 Hi everyone, welcome to our afternoon panel on inclusive teaching from a faculty perspective. My name is Ellen Frereau-Dourlan. I used to pronounce they, them or she, her and I work as an educational strategist for the equity and inclusion office in partnership with the Center for Teaching, Learning and Technology here at UBC. I'll just let my colleague and I quickly introduce herself as well. Sure. Hi everyone, thank you very much for coming. My name is Hanai Tskada and I use gender pronouns she, her and hers and my role I am an educational strategist with the equity and inclusion office and my role is embedded in the Center for Teaching, Learning and Technology. Great. And so to get us started, I just want to acknowledge that we're here today gathered on the unceded ancestral traditional land of the Musqueam people as well as for the folks who are joining us via live stream in the Okanagan, the territory of the Silux Nation. For me, I think that acknowledgement is really important for a couple of reasons and the first thing is actually I would like to bring a link in from the student panel that we had yesterday where we heard from students about their perspective on inclusive teaching and one of the things that stayed with me that one of the students shared was the importance of seeing yourself acknowledged even in a small way and so I think while land acknowledgements are not the sort of and all and be all of what it means to think about and to grapple with the reality of living and working on unceded indigenous land, I think they're also a necessary part of reminding ourselves of that reality and the responsibility that that carries in our everyday life and so for myself as someone who is a settler, a fairly recent immigrant to Canada and who came to Canada not having actually any understanding of this land as indigenous land, I reflected a lot of where that lack of understanding and knowledge came from and I think some of the conversations about inclusive teaching are about sort of that conversation who gets included, who doesn't but also who gets to do the including right and I think those conversations around land sovereignty and indigenous perspectives is very much also tied up in these similar questions. So before we get started formally with our event, I'd like to give a few shout outs to people who have made this event possible. First of all a shout out to Kelly Fleming who is the program lead for Celebrate Learning Week without whom this would never have happened. Also the events team was an incredible job of making sure that everything has been running smoothly in the last few days and as someone who often runs events by themselves, I'm really grateful that there's actually a team supporting us here. So I want to give them a shout out and finally I want to recognize that this event is made possible by the support and funding coming from the Provost Office for the whole of Celebrate Learning Week, not just this panel. So that was the couple of things I wanted to touch upon. Also just a note that the event is being live streamed at our campus in the Okanagan in Kelowna. So we'll, first of all, it's good to remind our panelists also that that's happening, but also that will become important for the question and question period, as we'll be asking for questions not just from the audience here, but anyone who is watching us from Kelowna. The final thing that I wanted to say quickly, if Miriam, thank you, is I wanted to take this panel as an opportunity to flag some of the work that has started on this campus and has been, in fact, ongoing on this campus for a long time around inclusive teaching. Henai and I have been working for the last year on launching this website. That's meant to be kind of a landing space for folks who are interested in hearing more and learning more about inclusive teaching. It's very much still a work in progress. So we would love if this is a resource that you find useful that you would like to be able to use. If you have some feedback on what's there, what you would like to see there, it would be great to hear it. And I think that kind of is hopefully one of the pieces of much larger conversation that we're trying to have on this campus around what it means to bring equity and inclusion into our teaching and learning spaces. And on that note, I will pass it over to Henai. I will introduce the session, the agenda for the session. So just let me briefly introduce the overview of the session. So before introducing our wonderful panelists and start the discussions, we'd like to take a few minutes to, you know, to kind of to highlight the work that is happening on campus to promote and support inclusive teaching at UBC. And to do so, we invite Associate Vice President, Equitian Inclusion Sarah Jane Finley to introduce a new program called Equitian Inclusion Scholars Program and the first cohort of scholars selected for the program. And after that, we will introduce faculty panelists and then begin panel discussions and then followed by Q&A with audience. And with that, I'd like to invite Sarah Jane to come and introduce the Equitian Inclusion Scholars Program. Thank you very much, and I, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to put my glasses on this morning. I was too vain to do that and I then forgot to read half my script. So, and so I ended up speaking from the heart rather than from the script. It's my pleasure to introduce you to the Equitian Inclusion Scholars Program and the scholars for the incoming cohort. The ENI Scholars Program is a new awards program that aims to support and enhance equity, diversity and inclusion in teaching and learning. With the ultimate aim of enhancing students' classroom experiences. The program has been developed by the Equity and Inclusion Office as part of our commitment to support existing efforts and to build capacity for deepening equity and inclusion in teaching contexts. It is supported by CTLT as part of their commitment to foster greater opportunities for inclusive teaching at UBC. Now, the funding for the ENI Scholars Program comes from the Commitment to Diversity Fund, which was advocated for by the student government in 2015 and was a commitment made by the Board of Governors. A central component of the ENI Scholars Program is to elevate existing efforts and to build capacity for furthering equity, diversity and inclusion in teaching and learning. There are many, many good EDI efforts going on in teaching and learning spaces across UBC. And this program is one of the efforts to bring together individuals and units working on the issue from a range of different perspectives. So we're really happy to have selected six projects that will be providing two years of funding. These projects are situated across eight faculties and there are 26 scholars connected to the six projects who range and rank from doctoral students through to full professors. There's a strong collaboration between academic and non-academic units on campus and half of the projects include a strong community engagement learning component. Now, while the projects are diverse in scope and approach, they share in common a commitment to grappling with complex notions of inclusion or exclusion in teaching and learning. Some projects focus on building faculty capacity, others focus on the student experience. Proposed outputs of the projects range in approach including curricular development, pedagogical interventions, resource development, assessment tools and capacity building. All at the interface of fostering greater potential for inclusion of students learning experiences and in ways that can be applied in related disciplines. So now I'm going to introduce the scholars and a little bit about the projects and if you're here maybe just put your hand up when I say it. So the first project is led by Neil Armitage and focuses on introducing community building education within two departments in order to develop resources that disciplines across arts can can embed to foster community building and student engagement. This collaborative and interdisciplinary project led by Mario Bondani uses a community engagement approach to explore how interactive and open dialogue about issues of sexual diversity, addiction and mental health within the undergraduate dental and dental hygiene curriculum contribute to a transformative learning experience. This highly coordinated and collaborative project led by Tal Jaros focuses on creating inclusive and equitable practice processes, tools and resources for supporting students with disabilities seeking accommodation during their practicum placements. Led by the director of the ACAM program. I'm sure I saw Chris someplace. Chris Lee, the focus of this, sorry led by Chris, the focus of this project is to build an interdisciplinary undergraduate curriculum that integrates equity inclusion and community engagement at all levels and aims to build capacity and foster community among teachers and scholars in Asian Canadian studies. Janice Stewart and Annette Henry lead this project, which is focused on developing teaching and learning resources that support faculty and administrators in their trajectory towards a professional and culturally competent approach to working with difficult and divisive issues across varied classroom settings. And then finally a team of people from science comprised of Christine Goodheart, Karen Smith, Jared Stang and Jacqueline Stewart will through a systematic assessment of characteristics of learning activities that support and engage students enhance equity and intercultural understanding in three science courses. The research team will develop and test assessment tools that will inform best practices for educators when implementing learning activities in an active learning environment. And could the scholars who are here please stand and we can welcome and acknowledge them? Thank you very much. Thank you, Saryjing, for the introduction. I'm actually, I feel like this is such a perfect thing that the announcement lined up with this event is it really points at the breadth actually of the conversations that are happening on campus and that this is by no means just a conversation that's happening between our panelists. Though we're very excited to hear what they have to say, but really something that's happening at the grassroot level in lots of different spaces on campus. So now I'd like to introduce the panelists who are joining us today. Instead of me trying to speak to and for them, I'll let them introduce themselves and maybe a couple of things that we'd like to hear just to get a sense of who you are, but also to get the conversation started really is if you could share your name, your pronouns, the role and, place that you come from on this campus. And also one reason why inclusive teaching is meaningful to you. And let's try and keep it pretty short so we can get into the depth of the conversation, but we'd love to hear a little bit of glimpse into how you think about inclusive teaching to start. And maybe we'll start over here. My name is Christine Goodheart. I use the pronoun she hers. I am a science education specialist in the department of botany. And my interest in inclusive teaching really stems not from so much my current role, but from my previous role as a biology instructor at a community college in Los Angeles. And I started off teaching very traditional with a textbook and lectures and exams and quizzes to assess my students. And I found that it felt completely flat and that my students were not succeeding. So I started to talk to them a little bit more and I started to delve into what the problems were. And I found that a lot of my students first of all could not afford the textbook. I had a lot of homeless students, students that were very low socioeconomic status. And without the textbook they were really at a big disadvantage. The students that could afford a textbook couldn't necessarily use it because they didn't have time. Many of my students were taking care of children, other family members working one, two, three jobs, commuting one, two hours each way. I had students that were deathly afraid of the subject that had very terrible test-taking anxiety that did not see themselves as scientists and didn't see how it related to their lives. So I had to completely change my core structure to better meet their needs, to better set themselves up for success. And in particular, one thing that I did in addition to throwing out the textbook and changing how I covered concepts to make it more interesting to them is to incorporate scientist spotlights where I would highlight scientists that actually were relatable to students and represented the different identities of students. For example, I had a lot of students that were religious that didn't think that science and religion went together, so I incorporated scientists that were religious. I incorporated women scientists and scientists of ethnicities that represented my students. And my students did a lot better and were a lot more engaged and excited about the topic. Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Sarah Gebremuse. I'm an assistant professor at the Peter A. Allard School of Law. I use the pronouns she and her. Before I get into a discussion of why inclusive teaching is important to me, I just wanted to thank the organizers for the invitation. Fairly new addition to the law school just joined last year, so it's great to be included and invited in spaces like this. Inclusive teaching is important and meaningful for me because as a black woman going through the Canadian education system and particularly the legal education system in this country, I never really saw myself reflected in the course material and the professors who were teaching to me. And so the opportunity to stand before a Canadian legal classroom and to teach very old colonial material but in a more nuanced and innovative way is why inclusive teaching is meaningful for me because without inclusive teaching I think we undermine the existence of so many students who are in the classroom and so many students who are seeking to enter the legal classroom because it is still a program and a profession that has yet to fully reflect the Canadian population. So inclusive teaching is important to me so that we can ensure there's greater equity in the legal profession and in law schools across the country. Hi everybody, my name is Manal Matani, I use the pronouns she and hers and I also want to thank the organizers for such a special event so thank you for including me. Why is inclusive teaching important to me? Plainly put because I got kicked out of university my first year. I did not do well, I did not feel seen. When I did feel seen I felt hyper-visible as a Muslim woman of Indian-Iranian descent. So as I pointed out the fact that I was different and Manal, can you please speak about your difference, that kind of thing. Or else nobody was even acknowledging the fact that my experiences were not reflected in any part of the curriculum whatsoever. So why do I do this? Because I don't want any student to feel the way that I did my first year at University of Toronto. And it's very ironic I ended up going back to the very same school in the very same classrooms in which I was kicked out of all those years later. I've been at University of Toronto for the last 15 years and just joined UBC this year. So that's why I do it is because I really don't want any student to go through what I went through. Hello, Anin. My name is Kevan Lamarou. I'm very proud to be part of the University of Winnipeg and to be visiting here in Vancouver. I was thinking as my colleagues were sharing that in Anishinaabeg language, Anishinaabeg-Mohen, there is no gender pronouns. There are assumptions about gender. Gender is much more fluid from Anishinaabeg perspectives. This idea of two-spiritedness is actually held quite sacred. The agoke way of community were held in high esteem and high respect. And for a number of Ojibwe people I believe that the imposition of gender binary and sexual orientation is a colonial imposition. But I very much enjoy hearing from people to know how they would like to be addressed so that I can conduct myself with respect and love accordingly. It's a pleasure to be a part of this panel. I'm humbled by the expertise and the personalities that I get to sit with. What a great gift I have in my life. I come from the Eagle clan. And in Ojibwe perspective, Eagle represents love. And I come from a grandparents who, when I was a very young boy, ran a boarding house for people coming from northern Manitoba that needed to receive medical care. So that they could be in a safe place where they were getting things like dialysis and other procedures that, again, were a consequence of poverty and oppression in northern Manitoba. I'm very proud of that. I'm very proud to come from those people. When I think about everything that I want from my own daughter, wealth and well-being and all those other things, if she became the kind of person that sheltered sick people when they needed a safe place to go, I would be so proud of her. And so it's in accordance with the teachings of my clan that I try to conduct myself with love and a sense of obligation to my brothers and sisters. And I suppose that's my interest in this. But more than anything, I'm very interested to learn from the people I sit with today. Hi. My name is Aftab Irfan. I am a first generation immigrant from Iran and in my language also there's no gender specific pronouns. If you must speak to me in English, I'll go by she and her. I am mainly right now working at the equity and inclusion office as the director of dialogue and conflict engagement for the university, which means I do 10% dialogue and 90% conflict engagement, some of which happen in classrooms or around things that happen in classrooms having to do with equity and inclusion. My teaching is in the faculty of applied science at the School of Community and Regional Planning. But I'm a social scientist in engineering, so it's kind of, I'm not a typical applied science professor, I don't think. The question of why is inclusive teaching meaningful to me. My therapist has noticed that the central thing that I get caught on or the thing that's important to me is integrity. It's not safety or success, but it's integrity. And I think this has to do with integrity. In a way, UBC promotes itself as this place for equity and inclusion. We talk about that commitment. We talk about ourselves as a global place. We talk about our commitment to decolonizing. And I think unless we are reflecting that in how we are teaching in the classroom and what we are teaching in the classroom, it's false advertisement. That feels very troubling to me. It feels out of integrity when we do that. At the planning school specifically, we have an indigenous planning stream that we've had for the past five or six years. And we quite, I was going to say, kind of ambitiously or even aggressively recruit indigenous students. And so to then expect that they just come in and nothing changes does not really work. So again, I feel like to have integrity, we need to pay specific attention to this. Hi. My name is Benjamin Chung. I prefer pronouns are he, him and his. And I'm a lecturer in the Department of Psychology, relatively new addition, I guess, to the department as of three years ago. And inclusive teaching is important to me because my wife said to me one time, it seems like whenever I ask you how your day is doing, it's centered around your students. If your students are crying in your office, then you tell me you had a bad day. If your students are excited about what you did today, then you had a really good day. And often a lot of my experiences in interacting with my students have to do with students who either are crying because of the mental health issues, because of culture dynamics that they're dealing with at home. Or they are thanking me through tears just simply because I told them they can have an extension on their assignment and they don't need to give me a doctor's note or anything for it. And it has really highlighted to me just how important it is to be considerate and inclusive of students in a variety of our teaching practices. So with that in mind, I try to make sure to carry that in my teaching as well. Hi, everyone. I'm Wendy Carr. I'm from the Faculty of Education. My pronouns are she, her. This year I've held a number of administrative positions as well as teaching for a very long time in the Faculty of Education and in K-12 schools. This year I'm a senior advisor to the dean in charge of two really exciting areas. And one of them is sexual and gender diversity and inclusion, and the other is mental health literacy. And there's some very interesting overlaps between those two portfolios as you might imagine. Something that we're really working hard on in the Faculty of Education, and I've been putting quite a bit of effort in the last couple of years, is building a culture, a community where our language, our curricula, our practices, our structures can really encourage or enable everyone to see themselves. We've heard that from a few people today, and Kevin, thank you for the inspirational start to the day with your keynote. That was also a theme. We want different forms of knowledge, different ways of knowing, different ways of living one's life and experiencing one's identity to be not only acknowledged but actualized while in our program. We're in a really fortunate position of preparing teachers to become educators, preparing teacher candidates to go begin their careers as teachers, about 800 of them per year. So it's a potential to have a profound influence systemically. And so how we shape our program in the Faculty of Education very much can influence how individual educators go out into the world of teaching. And in some cases start to reverse some of the harms of marginalization and discrimination, particularly in the areas of sexual orientation and gender identity. So we value all areas of human rights, and those really predicate our policies and practices. And we have a particular focus on preparing new teachers so that they feel included in our program and can learn to inculcate that sense of inclusion in their teaching. So it's a real pleasure to be here today. I do not do my work alone. Again, Fawar al-Julao has done a lot of work with us. Steve Mulligan is in the audience and is a seconded educator who helps to really create this sense of culture. And we're working closely with Janice Stewart and Janice has done some formidable work laying the groundwork as has equity and inclusion. So I'm really excited to be here. Thank you. All right. Thank you very much, everyone. So we'd like to start our panel discussions. And then maybe I can put on the names of the panelists in case people are sitting in the back. Just so that you can see all the names of the panelists. Thank you. So before we begin the discussions, just to let you know how we structure the conversation in this kind of coming one hour, we have prepared some discussion questions for the panelists. So we are going to have that question in discussions with panelists. And we have asked everyone on the panel to kind of speak from their own teaching experience and perspectives. And also yesterday we had a wonderful student panel event. And then on that panel, I think five students spoke really eloquently about their experiences in the classroom, what it's like to be in the classroom and feeling included or sometimes