporating principles of universal design into your teaching;
• learning one tool for universal design each term and then applying these to your next assignment, syllabus, or lecture;
• providing options for students to exercise autonomy and self-determination in negotiating their access needs rather than limiting options and making choices for them;
• attending accessibility workshops and trainings provided by the university and other organizations;
• learning more about disability justice from disabled thinkers, writers, activists, students, and educators; and
• developing flexibility in assignments that allow students to make their own adaptations.

Beyond accommodation, faculty can integrate critical disability approaches and material into their courses by engaging with disability rights, disability justice, crip theory and politics, mad studies, disability arts and activism, neurodivergence, and critiques of ableism. Further, in addition to adopting universal design principles for course materials, faculty can work to transform their classes by building relationships with disabled communities, re-envisioning the structure and role of their classrooms, and engaging in continued learning and transformative work relating to disability justice in education.

Flexibility, Self-Determination and Autonomy in Assessment and Course Design

If you’re thinking of ways to adapt your courses, consider which practices you have flexibility around and which are non-negotiable (e.g. alternative assignment structures, flexibility around deadlines and extensions, etc.) Developing flexibility in your courses and your approach to teaching can make your courses adaptable to everyone involved. In a traditional model of teaching, assessment follows a singular trajectory where everyone completes the same assignments with the same deadlines. Providing options for everyone can help students determine for themselves how to adapt their learning approach to your assessment.

Instead of making choices for students, providing options, flexibility, and models for them to work from can empower students in their education rather than require them to self-advocate. This can be accomplished by:

1. offering structured models for assignments and deadlines;
2. clear and transparent policies on extensions;
3. inviting students to manage their timelines rather than using a punitive approach
   (e.g. grade deductions for late submissions); and
4. not requiring medical notes or official documentation for extensions.

Centring self-determination and respect for people’s autonomy provides a good foundation for decisions around best practices. For instance, if a student discloses details of their accommodation request to you, you have an obligation to keep that information confidential unless otherwise stipulated by the student.

Institutional Access Policies

Institutional policies on access and accessibility generally follow government regulations and human rights and anti-discrimination policies. However, many of these laws, policies, and practices may not reflect the shifting language and best practices in disability justice approaches to accessibility. For example, university policies are sometimes drafted and implemented decades ago and are infrequently updated to respond to how “the discourse and approach to Accessibility and Disability has greatly changed” (Center for Gender Advocacy, Mapping Project, 2020 [PDF]). As such, faculty may be following official university policies with regard to accessibility and inclusion, yet doing so may not be enough to address implicit and explicit exclusions, ableism, and discrimination from taking place in our classrooms.

Access policies can be vague as to what actions are expected of students and other stakeholders (staff, teachers, administration) in securing an accessible learning environment. Faculty are encouraged to provide universal accessibility in their classes but are not required to do so and are not provided with resources or funding to incentivize and facilitate improving accessibility in education. Further, prohibitive costs associated with disability-related diagnosis and new or temporary disabilities mean that a significant number of students and faculty will have accessibility needs that may not be supported at the start of each semester.

Limitations on Access Services

Government and university policies predetermine who is recognized and eligible to access services provided by educational institutions and what accommodations a student is given, usually following an official diagnosis. Specific accommodations are usually determined by diagnosis rather than actual needs, although accessibility office staff may try to adjust accommodations to help support disabled students.

For a variety of reasons, students may have unmet support for their needs, both institutionally and through diagnosis. Financial constraints may limit who can access diagnosis or support services, given that learning disability assessments are costly and not usually covered by schools, public healthcare, or private insurance. In other cases, students experiencing a mental health crisis may require a psychological evaluation and diagnosis to access accommodations, which can be impacted by limits in the availability of appointments with qualified medical professionals. Without an official and recognized diagnosis, accommodations are not easily provided by institutions. The result is that despite the high number of students enrolled with access services, a significant number of students have access needs that remain unrecognized and unmet by educational institutions.

The principles of universal accessibility reduce the burden on individual students by reorienting the classroom in a way that assumes students will have access needs. While the burden cannot rest only on individual faculty members to predict student needs, students with access needs face significant barriers and biases around their navigation of access in education.