not so included or sometimes worse. So we would like to bring that conversation to this panel discussions as well. So we are going to include some of the questions in the panel discussion. And then after that, we will invite everyone from the audience in this room and also on the live stream to join the Q&A with the panelists. And so we have this hashtag CW2019. And also if you are shy and would rather want to participate in the Q&A from this room, you are more than welcome to participate through the Twitter. So with that, we'd like to start. So thank you very much for your introductions and then sharing some thoughts about inclusive teaching. And then some of you might have already kind of touched on the question that I'm going to ask. But maybe you could kind of elaborate on the definition of inclusive teaching. When we talk about inclusive teaching, what does it mean? And if you, you know, just coming up with the definition is a little too much, then maybe what makes it inclusive teaching? What are the key elements? Well, I can jump in and I know everyone will piggyback on this. Just a few ideas to start. When we think of our curricula and how we, which is often the first and even our syllabi, the first sort of compact, the first contract into which we enter with students, we need to think about how we're representing what it is students are going to experience in our courses. Whose knowledge is represented and valued? Who are the writers, for example, that are featured in your course? How do you structure engagement? Because different groups engage in different ways. And so even how your evaluation structure sometimes highlights or foregrounds particular ways of engagement. Is there an inclusion statement in your syllabus, for example? So these ways of beginning to look at curriculum were part of a curriculum mapping exercise that we did in our faculty. I think the way that students will see themselves begins with our actual curriculum. And then it moves to the language and the practices in the teaching environment. How we speak and write people into existence and out of existence is very much something we need to be conscious of from the very first contact that we have with our students throughout the process. Because, again, we're always modeling for them. We're always, every interaction is not only in and of itself significant, but it's the witnessing of that interaction that has this ripple effect. And so we live inclusion through our practices and we model for our students and for others of observing us what we value. So that would be a way to kick off, I think. Or maybe differently, what do you do in your classroom? Maybe share your concrete examples of what you may intentionally do to make that classroom environment more inclusive of you? I think the big thing for me in my classrooms anyway is that people feel welcome and safe in participating in class. And I think I appreciate the fact that this forum is allowing for people to go on Twitter, for instance, and participate if they are feeling shy or anxious to speak in public in front of all these people. In psychology our classrooms are anywhere between 90 people to 300 people in a single classroom. And you can imagine speaking in front of 299 other students can be extremely daunting. My classes on average are about 150 students. And so I've had a lot of students who will come up to me individually afterwards and ask questions and make comments about the course, about the content that we just discussed. But it would have been so much more productive to have had that conversation in the midst of the class where we can actually talk about those ideas. So in my class I have this question box and it's a little box off in the corner of the room where people, if they feel like they're uncomfortable with speaking up in class, they can put in a little slip of paper that is anonymous and drop it in. And then at the end of the day I'll collect the box. I'll take a look at the questions that are there and I'll bring it up at the next class. And then we can have a discussion about that without having to name anyone. Sorry, I got too excited. Without having to really name anyone or out anyone as having asked that question. And we get really fruitful discussions coming from that. And so just finding ways to include more people into the discussion is really what we're trying to do and it's really what's needed in our classrooms. There's a lot of other policies that I don't want to take up too much time. But there's a lot of other policies that I try to do in my classroom where the goal really is to welcome students and to make people feel like they belong and not visible in the way that Manel unfortunately experienced in university. But to make people feel like they have something to contribute in a way that is meaningful in the classroom. And in creating different ways for students to participate. Here from a lot of educators. Anyone else to add? Broadly speaking I would consider inclusive teaching to be meeting students where they are. And this ultimately I think will look very different in different people's classrooms depending on who your students are, the context of your course, what your strengths are as an instructor and maybe your weaknesses are as an instructor. But it's going to look different and I think that the key thing is to get to know your students. If you know your students then you'll be able to better set up a classroom environment in which your course content, materials, curriculum, teaching practices are interesting, relatable, accessible to everyone in the course. Thank you Christine. Is there anything you particularly do to get to know your students where they are at? Because that's something I often hear and everyone seems to have different strategies to get to know their students. Depending on the size of the class, when you have 100 students in the class or 20 students, can you share something? Yeah definitely. Having interactive activities during your course is a really great way to get to know your students because you can walk around, especially you can walk to the back of the room where the students tend to probably, you engage with them less. And they're probably the students that you need to hear from most. Also I've heard we are currently engaging in a student diversity initiative in the Faculty of Sciences and I've been doing some student interviews and what I hear over and over and over from students is that they want to interact with their instructors. They want to have actual physical interactions with you, but they don't always feel like they can. So being approachable, being friendly and something also that they talk about is sharing about yourself, talking about your own struggles and showing your students that you're a person makes them more likely to want to engage with you and trust you and tell you a little bit about themselves. I can pick up from that. I think I kind of think of a two-piece approach. One is in the design and what do they read and what does the course content cover. And then there's the stuff that happens when I'm standing in front of the room. And I think if I'm honest, I mean in the preparation design, I am thinking about different identities. How would this land for my queer students? Am I speaking to examples that have the immigrant community? I do think about that in the preparation. But when I'm standing in front of the room, what I'm most conscious of is including things below the neck. That there's heart in the discussion, that the body is present, that there's identity is a thing that we can talk about. In some way, I feel like the most colonial thing about our institution is that we are from the neck up. And so when I really think about how to be inclusive, that's what I'm being inclusive of most consciously. And part of it is exactly what you're talking about, of coming in as a person and sharing a little bit more personally. And going to the back of the room, which is like you have to have a body to go to the back of the room. It doesn't just happen in the realm of ideas. So yeah, I think it manifests in those ways, but just kind of in terms of where my attention is. It's like meeting every person as, well, really like holders of knowledge and wisdom and involving all of that, inviting all of that into the discussions in the classroom. Or like yesterday, one of the student panelists was talking about, you know, sometimes, you know, their peers speak just, you know, they're just uninformed. I mean, you know, just thinking about, you know, meeting where students are at, students come from all different places and different educational backgrounds. And students bring in different levels of skills and knowledge and different forms of knowledge as well. And I guess sometimes, you know, students come with this uninformed idea about something and then, you know, carry on the discussions. And the students' expectations are, you know, they want instructors to, you know, say something and then to kind of facilitate that conversation, you know, whatever the comments raised there. And often, you know, educators do talk about, you know, meet students where they're at, but at the same time, it's really a challenging task. For example, you know, in the classroom, when, you know, I came to Canada, there was no, like, I didn't really know anything about residential schools. Right? I am an international student. Then, you know, about students, other students talking about residential schools. And then, you know, if I say something really uninformed or just even say, what is it? What is it about? And how do you facilitate that space? Do you have to, you know, if you are talking about inclusive classrooms, then how do you facilitate that kind of space? Experience or insights? Well, that's part of the art of teaching. And so that's something more often than not. So preparing teachers, that's a question that comes up. You know, how do we take students from where they are and enlighten, move them along? Because remember, it's not just enlightening that student. It's what's going on for every other student in the space at that time because they're listening and learning and watching. So you have to respectfully honor where they are, consider the background that brought them to that thinking, and perhaps there are some gaps, as well as some richness. Well, obviously, I really appreciate thinking of them as vessels, obviously. They have their own resources. Respecting that and moving them forward in their thinking. And so that can take the form of provocative questions. You know, have you thought about I wonder questions? You can get a lot into an I wonder question. So it's a skill and it's not easy. And that's why becoming a teacher takes a lifetime. Or maybe we can then just shift the conversation a little bit to think about, so you know, you kind of in the introductions, you talked about why inclusive teaching matters. And then so then what about the impact on students? What impact are you trying to really, you know, have on students learning? Why, you know, what does it matter? And also yesterday from the student panel, some people from the audience contributed this question about how do we know that it's working? Oh, going back, if that's okay. I come at this with a very different perspective on teaching because I've been out of the academy for the last five years. I've been, I'm a geography and journalism professor, but I've been hosting a radio show in downtown Vancouver for the last four years called Sense of Place. So I spent the last five years like asking people questions every day, all day, like, you know, 10 to 12, and it's been fantastic. But it made me really think about the power of questions. I'm so glad Wendy that you brought this issue of questions because it's top of mind for me these days. And it made me think more about listening and how I'm not a very good listener. And here I am as a radio host. I'm expected to listen, but I was too busy trying to think of a great question than listening to the answers that I was receiving. So maybe start thinking about listening as not just a political act, but as a pedagogical act. And how could I encourage a different kind of listening? I mean, again, I was so struck by Kevin's powerful keynote today where he talked at the very beginning about how we listen or how we don't listen and what we're, what we're paying attention to. And it made me think, how can I structure a class, as I embark upon my first time teaching at the Institute for Social Justice here on UBC, that would encourage students to listen in a different way? And I told that powerful story at the beginning about what, like for me, at least it was powerful because it was so gut-wrenchingly difficult at University of Toronto. Because for me, that's really been the inspiration for thinking about the development of this course. And I have the pleasure of teaching a course called GRSJ 101, which is a course on Introduction to Social Justice. And in this course, I've really been trying to think through what Cornell West tells us, which is social justice is just what love looks like in public. I can't stop thinking about that. It's like top of mind for me. So I wanted to think about how I could bring that into the classroom. So I structured a course that looked at the question of geographies of inspiration and violent epistemologies. And that's a bit of a mouthful. But what that really means is I want to ask what inspires us to learn? What inspires us to listen? What gets us excited about ideas? And so the way I structured the course was simply like this. Every week I'd bring in a different guest speaker. That speaker would give two articles for us to read. What is the piece that inspired them? You know when you're in school and you read a piece, you're like, oh my God, this is why I went to graduate school. It's like this one article. But we also read a piece by that person that they wrote. The one that they felt epitomizes their career. The one that they really worked hard on to get just right. The students read both and had to make the links in terms of what was inspirational from the piece that they read and the piece that they wrote. And then I interviewed that person for an hour and a half every Tuesday. And the dynamic was incredible because as you see, we all want to get to know our professors, but we often don't get a chance to do that. And that's why this is a first year course. Because the students can hear me talk about the themes that I talked about were risk, relation, revolution, repair. What are the risks we take in teaching? How do we think about revolution? What does relationality really mean? And what is our duty to repair? So we talked about this for the first hour. And then on the Thursday, they would meet in groups of ten students in each group and they would talk about what they learned in the class. This experience was transferential for me. I mean, look, I get to interview all these really cool professors on campus, but it's also about the students developing relationships with the professors that are here and there are such talented professors here on campus. But they don't often share their personal story, their trajectory. And hearing the stories of trauma, like what they went through in university, you would not believe the stories that came up in class. And on the Thursday, the openness with which they share their stories. But the students could see themselves reflected in those people speaking. Completely change the classroom in a way that I hadn't anticipated. Now, I think one thing that's really important for me in the classroom, it's not just what I'm doing at the front of the classroom, but I also like to think about integrating some of these kinds of principles into adjudication. So one of the things that I did is I asked the students for their final paper to write a letter to the speaker. One speaker that they thought was pretty, really moved them. So I've just spent the last three days adjudicating all these letters to speakers and they have been extraordinarily moving and powerful. Why do I do this? Not because I just want them to reflect on it, but also because I actually want them to send those letters because then they can develop a relationship with some of those professors and perhaps even take a course with them, do a directed reading course with them. So that's my example of how I'm trying to do this in the classroom, how that's been very, at least been very transformational for me, but certainly from the students, from the feedback I've been getting, it's altered their way they've understood their own trajectory in the university so far. I'm so glad now that you are talking about students need to relate to the content and they need to see themselves in it because yesterday on the student panel students did talk about how much it's important for them to be able to see themselves and then have their voice being reflected or even the voice, right? Like when they didn't have the voice. So it's really wonderful. The impact. I think what's important to consider often is that undergrads don't know what academia is like and they don't know how to navigate their ways around university, university politics, university dynamics and the rules that are spoken and unspoken that they just don't know. And like there are students who don't know to ask for extensions at all. And I had a student, I had one particular student that I'm thinking in my mind right now who major honors and a major trying to do it in four years because of family reasons and was stress beyond means trying to accomplish everything in that term with like papers and exams almost simultaneously. And I said to the student, you know, you can ask me for an extension and give you an extension. That's fine. You have all this other stuff that you need to deal with. You need to, you know, you need to be okay. And the response was from the student was, really, is that okay? And I was shocked just because, so this is a first generation university student. And it's sort of not surprising. There's not a lot of scaffolding that was able to happen within the family on like how do you manage your time and how do you manage your mental health and well-being in university? How do you manage the people that you'll meet that you'll come into that you come across in university? And so over time it's sort of just having these kinds of relations having these dialogues with the students and you're sharing your own experiences and sharing what you know about university dynamics and academia dynamics that the students, you sort of almost empower students to be able to take more of the control that they really should have, but they often don't realize that they have, to make the university experience one that they can actually enjoy, one that they can actually thrive in. Otherwise it's difficult for people without that scaffolding, without that experience. That reminds me of the keynote speech this morning, Kevin was talking about flexibility and kindness to students and in space. Anything else to add to it? Otherwise we can kind of shift a little bit the gear towards kind of, you know, as the UBC, you know, kind of walks towards structural way of embedding if you can inclusion into different areas of work that UBC does. And then teaching and learning is definitely one of the big areas where we want to embed that and then we want to kind of hear more of your thoughts. And then I'll pass this kind of part of the discussion to Ellen. Sure. Yeah, I guess maybe just before moving on to those kinds of more structural pieces, I'm curious to hear jumping off on a couple of things that were said. And one of the things that strikes me is the mentorship piece that I think Manel, you spoke to in sort of the way that you were scaffolding that into your exercises or the trajectory of your class rather. And that's actually something that also came up yesterday in the student panel. A couple of students spoke directly to the importance of mentorship or the absence of mentors or not knowing sort of where to find mentors. And so I'm wondering if you can speak to your experiences with mentorships of students. What does that look like? And the tensions around that, we had one student yesterday specifically who said that she struggled as a racialized student, you know, looking for mentors that reflected who she is and to whom she was drawn, but also being very aware that often faculty themselves have experiences of marginalization or often, I think she said, oversubscribed. And so how do you balance that? And after you had a beautiful answer yesterday, I think to that student directly. But yeah, I'm just curious about that conversation and if you wouldn't mind speaking to some of those experiences in your lives as instructors. I can start with what I said yesterday from the audience to the student. What I said, which came really clearly at the moment was I think it's one of the most moving things that happened to me when a student asked for mentorship. And especially when they say very specifically, it's like, I would like you to be my mentor and kind of uses that word maybe even. I mean, there's nothing more meaningful than that in a lot of our roles and especially for those as faculty who struggle with being in front of the class and our own issues of marginalization and having to deal with all these structural things and often the students are the best thing, the best part of the job. And so my encouragement was actually to ask for it because also I'm not oversubscribed. I think I can see my students protecting me in a way and being like, well, I want it, but probably everybody wants her to be their mentor and actually not many of them are asking me. I don't know if it's just me or if that's more generalizable. But I would actually like to be asked. And as I was thinking of it overnight, I actually think I would like it to become even a little more formalized. I mean, there's already something in the calling it mentorship that formalizes it beyond the, you know, I want to cry in the hallway and I need somebody to listen. Like mentorship gives me a place from which to express my care and hold that longer term relationship. And maybe ideally to also get credit for that, you know, like the sort of the overextension and the emotional labor that like that's a real thing. And maybe some of the mentorship if it is named and acknowledged could be also accounted for formally. I can speak to an example in education. And it's perhaps not a formalized mentorship, say, as working with a grad student, but our undergrads, our teacher candidates come to our program with degrees. And they come from really diverse backgrounds, not only personally, but in terms of academically, as well as having had many lived experiences between their undergrad and coming into our program. Often what our work as mentors, and I know Steve has done this work as well, particularly with our LGBTQ2 plus students, is helping them to navigate unwelcoming terrain. And that can be, for example, in a very conservative K-12 classroom. And there are lots of those. Education can attract a certain and inculcate a certain conservatism. And so those who are different, however we want to define that, and Kevin, I liked how you physically drew a line in the ground to say us and them. So if you consider yourself to be a them, and you're going into an unwelcome environment, we as mentors, that's one of I think the strongest gifts we can give to students is to help them to navigate that terrain. Is how to