Student Perspectives on Accessibility

While this section summarizes findings from the Centre for Gender Advocacy’s Mapping Project Report and current practices at Concordia University, many of the findings may be applicable to those teaching at other institutions. Self-advocacy is often expected from students and may even be written into access policies.

According to the Center for Gender Advocacy’s Mapping Project, students with disabilities and access needs reported that many faculty members invalidated, shamed, or dismissed their needs if students did not provide official documentation from institutional access offices. For this reason, students use early interactions with professors and the syllabus language to gauge faculty receptivity for negotiating access needs.

In a survey done by the Mapping Project, students overwhelmingly reported wanting faculty to receive better training around accessibility. See Table 1.2 (below) for a compilation of the most significant of students’ desires, out of the 252 people surveyed by this project, for faculty to better engage with disability justice.

Mapping Project Survey Results [Skip Table]

Table 1.2 Mapping Project survey results.

Strategies for Supporting Students

Common Accessibility Challenges and Possible Solutions [Skip Table]

Table 1.3 Strategies for Supporting Students

In all the above examples, student access needs exceed what is currently available to them through official university services. Instructor receptivity to working with students on accommodations and accessibility can be a meaningful and impactful way of supporting student learning. Further, adapting teaching approaches and incorporating accommodations and changes to your teaching and your courses can have long-term benefits for all students.

Strategies for Accessibility

Faculty can use extended syllabus statements to reflect on how access and accommodation will be addressed in their specific classes beyond your institution’s official policies. Developing your own extended statement can help make clear your approach to accessibility to students and empower them to determine how they will navigate your class in advance of making accommodation requests (if needed.)

See here for a compilation of different university and faculty syllabus accessibility statements.

Accessibility and Accommodation Statement

Below we have included how an extended Accessibility Statement looks when added to a syllabus. Feel free to use or adapt this statement to your teaching needs.

We have also included a downloadable PDF version, available here: Extended Accessibility and Accommodation Statement [PDF]

Beyond the Syllabus

More than just a statement, accessibility and accommodation can be incorporated into the classroom as a collective project rather than simply a service provision. This can help make accessibility a collaborative responsibility laterally across faculty, students, staff, and university services. In the classroom, this can be accomplished by making access and accessibility statements part of course development, inviting students to co-create statements, policies, and practices for the course, or sharing your own teaching philosophy documents on accessibility.

See Appendix: Cultivating a Culture of Accessibility, Accommodation, and Respect for an example of one such document.

Resources

CAST. Universal Design Guidelines.

Centre for Teaching Support and Learning, Teaching Assistants’ Training Program. Access Checks. University of Toronto.

Centre for Excellence in Learning and Teaching. 10 Tips for Creating Accessible Course Content [PDF]. Iowa State University.

Dolmage, Jay. 2017. “Academic Ableism: Disability and Higher Education.” In Corporealities. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Fritsch, Kelly. 2024. “Desiring Disability in Our Learning Communities: Fostering a Crip Culture of Access.” In Reading the Room: Lessons on Pedagogy and Curriculum from the Gender and Sexuality Studies Classroom, edited by Natalie Kouri-Towe. Montreal: Concordia University Press.

Hamraie, Aimi. 2016. “Beyond Accommodation: Disability, Feminist Philosophy, and the Design of Everyday Academic Life.” philoSOPHIA. 6(2): 259-271.

Hamraie, Aimi. 2020. Critical Access Studies. Harvard Graduate Studies in Design.

Hamraie, Aimi. 2020. Accessible Teaching in the Time of COVID-19. Critical Design Lab.

Jama, Sarah. 2019. “Dismantling Ablism in Ontario.” Filmed August 29, 2019, in Ontario, The Agenda with Steve Paikin and Nan Kiwanuka, TVO, 0:26:39.

Laureano, Bianca I. and Aiesha Turman. Crip Camp Curriculum.

Rello, Luz and Ricardo Baeza-Yates. 2013. Good Fonts for Dyslexia [PDF].

Tshuma, Gift and Shayna Hadley. 2020. The Centre for Gender Advocacy, Revision Recommendations of Concordia University’s Student Accessibility Policy [PDF]. October 7.