hold your own ground, how to hold who you are, and work within structures that are often very unwelcoming. And there are ways through, and typically we, if we've made it here, have figured out some of those ways through. And so sometimes that can be the most powerful teaching we can share with our students. And, you know, we've heard enough feedback from candidates, particularly navigating the terrain in a K-12 school. It's very different from a UBC classroom. That some of those tips, some of those assurances that they are not going to lose their identity, they can just shift for a little while and then resume once they're in a more secure role, for example. That can be very helpful for students. Thinking back on that, I'm actually curious to hear from both law and science for slightly different reasons. Law, because it's another professional program which I think raises slightly different questions right around not just mentorship within teaching and learning spaces, but potentially moving on to a career in a particular field. And actually in some ways, similarly in science, I think there's been efforts sometimes at formal mentorship, and I've usually aimed at women, right? And I'm kind of curious if you can both speak to your experiences with these both informal and formal opportunities and the impact that you've seen that had and where you'd maybe like to see more happen. So to your point, mentorship in law is critical, because to borrow Ben's language, there really isn't a lot of scaffolding for certain groups who are pursuing legal education. And so my personal experience, I sought out mentors as much as possible and not only turned to lawyers or law professors that look like me, but also to other professors that were either doing work in similar areas of interest. And oftentimes it wasn't as successful as I had hoped it would be. I mean, oftentimes I think it was because those profs didn't really think that, especially those in academia that academia was in store for me. And so, you know, why, if they don't see me as sort of that shining star of a student, why bother mentoring and lifting up the student to the potential that I was hoping to achieve. And so that has really shaped my experience now as a professor. I'm joining the ranks of a profession that I never really thought I would, just because, again, I didn't really see myself reflected in this profession. And unfortunately the private practice of law, which I didn't really want to pursue to begin with, even though it paid really well, also didn't have much luck once I gained more and more graduate legal education. And so now as a professor and the only black professor at the law school, I do, of course, have a natural affinity to helping the few black law students that are studying here. Because I recall what it was like being a black student, one of the few black faces in a law school and trying to navigate a predominantly white institution, a predominantly white profession, and what that would entail. And so I've, through whatever efforts I can, have supported the students in, I would say it's been mostly informal, because we just haven't given a title to it at the law school. And so I've reached out to, the students are organized. There's a Black Law Students Association and they try to organize a number of different events during the year. So I support them in any capacity that I can. It would be great to see that type of support be formalized because as I completed my annual report for the first time, I was like, where do I put this work? That took up so many hours. And I was like, it's really just like a footnote at the end of the report. So it would be great to see it formalized and to see the type of work that so many marginalized professors do to be recognized. And if I can just quickly make a connection to, again, something I've said this morning in your keynote, Kevin, around seeing past the struggle to seeing the potential, I think that really resonated with what you just shared, sort of getting, like professors kind of deciding right from the get go, are you someone that I see as having potential or not, right? And thinking from once you're in that instructor position, thinking about what is shaping who we see as having potential and who we see as not having as much potential, and then maybe being less deserving of our time or attention. So thank you for your sharing. You want to speak to us? Sorry. I didn't mean to put the two of you on the spot. I just automatically was drawn to kind of those spaces, I think, as interesting spaces for mentorship. Yeah. I can really only speak to the biology program. But as far as what came out of the interviews that I've been doing with students is they really would like more mentorship that comes out over and over and over again in the interviews. And it's something that we're thinking about. So we're in the process of a curriculum renewal project. And it's something that we actually want to integrate into the curriculum a little bit more just because we are seeing that there's such a need for it. And we want to build that capacity within maybe the curriculum. That's actually a really interesting tie-in to another question that we had which is around structural supports. So we've been talking not only but somewhat to sort of what it is like to be an instructor or a student trying to make those connections and trying to create that space in a classroom. But to a large extent, that's also set up within a larger context of the institution, of the university. And so not having room in an annual report to speak to some of that work. Shapes then whether or not that work is appealing work to do because you know that you're not going to get recognized for it. And so I'm curious if some of you can speak to what you see as either promising practices that are happening in your departments and faculties or practices that you'd like to see implemented, right, in terms of building in that recognition for whether it's mentorship, it's a bushel of labor that instructors are often called to do or inclusive teaching practices more broadly. I was introduced to a theory by an academic by the name of Joan Ogbu out of the United States who talked about his experience working with African American students in the United States. And he talked about this idea of a forced choice dilemma or the phenomenon when we find students in a situation where they have to choose between being successful at school or being loyal to their home community. And really what it comes down to is a conflict of values and a conflict of identity. And to really understand that I suppose from a Canadian perspective I had to really reflect on the truth that the primary weapon used against Indigenous students, for example, was mainstream public education and the academy. And being in a situation where you have to choose between perhaps pursuing a pathway to success as defined by other or being loyal to your home community, that's a real tension. And I think it kind of speaks to this idea of mentorship and some of the structural questions that we have in place around what we're offering students. It really goes down to the idea of values and what's the point, right? When I was decided that I was going to pursue my PhD, I went to my elders, my knowledge keepers to share this with them. And the first question that they asked me was why? And the reason that they wanted to know why I wanted to pursue a PhD is because they wanted to know what I was going to do with that knowledge. Why are you pursuing it? And they asked that question because that was going to determine whether or not I was going to get support from the community in that pursuit. If the purpose for pursuing it was to get three letters after my name that allowed me a certain sort of arrogance or hubris or a certain sort of leverage over other human beings and there was no support from my community for pursuing that education. If the point was to do something with that knowledge, to enter into relationship with that knowledge and enter into a place of responsibility for that knowledge, then we could open up the conversation for how the community might support me in that regard. And I'll just give you an example of this. Several years ago, I had a cancer scare. I went to go have a regular dentist checkup and my dentist found a growth in my job. I don't mean this to gross you out or anything like that. It's for illustrative purposes only. But I found this growth and so they took some x-rays and the dentist took a look at the x-rays and when he came back, he put the x-rays up on the lighting wall, you know, and the first thing he said was, yeesh, and I thought, well, that's not really filling me with a lot of confidence there, doctor. And so he sent me to a specialist and was determined that I was going to have to have surgery to have this growth removed out of my job. So I went in for surgery and while I was sitting there, you know, in that fantastic gown where your butt hangs out the back, waiting for this procedure, the anesthesiologist came in who was in a big rush and I was nervous because I haven't had a lot of medical procedures and I was just intimidated by the situation and he said, you got two choices. You can have a spinal, you can have general anesthesia. One might give you brain damage. The other might paralyze you. Which one do you want? And I said, I don't know, doctor. Which one would you recommend? And he said, it's not my choice, it's yours, but you got to make a decision quick because I've got other patients. And I said, I guess I'll take the brain damage package? I don't know. I don't know what else to really suggest and I was horrified afterwards. I remember being so scared my hands were shaking. And a nurse came up to me and very kindly assured me that they have to say that for legal purposes that it had nothing to do with, you know, anything that I needed to be worried about. Everything was going to be fine. I'm sure that anesthesiologist got A pluses on his work. And then the matter. There's something missing in his pursuit of well-being and health for people that he was intended to serve. And so it goes back to this idea of what's the point? If it's to hold leverage over other human beings, then the values are inconsistent with at least any indigenous community that I've ever interacted with. I think you raise a good question also with the story around what are we assessing and for what purpose, right? Which we can get into. But yeah, what do we determine as being a successful, obtaining a successful degree? And what does it look like that career along the way? Does anyone else have examples or thoughts around this idea of how do we create some of these formal supports for efforts around equity and inclusion and teaching in the room? I don't know if it's asked for formal support, but just as we were talking about assessment and adjudication and evaluation, I've also been marking papers for the past three days. We finished two days ago. But the question was up for me so often. What am I doing as I evaluate these papers? And maybe I'll share my struggle because in some way, what I would love is communities of practice of people who talk about these things and where it can bounce ideas off of each other. And my struggle as the assignment was essentially a literature review. It was not maybe part of the problem, although I made it very broad. It doesn't have to be literature to literature. It could like blogs would count, videos would count, and stories would count that you hear firsthand. So it was very broad. It could be in any format. But as I was reading it, I was aware that some of the students, and actually I was maybe specifically aware of it with some of the Indigenous students, the way that they were writing, my first look