Tshuma, Gift and Shayna Hadley. 2020. The Centre for Gender Advocacy: Mapping Project Report. October 7.

UTSC Campus Curriculum Review Resource Hub. Pedagogical Development with Universal Design for Learning. University of Toronto.

Waggoner, Jess, Hailee Yoshizaki-Gibbons, Ashley Mog, Krystal Cleary, and Margaret Price. 2017. “Disability Access as Feminist Praxis at NWSA and Beyond Workshop.” Workshop Presented at the National Women’s Studies Conference, Maryland, USA, November 2017.

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Speak From Your Own Experience

A common pitfall in the classroom that leaves many marginalized and historically excluded students feeling unwelcome is when their identity or experience is being discussed, subject to debate, or theorized by people who do not have a shared experience. A helpful guideline for discussion is asking students to focus their classroom contributions by sharing their own experiences on a topic and focusing their discussion on others’ experiences by talking through the language used and experiences shared by the authors of a text examined in class. This approach allows students to discuss the experiences of others without speaking on behalf of, or by appropriating, the experiences of those who have been marginalized and excluded.

Surveying and Adapting Courses to Feedback

When we rely on spontaneous student feedback, we tend to only learn about what really is or isn’t working and not the in-between. Using surveys and other feedback formats can help students share their classroom experiences, needs, and priorities in confidential or anonymous ways. Surveying can also centre on feedback that is driven by self-reflection, in addition to feedback on the course itself, as well as peer interactions. Further, students who face barriers, challenges, or harmful encounters in a classroom context will not always express these experiences with a teacher or even their peers. Students who stop showing up or stop participating are often invisible to faculty members. Anonymous surveys can open a door for students to provide feedback and share their experiences while reducing the potential for fear of retribution.

When surveying students, invite them to self-reflect (e.g. what am I struggling with in this class? I could use more support and help on…) and reflect on their peers (e.g. communication, what is working, what isn’t working, what could help) to help identify possible areas where more support, resources, and attention could be helpful. This approach has the added benefit of providing opportunities for students to evaluate their own participation, progress, and role in the course, making feedback not simply uni-directional.

Course Surveys

Encouraging students to develop skills at self-moderation can help them become better at participating in class and self-assessing whether they could participate more or become more cognizant of the space they’re taking up. Below are some common examples of techniques used to encourage student self-moderation. These techniques also help relieve the burden on faculty to call on students for their own participation.

The Token Metaphor

Share with the class the metaphor that every time they enter class, they are given 3 invisible tokens. Each time they speak (ask a question, offer an idea, etc.), they metaphorically hand over a token to the professor. Halfway through class, ask the students to consider:

• How many tokens do I have left?
• Did I use mine all up in the first half hour?
• Do I have them all left?

*This exercise was introduced by Dr. Gada Mahrouse

Reflection Exercise: Student Participation Styles

Ask your students to reflect on and interrogate their own participation style. This exercise can help students understand their participation as a spectrum rather than a binary of participation and non-participation.

• Individually, ask students to assign the following participation styles, ranging from “less often” to “more often,” based on their comfort with and practice of these techniques. Such as:
  • Asking questions
  • Offering ideas
  • Giving recommendations
  • Listening
  • Taking notes
  • Talking with peers during breaks about ideas in class
• Have students share their own participation spectrum in groups to discuss their different styles and how each of them might benefit or learn from their peers differently through those styles.
• As a class, discuss how there are a variety of reasons why people choose or are more comfortable with certain participation styles (e.g. navigating experiences of oppression and harm in the classroom, being neurodivergent, having anxiety, or being tokenized).
• Emphasize that the classroom can be a space where we choose to expand and try things out and that we are here to collectively learn with and from each other.
• Ask students to try to challenge themselves by individually coming up with a participation goal for their semester.

Participation Self-Assessment

Another strategy that can be useful is participation self-assessment, where students grade themselves based on a participation rubric (sample) [PDF] that models and outlines different ways that participation may be assessed in a class. This exercise can be done at the start of term, at the mid-term, and at the end of term to help students track their own progress through their participation, and can also be used as a grading rubric for participation assessment in the course.