when I was reading it was like you can write like that in high school, but I don't know if you can write like that in a graduate program. That was the first thing. And it was because I was saying things like, there are three arguments, and now I will present the first argument, and now I will present the second argument. They were just kind of taking me through what they were doing in the paper. And from what I have learned in university, it's like you can kind of drop that. You just tell us what you need to say. You don't say I'm now going to say what I'm going to say. But when I was thinking about it, it's like, well, that's a narrative way of writing. There's nothing particularly wrong with that. It's not actually high school. It's like how it comes most naturally. And when I think about how this student's speaking to class, it's exactly like this. And it's like taking me through a story of moment by moment of what is happening to them. And so I was in this dilemma of like, do I say this is perfectly okay, which it is? Or do I also say to them, if you're going to be a planner and you're going to do this and you're going to do it for the municipality, they expect you not to say these things. Because that, I mean, in some way, I like them to know that information so that they can succeed and get to the top or whatever. But I am doing that within such a broken system. So like, do I prepare my students for the broken system? Or do I resist the broken system? Why do I do with that? And it's due at midnight and I need to finish marketing. I was just going to piggyback off of Aftab's point because if you want to look at a broken system, I think the legal system is this one that is closed. Yeah, it's quite broken. And I think we, and you struggle as a professor because you were trying to impart on students what they need to succeed in the profession, which is still stuck on some very old ways of writing and communicating. But at the same time wanting to give them room to express themselves and to express the challenges that they have encountered with this broken system. And I think law is still trying to figure that out and find an answer to that. And some of the efforts to your question that the law school is currently trying to undertake, a number of them are around the Truth and Reconciliation Commission's call to action because there was a specific call to action to law schools. And so the Eller School of Law is trying to figure out really how we can respond to that call to action. And in other efforts as well, recognizing the range of student perspectives and the students that come to law school, we've included some workshops on transinclusivity to encourage professors to be more cognizant of the different identities that students have. And so encouraging professors to use their pronouns, acknowledge the pronouns that they use and also to not presume students' pronouns and the preferred names that students would like to... Or not assume that students' name would necessarily jive with their gender and just to be more mindful of those instances as well. But I think we still have a long way to go. I myself am trying to do some work around diversifying the student body itself because I mentioned there are very few black students I wouldn't want to give numbers because they're shockingly low. So there's also work that needs to be done, I think, as well, and even just diversifying our student body. But I'm hopeful, otherwise I really wouldn't be here or I would be very depressed most of the time. So I am still really hopeful that some of these things can be implemented. So something else that... This is taking us back a little bit. I feel like I'm trying to follow the flow of conversation and realizing something I left behind somewhere before. We talked a little bit, I think, and I asked a question earlier around what happens when there is a comment in the classroom that needs to be addressed. And I'd like to go back to that a little bit because in some of the conversations that we've had in our work with faculty members and instructors, those moments of how do you respond in the moment and what happens when there's a breakdown, especially amongst peers, potentially right amongst students, comes up because I think a lot of instructors feel like they haven't been well-prepared or well-equipped to deal with what I would call difficult or brave conversations, kind of a different take on the same thing. And so I'm wondering if you can speak a little bit to what that has looked like in your classrooms, the techniques that maybe you've used or what you've found successful, something that I think was mentioned yesterday is the impact, right, and how we repair than what happened. So there's kind of two parts that I seek to the question is what do you do when a moment like that happens where there's an inappropriate comment that's made or whether that's coming from a place of ignorance or a place of resistance to the material? What happens and what do you do as an instructor or facilitator in that moment? But also, how do you repair the harm that has caused in the classroom? And I think I'm thinking of that because of some of what was shared by students yesterday in terms of the impact that that has on them, right, when they sit in that space and potentially then the lack of interest or willingness to go back to that space and not knowing what will happen. I think you have to be explicit about what guides your work. So you have to be explicit about your values. In education, it's really important that our teacher candidates know that they hold personal values that are shaped by their background, by their family, by their experiences, and then they have professional values. These are guided by human rights. They're guided by respect, equity, inclusion, all of the tenets that we hold dear in a social justice forward institution. And it is their duty. It is their professional competency and that's why we're framing a lot of the work in the faculty around this notion of professional competencies. It is their responsibility as professionals to sometimes hold their own personal biases and opinions to one side as they uphold their professional competencies. And these are guided by human rights. You know, it's constant law. And that's a fine line, but it's something that we can model as instructors by laying bare what those guidelines are, what those operating principles shall we say are, and then operate accordingly. And that is a way that you can both preface your responses so that if something is that you hear or witness goes astray of those, you need to stop and say, well, this is what I was talking about. This is an instance of where, you know, we're going into this domain of personal bias and you don't frame it that way, personal opinion, let us say, and we need to now put on a professional competency framework and adjust. And so by doing that, you're not, you are making a judgment. It's your responsibility to do that, but you're giving a basis, a theoretical framework upon which to base that judgment and action, and then you move forward. And you can return to that because you can be sure there will be other instances where you need to bring that out again. And if you're clear of the onset and you have this as an explicit set of guidelines, you return to those again and again. And as you do so, you're modeling what teachers need to do all the time, whether they're here or whether they're in the K-12 system. So it's being clear about what those professional values and boundaries are. Thank you. Sometimes I think it, at least in my classroom, it hasn't so much been the impact that a person's comment makes on others, but more about other people's response to a particular student who's making a comment. So, and I'm particularly thinking about a student with a, who speaks English with a foreign accent, a non-European accent in particular, often in psychology classrooms, a vast number of our students are of East Asian descent and many of them speak English as a second language and many of them also have accents when they speak English, at least an East Asian accent when they speak English. And often what I will experience is when a student speaking with that particular type of accent, asking a question, or making a comment in class, I hear sighs. Or I hear people breathing deeply and sort of like, which communicates to me that they're now disengaged, communicates to me that they don't care about what this person, what the student is talking about. And I think in a lot of cases, there's this confounding of accent at speech and maybe the perceived validity of someone's comment or what the validity of someone's thoughts. And that concerns me because I was, I'm an immigrant myself and I came here from Hong Kong when I was nine years old and I had spoken with an accent until I guess over time I more or less lost it. But I'm very aware of that conflation and what that feels like for the person to be speaking that, to be saying that and to be expressing that accent. And so when I hear other people's response, that kind of sighing response and disengaging response to the speaker, if anything, I make sure to highlight how important that question was and how much of a contribution that is making to the class discussion because I don't want to just answer the question, just like it's any other question, because obviously the other students are responding to that question in a way that doesn't make it seem like any other question and so I can't respond to it in the same way. So I make it a point to that student, to thank that student for asking that question and to also highlight how that question is contributing to our class discussion, to our class knowledge. And I've had that happen several times over the last couple of terms in several classes and I think over time I started hearing less, I don't know whether they've just, many other students have just sort of not explicitly expressed their disengagement but are still internally or privately expressing or experiencing disengagement, I don't know, but at least my purpose in that moment is protecting the student who is asking the question and as long as there isn't as much of that expressed, explicit frustration or disengagement, then I think that's better for the student and better for participation. And to speak to this question, it feels a little bit risky to say this is what I do and is it right or wrong and I really appreciate the way that you've just spoke to it. I do, I mean, I really, I mean, I facilitate the heck out of my classes. I really, and I've facilitated some, I facilitated for the UN and these things between the federal government and First Nations and sometimes those are the chops I have to bring to my classroom. So, you know, it's not easy what's happening in the classroom. I do find myself often paraphrasing, amplifying the voices of the students you are talking about. Their question actually has a lot of it. It's brilliant, but it is being said in a way that this room cannot hear or cannot hear well and I can lend myself to raise that and I will like physically stand with them and repeat what they've said and amplify it. So to me, I mean, mostly what I see, so there's probably every once in a while somebody who is, you know, just kind of awful and wants to violate others' human rights. I think that is possible that that could happen. Mostly what I see is people not knowing, is ignorance or more kindly not knowing, not knowing why it is wrong to say something like that and especially given where we come from all over the world, like there's no way that people are going to land here as an international student two years ago and know all the norms of Canadian society and know what it means to use the right pronouns and know