Facilitation Techniques

 Collective

The following strategies can be used to encourage collective facilitation of class through co-creation and collective accountability:

Creating Over Criticizing

While students appreciate opportunities to apply critical thinking and analytic skills that they develop both inside and outside of the classroom, there are other approaches that can engage students in critical thinking beyond critique, such as creating or co-creating. For example, while we often state what we do not want in a classroom, society, or syllabus, we rarely ask what we do want. Creating and co-creating encourages students to think beyond the current circumstances and apply critical ideas in new ways. For example, ask students to outline the critique in a reading or class topic/discussion, then to envision a world where things have been transformed.

Classroom Agreement/Contract/Ground Rules/Rules of Engagement

At the start of the semester, collaborate to create a set of agreements for the course. This can be revisited and adapted on a monthly or bi-semester basis in response to the emergent needs of the classroom. Below is an example of how to organize this group activity:

1. Separate students into groups for 10 minutes and ask the following:
   • How would you describe your ideal learning environment, group dynamic, and tone for the class.
   • What are 5 features that make this ideal environment possible?
2. Translate those 5 features into 5 actionable items for our class agreement (e.g. feature = not judgement; action = we don’t make assumptions about a person if they share something that we disagree with or view as problematic).
3. Invite the groups to share their actionable items with the class and to explain how these actions support their vision of the classroom. If similar items are introduced by multiple groups, have the other groups make suggestions for adjusting the language to ensure collective co-creation.
4. If an idea is contested, first seek clarity from students to see if a compromise or middle ground can be easily achieved, or if contested ideas can exist simultaneously or in contradiction. If a resolution is not easily achieved, probe the underlying values of the proposed terms of agreement to find opportunities for reframing and revising.

Professor

Faculty can help facilitate class discussion by managing the flow of participation using the following techniques:

1. Call on students who raise their hands with less frequency first to encourage new contributions to the discussion.
2. In a large class, if many hands go up, say you will take comments from 3 people and invite those who have already spoken to lower their hands.
3. Validate and Invite Class to Hear from Others: Students who participate more regularly in class than others may do so from a desire to be heard. Introducing self-reflection and self-moderation techniques can help students learn to improve the quality of their participation; however, managing participation from those who dominate class discussion is important for faculty. Some techniques include:
   • allow the person to speak;
   • validate what they have shared;
   • say that you want to take note of this as you think it’s important;
     • then shift towards saying you want to hear from others about the same topic at hand;
   • either take a raised hand or call on a section of the class that has not yet participated;
   • focus on prioritizing hearing from others rather than shutting someone down.
   • Facilitate non-verbal participation by:
     • writing on the chalkboard/whiteboard;
     • making comments or posing questions on online class platforms;
     • using the chat feature for discussion in online classes;
     • using a live/cloud-based collective shared document for in-class discussions;
     • handing out question cards that students can pass to the front of the class;
     • moving between full-class discussions and small groups/paired discussions;
     • using polling or anonymous live feedback software in class.

Incorporating sustainable design into your courses can reduce the environmental and economic impact of purchasing printed textbooks. Textbooks may be helpful in standardized courses, where student learning is consistent across institutions (e.g. mathematics, anatomy, etc.); however, in interdisciplinary fields, requiring students to purchase textbooks can create barriers to accessing readings since expensive copyright permissions can limit the number of students who can access electronic and print copies of textbooks available through the library. Students who struggle to cover the costs of textbooks may forgo reading course material altogether.

Encouraging Reading: Strategies and Challenges

The following strategies aim to encourage reading among students at all stages.

Introductory Courses

• Offer short excerpts of texts (especially theoretically or conceptually dense texts) and provide reading questions and/or group reading notes.
• Spend time early in the semester workshopping how to closely read a text.
• Remind students that full comprehension of a dense theoretical or technical text is not the goal of reading at this stage.
  • The goal is to familiarize yourself with technical and theoretical language, introduce new ideas and ways of thinking, and develop advanced reading skills slowly over time. You may return to these texts in future courses for more advanced engagement with the ideas, concepts, and arguments introduced during this class.
• Provide previews of upcoming readings in class so students can know something interesting about how they will connect to coursework.
• Teach reading strategies in class (e.g. a system of note-taking in the margins). Invite someone from the library or writing center to run a brief workshop with students on how to read and take notes.
• Clarify how the reading connects to course material and topics.
• Use a variety of mediums to appeal to different student preferences and assign denser material alongside lighter material (e.g. an excerpt of a theoretical text alongside a video or podcast).