the history of the residential. You know, like it's just too much to ask and we are, yes, we need to teach them but they're not trying to violate somebody else's right or hurt them on purpose or make it difficult for them. So, I mean, I like your example at the beginning of not knowing the stories of this place and so, I mean, let's say that in my class there was a Hanai and Hanai is saying, you know, why are we hypothetically saying, you know, I don't understand what the big deal is, like maybe residential schools, they were trying to do good things, right? Let's say that Hanai was saying that. And so, yes, super uncomfortable and like very problematic and people could be negatively impacted by that. She's not meaning to hurt people. She just doesn't know. And so, and the reality is, I mean, even though we are not saying it, there are many people in the society that actually think that. They don't know what was wrong with residential school or they have that objection to it. So, to me, this is a moment where the conversation can be deepened instead of like left where it is. And so, I would amplify that comment and with as much kind of kindness as I can. So, there's a view here of like, I actually don't understand what the big deal is, right? And I might even check with her or if I know she's a newcomer or doesn't have the history or something, note that. And I might say like, what is the response to that? What do we want to say to that? And sometimes, including, so sometimes people will say, well, I'm hurt by that because of this, because my family's gone through it or because I've read this book and know this history, so education can happen around that issue. Other times, people will say, well, actually, I just don't, I don't have energy for that conversation. Or I've had it a million times, I'm not having that. In which case, I could say, you and I can talk about it at my office hours or whatever. We don't need to necessarily do it in this classroom, but there's at least that opportunity. I think the thing that's problematic for a comment like that to just hang and or for this person to feel marginalized, not because of something wrong they're doing, but because of something ignorant that they're doing. So, again, I started by saying like I do bring all my facilitation skills to do it, but I think it is, that is the real opportunity to deepen the conversation when those problematic statements come into the room. I want to thank Aftab for making yourself vulnerable. You said that you were a little uncomfortable to share that, but I appreciate it very much. And so I wanted to honor that by perhaps being vulnerable myself and offering two things in response that many people don't agree with me on. The first one is that I have never personally seen a shame-based approaches to challenging discrimination be effective or efficacious. I've never seen someone twittered enough to be able to change their point of view. I've never seen somebody humiliated enough to change their racist ideas. I've never seen somebody browbeaten enough with moral righteousness to change their mindset. I have seen it silenced. I have seen people fired and disappeared, but all that really assures for me is that it's going to be waiting there for our children to have to deal with. And so, because I'd rather it come at me and us in our generation than our kids, there's a different sort of sensibility that we want to bring to that, and I appreciate that. And it's asking an awful lot, and I hope that we all in the room have a sense of just how profound the folks that I'm sitting with, just the quality of instruction and compassion and professional accomplishment that they bring to this, it's a lot to ask of people, and it's very humbling to be in the present of. One thing I think about a lot about this idea of challenging discrimination or ignorance and where it exists is the idea of privilege. And it's something that I think a lot about, and so I'll say the second thing that oftentimes people will disagree with me on. If I'm giving a presentation, I'm talking to people, and I'm going to lose an audience, it'll be talking about privilege. That's not the thing that people will disagree with me on. I think everyone can understand and feel very accusatory. And so my stance that people sometimes disagree with me on is that I don't think it's any of my business, whether anyone in this room has privilege or not. It's not for me to point out, it's not for me to identify for you, it's not any of my business whatsoever. But my position is this, if privilege does exist, if there's anything in your life that you have that maybe other people haven't been able to enjoy, my first thinking is that I don't want you to feel ashamed of that. I don't want anything to acknowledge that. It can actually be empowering and socially positive. I'll give you an example. My own daughter, who is status Indian, but growing up in a home where she has an academic father and a mother who's the vice principal of a school, typical middle-class Canadian enjoying more privilege than most of the world would ever know. And I don't want her to feel guilty about that. But if she ever looks down from her place of privilege and says, why don't they just go over that? Or some other equally ignorant thing? I feel like I'll have failed her. My job is to sort of empower people, I think, to see the gifts that we've been given to, I suppose, do good by other human beings. And I think that if we can sort of, you know, do exactly what you suggested, which is to sort of see people who are offering ignorant statements potentially as being, those being teachable moments or opportunities or a better way of relating to other people, then we have a different set of skills available to us. It's like that old saying that if the only tool we have is a hammer, it's tempting to treat everything as if it's a nail. If we see ignorance as being an enemy rather than a constructive opportunity to create change, then I think it offers a different set of tools. But I also wanted to thank you for this beautiful blanket you put on the table. You did a great job of setting up the sound system here. It looked very professional, really enjoying this blanket, so I wanted to thank you for decorating the space with it. Thank you. I just want to be mindful of time. Any final thoughts on that last conversation before we maybe turn to the audience for some additional questions? Maybe I could jump in and then give you back on the conversation that's happening right now. It's like yesterday at the student panel, some students, you know, you are talking about how you may kind of irritate the moment and then, you know, protect some of the students who are being affected in the moment and things like that. But the students also did talk about the learning spaces where the instructor is not necessarily present. For example, small groups, you know, assignments, or going into labs where the TAs keep rotating. And then so the instructor, you know, cannot really reach and project them all the way. And yet some, you know, students do kind of appreciate if the peers, when something happened, if the peers showed up for them and they supported them. But, you know, when they were talking about it, I thought, wow, then how do instructors set up that kind of classroom, kind of maybe a sense of community, you may call it, or develop some kind of guidelines or setting the norm or expectations. Would any of you here do something intentionally to create that kind of classroom environment where kind of everyone needs for each other to show up? I'll answer the question just to break the silence, because I hate awkward silences. I think in my practice, no, I mean, there's a lot of individual work that's done in my classes. And whenever students do have to do any group work, I find that students do a great job. I'll say great because I think it's for their own well-being, but they do find a great job of finding their community and other like-minded students who will support them. And so I say it's great because they're being mindful of their own health and well-being, but on the other hand, it's detrimental because then we're really not, you know, having students really engage with people with diverse and different perspectives. And so I think that's still something I struggle to do as a professor because I would want students to find their little clan, their little community that can support them in my classroom and of course in their three years at law school because it is the law school can be a very oppressive place, but I think then there are some students who are leaving a law school without the diversity of perspectives that they really should be and are entering the profession without that breadth of perspectives that they should be. So still something I'm struggling with, so maybe I have to take more classes with Aftab to learn more about ways to do that. Then maybe we can open the conversation to the floor. So if you have any questions to the panelists and then just to remind again if you are participating on live stream, please use the hashtag 2019 or even if you are in this room you'd rather want to participate that way please feel free to. But yes. We have some mics. For the live audience it's helpful to use the mics for anyone else. I'm Italian and American so volume is not a problem usually. First of all, Manel, your voice is so beautiful. So for the moment you spoke I thought and then you said you're on radio. Perfect. Some things are right in this world. Thank you so much all of you for your perspectives. I don't know how to phrase my question so bear with me. I am a non-indigenous or Indigenous impaired person working in an Indigenous space so I recognize the value of allies. And I have been at UBC for about three years. I feel like I've gone to every CTLT event around microaggressions or pedagogies or Indigenous content in classrooms and I am just struck over the three years of how little or how few men are coming to these sessions. I know I've talked to you Ben about this. I'm like is there a psychological reason for this but I don't know how to phrase my question. I'm wondering if anyone else is concerned about this even looking around this room. Why are so few men coming to events like this not to like make it a sexist thing. I just looked up figures and you know 91% of deans at UBC are men 77% of heads of department are men so I feel like, and that's from 2014 I don't know why it's not more current. So I'm just kind of curious and I don't know what to do because I feel like this is a critical component of this conversation you know I know where the converted I know where the choir I know where they engaged but like what do we do for those who are not maybe the converted or not engaged and how do we have more active participation from those who are not here. In a way I want to say I'm not too worried about it because all the men are in the conflicts and they're coming to me anyway. The thing is like there's no escaping these issues and the department heads and deans who are mostly men. If they don't proactively get some of this stuff they get it when things go wrong. So as far as I'm concerned it's their loss you know like it would be probably really good to end and not say that we shouldn't make more efforts for them to be in this room but at this point I think like this these conversations are unavoidable unescapable and in fact I've enjoyed conflict as a way of having the people who really need to be in the room with a steak as opposed to the usual suspects which we often get if we are proactive about things. If I can offer something in that regard and I don't want to presume to be speaking for anyone else just to offer a little bit of maybe my own perspective on that question. I