Intermediate and Advanced Courses

• Share your reading experiences to help model engagement with texts, share with students what you are reading and ask them about what they are reading.
• Prepare students to read a previously read text differently by prompting them to pose different kinds of questions, sharing new or different passages that stood out in the reading, or a new insight from rereading.
• Use advanced reading strategies, such as reciprocal teaching exercises to get deeper into the reading.
  • Reciprocal Teaching Exercise [PDF]

Below are the scenarios from the self-assessment quizzes (only available in the online format) that introduce each chapter of this guidebook. We’ve included the scenarios without the answer prompts so that you can use and repurpose them for your own discussions and workshops on pedagogy.

Gender & Pronouns

1. On the first week of the semester, you see a familiar face in class and refer to the student by their name in front of the whole class. The student is visibly distressed and tells you they use a different name. What should you do?
2. During your first class, you use a pronoun go-around exercise, where students share their names and pronouns with the class. One student says, “pass,” and then another student questions them and asks, “Well, how should I refer to you?” How do you respond?
3. A student informs you that their student record hasn’t yet been updated to include their new name and gender. They are concerned that their peers will use the wrong name in online class discussion forums. How would you troubleshoot this problem?

Indigenous Content and Decolonizing Principles in the Classroom

1. As part of your work to try to respond to your school’s call to Indigenize course offerings, you invite a guest speaker from another department who is an expert on Indigenous art and artifacts into your course to talk about Indigenous cultures. One of your students questions your choice of a guest speaker who isn’t Indigenous. How would you respond to your students?
2. You help your department host an event on Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls, and Two-Spirit people. During the event, a student who you know is Indigenous is visibly upset and leaves the event. How do you handle this scenario?
3. During a university workshop on decolonizing curriculum, one of your colleagues shared that she already includes the university’s territorial acknowledgement in her syllabus. Another colleague in the workshop shares his plans to decolonize his classes by having students perform a charitable task for extra credit. How would you respond?

Diversity, Inclusion, and Racial Justice in the Classroom

1. Political protests have been organized on campus in response to anti-Black racist incidents involving campus security. Given the context, you screen a documentary in class on the history of police brutality in Black communities. The film depicts graphic images of Black people being attacked by police. What do you do to prepare for the class?
2. During a class presentation, a student plays a song that contains the “n-word” in the lyrics. The student puts the lyrics up in the presentation and invites the class to discuss the song in relation to course readings. Some students in class participate in discussion by reading the word out loud. How do you navigate this context?
3. In a class discussion on racism, a white student calls out a fellow white student, accusing them of being racist because they questioned whether affirmative action initiatives work.

Navigating Difficult Pedagogical Dynamics

1. During a class presentation, one of the student groups plays a video featuring overtly sexualized language and derogatory comments on people’s bodies. Some students in the class are upset and say that they should have been given a trigger warning before seeing the video. How would you handle this situation?
2. During a department meeting, your colleague suggested that her classes are a safe space for her students. However, you know of at least one student who has confidentially shared with you that she feels uncomfortable in this professor’s classes but has not felt safe to say anything directly to this professor. How would you respond?
3. After a guest speaker visited your class, you received an email from them expressing concern about how it went. They share that they felt tokenized by you and the students in the class. How would you respond?

Access and Disability Justice

1. During the first week of the new semester, a student approaches you after class to ask if they can have an accommodation. They’re not registered with accessibility services because they don’t have a medical diagnosis, but they have been struggling to high levels of anxiety that disrupt their ability to complete class assignments. How would you respond?
2. While discussing the topic of climate change, a student suggests we should be revisiting ideas around population control to ensure highly qualified and skilled individuals have the resources needed to ensure the survival of the planet. How would you handle this discussion?
3. One of your students who has relied on notetakers provided by the access office has just informed you that this service is no longer available to students who are registered for accessibility support. How would you respond?

Cultivating a Culture of Accessibility, Accommodation, and Respect

Please note that this is a working/living set of ethical terms that will grow and change throughout the course. This is not an official policy but rather a guide to help ground both students and the professor in the practice of accessibility and a respectful classroom. This guide may be relevant to disability, gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, language, economic status, citizenship status, and even personal hardships. You can help build this guide by proposing edits to the document.

While we collectively strive to build a barrier-free world, we must also recognize the challenges of implementing full universal accessibility, autonomy and self-determination in the classroom (and at the university) due to the systemic, institutional, and structural configurations of power. Even as we call for systemic change to achieve more accessible, inclusive, sustainable, and respectful classrooms requires our collective collaboration. In the spirit of collaboration, we commit to the following:

• We prioritize respect for self-determination over achieving universal consensus in the classroom. We strive to hold space for our varying levels of knowledge, skill, and experience in the classroom and engage with one another with compassion and patience, except in circumstances where harm is ongoing and/or intentional.
• There is no single universal model of accommodation because barriers, violence, and precarity may emerge and subside unpredictably, they can be temporary, relapsing and remitting, or long-term, and they may be experienced individually or collectively. Therefore, should any change occur in someone’s engagement in this course (including attendance in class, work in groups, or completion of course work, returning assignments, etc.), we will discuss accommodations as soon as possible with the appropriate person/people to help adapt to these changes.
• Decisions to disclose and not to disclose reasons for accommodation requests should be respected. No one should be compelled to disclose personal details relating to accessibility; and conversely, disclosures around accommodations should be met with respect and consideration for the privacy of others.
• In prioritizing self-determination and respect, we collectively endeavour to use the language people choose for defining themselves both within the classroom and outside of the classroom. If we are uncertain about what language to use and when we will ask in a respectful manner for clarification.
• We recognize that language is not universal but cultural and contextual. As such, we strive to use appropriate language in the classroom while also recognizing that such terms may be contested, contradictory, or different across various contexts.
• We strive to individually and collectively consider our own participation in class to encourage a safe and respectful learning environment. We strive to practice respect by reflecting on our attitudes, assumptions, responses, language use, and word choice during class. When we make a mistake or cause harm through our use of language (whether intended or unintended), we commit to understanding how and why harm emerged, and transforming our behaviour to the best of our ability when appropriate.
• We also recognize that the classroom is a space for working through difficult and contested ideas. This means that we must seek to understand how barriers, language, and harm emerge across multiple levels, including the individual, the social, the systemic, and the institutional. Identifying how or why harm occurs is as important as alleviating harm.
• We recognize that difficult/challenging/uncomfortable feelings are not the same as harm, although harm can be experienced as a difficult feeling.
• This requires approaching a conflict with generosity by:
  • assuming good intentions unless intention to harm is clear,
  • reflecting on the source of harm, which may be individual or systemic,
  • evaluating safety without equating this with discomfort,
  • identifying the appropriate actions for transformation,
  • using a collaborative rather than punitive approach,
  • prioritizing collective learning, growing, and adjusting as we develop new understandings of conflict and harm.
• While accommodations for recognized disabilities are set by the university’s accessibility policies and services and through agreements established individually between a student and professor, peers also play a role in cultivating a mutually supportive, accountable, and sustainable classroom. We, therefore, strive not to make assumptions about our peers and to “check-in” with our peers and/or the professor if we are experiencing challenges in a classroom dynamic (e.g. a group member who has not completed their work, an interpersonal conflict, a circumstance of oppressive or inappropriate behaviour, etc.)
• Accessibility is an ongoing process. We are all responsible for checking in throughout the term, not just at the beginning of the semester. It is never too late to seek accommodation or help or develop new ways of supporting one another in the classroom.

For more information on how official channels at the university identify and provide resources for accessibility and disability, seek out information with the campus access services office and talk with peers about how they have navigated these services. If services are not available to you for any reason (e.g. cost or barriers to diagnosis, unrecognized barriers, specific accommodations that are not provided, barriers are not disability-related, needs may be temporary or newly developed, etc.), this is an invitation to discuss supports that we can collectively and individually co-create in this class.

Natalie Kouri-Towe

Online Tools and Resources for Students