spoke to this a little bit this morning when I said that I was raised by men who had some pretty uncomfortable problematic ideas about masculinity and part of that translated to misogyny to be honest with you and I don't say that to upset anyone and please forgive me for saying anything that might be uncomfortable but that was the reality that I grew up in and I was very hurtful for me to even think back on some of the ideas that I was surrounded by and even some of the things that I was guilty of saying and when I first went to university one of my first courses that I took was an English course because nothing else was available and I walked into a course saying what I was signing up for and it ended up being a course on feminist literature and my professor at the time was a brilliant academic by the name of Keith Lewis Fulton and what she presented was this first time I mentioned the word privilege it was the first time that she introduced me to that word and the first time I heard it I was profoundly offended by the suggestion that I had male privilege because I thought in my own head at that time with my very narrow world view how dare you suggest that I didn't struggle to be where I am now that I haven't faced my own struggles and of all the ways that she could have responded to me that she would have been permissible she could have kicked me out of the class for my ignorance she could have shamed me she could have humiliated me in front of my peers instead she created a space for exactly what we've been talking about here to sort of engage with me in a way that allowed me to sort of be vulnerable with my own ideas and to continue at a different point of view and she stayed with me on this journey where by offering me respect I was able to feel safe enough with my own misunderstandings to be able to think critically about this and in returning after we had established that relationship back to this idea of privilege I was able to come to the realization much to my surprise that absolutely I do live with a profound privilege being male that absolutely hasn't been afforded to my sisters and it doesn't in any way invalidate my growing up with my struggles but what it does suggest is that there have been doors that have been open to me because I am male for no other reason than the fact that I am and so moving forward with that sort of knowledge I've sort of reflected upon some of the other ideas that I grew up with about what it meant to be a man and if I'm working with kids for example one of the things that I'll say to young boys in particular is as we engage with some of these issues I want you to remember that it's very masculine to cry and show emotion and to be vulnerable I also think a lot of boys particularly indigenous males because of the circumstances often times that we grew up with grew up with this idea that we need to be strong in strong means being violent or strong means showing very little human emotion no vulnerability in terms of our soul in terms of our emotionality in terms of those things that really humanize us as human beings and I suppose where it would be easy to be angry at people for being as ignorant as we see sometimes I really see it as a suffering and so I've been trying to sort of demonstrate with young men in particular that vulnerability and that emotionality that ability to be present but I think that part of the message that keeps men away from some of these conversations is that unwillingness to engage in a space that is emotional that is vulnerable that does sort of ask us to tap into a different reality than maybe the one that we are imposing on ourselves as these awful ideas of masculinity that are really choking the vibrancy out of the contribution that we could be making otherwise and so maybe it's another opportunity to engage with an exercise of here perhaps as maybe another point of view but I will say this that I also share your optimism and your hope because part of my journey of healing from my own sort of toxic masculinity if you will is coming to remember and reflect and ground myself in the reality that I come from a matriarchal society and what I mean by that is that it was always traditionally women that were held the responsibility for leadership and guidance for that community and so when I sit with sisters I'm reminded of a profound power that has the potential to really transform the world around us in ways that maybe straight academic power could never accomplish and I'm very grateful for that but I'm also sort of reflecting on the idea that in 1871 when treaty one signed which is where Winnipeg exists where I have my homeland women were turned away from that treaty negotiation because women were not seen as having a voice in political affairs so we have this rejection of feminist ideas coming from Ojibwe communities fast forward to 2019 we have over 2,000 missing and murdered women who should be at home with their families tonight but won't be most were victims of people that they knew and so I think that sexism and homophobia and toxic masculinity again are impositions of colonization and I think that if we can engage with the calls to action in a good way are going to benefit everybody and maybe allow us to enjoy more vibrancy on our campuses please forgive me if anything I said was upsetting Hi folks, my name is Neda, I'm a graduate student in nursing and public health I really appreciate the space because as a racialized woman on campus I don't feel I have a lot of spaces to talk about my experience as a graduate student and so I have a question but I want to give some context to it because Uftub as you said a lot of the time we talk about this more intellectually as opposed to personally so for me being in graduate school it's a very personal experience I come from a country where my parents were not able to access education as freely as I am so I'm very privileged to be here during the time my dad was going to school there was a revolution and so coming to graduate school I feel really really humbled and really privileged because as much as I think that education is a right it's not yet for everybody and so I immigrated to this country when I was 6 years old and you know as a lot of immigrants and people who might not be born here understand that it takes a lot of time to deal with the emotional trauma of immigration and identity crises and whatnot and I have to say when I came to graduate school I was very hurt and sad and disappointed because I felt like for the first time after 22 years of living in this country I had to question if I actually belong here I'm in the School of Nursing and Public Health I've practiced nursing for almost 6 years now I've treated racialized people many racialized people as you know I work in Emerge and we have a lot of people of color come in and I've practiced in indigenous communities so remotely in BC as well and I understand the barriers a lot of people face accessing health care in our country and I saw a lot of ways that racialized people or sort of marginalized identities in general so non-binary folks transgendered folks and intersectionality of those identities how they are othered in health care and so when I came to graduate school I realized that there's not a lot of marginalized identities in faculty and I started to realize where some of these problems arise in our health care system there might be something to think about there and having to carry the burden of working and going to school but at the same time constantly trying to find mentors constantly trying to look for places where I can say what I want to say and not feel like this might affect my grade or how I'm seen on campus or in my faculty and my ability to succeed and so I guess I kind of want to ask for I know a couple people on the panel mentioned that they had similar experiences when they were in graduate school and how like what are your words of almost wisdom for coping because this isn't going to change you know today right with these conversations this is a long standing issue colonialism is going to take hundreds of years to dismantle just like it took hundreds of years to build so how do we cope on this campus that wasn't built for us to be here thank you well I don't mind sharing my experience because I definitely relate to what you said you come from a very strong family I can imagine immigrating to Canada is not a piece of cake I mean my family also immigrated from famine so I totally understand so it's already in you the strength to persevere so just keep persisting and I hope whether it's in your faculty or in another part of the university that you can find some safe space so that you can you can vent you can be yourself because that is I mean that's something that is critical to your well-being I've thankfully been able to do that for some students at the law school and when I go home I have a great partner who celebrates my blackness and we thrive in it and we find things to enjoy together because he's an immigrant as well and he's had to struggle with the immigrant experience in this country so we find things that bring us joy and celebrate those things as often as we can because it is very taxing coming to this campus every day and wanting to be your full self but knowing sometimes you just can't when you have to bite your tongue in certain meetings or in your classroom because you just don't want to say that comment and be known as that person and so once you're out of that space for me it's blasting Beyonce as often as I can because she brings me so much joy and whenever there's basketball on TV I just got to watch because that also brings me joy so find something that brings you joy and helps you persist because it's in you and I'm sure you can keep doing it and Aftab said she was willing to mentor so safe spaces I'm also if you want to grab coffee send me an email at any point in time I would be happy to just share my experiences and give you an opportunity to just speak with a friendly person on campus Sometimes I feel like the luckiest person on the face of the world and that I come from a people who are capable of withstanding anything and I shared this morning that I feel such a sense of pride in recognizing that residential school survivors as children faced the very worst that Canada has been guilty of and yet still somehow found that inside of the strength and voice of the ancestors and the culture in the spirit to grow to be the kind of people that could extend their hand in friendship back to Canada feels so much pride and makes me feel so good inside and reminds me that Indigenous peoples across Canada are capable of facing any challenge I don't know anything about your cultural background but I know that you come from the same strength too and I'm so lucky that I'm able to come back to the Sundance and receive the healing from the Thunderbirds in the summertime and to be able to go to the the Sweat Lodge but I think that one of the things that we can do is recognize that as children of Mideaki, a kind-hearted mother earth that we were born capable of incredible strength and resilience and that you carry the strength of your ancestors in you being here because you said it everything inside of this was designed to keep you out of the system and here you are in persistence that's incredibly beautiful and inspiring Holy Smokes, the impact that you're going to have on future people as role models is unbelievable I just wanted to thank the panel you guys are amazing and many of you are talking about compassion as a kind of a pedagogical mode and I agree and I feel like it was an awesome way to come at things. This year we had a session who was teaching a transliteracy course and the session was having a meltdown really and couldn't continue in the course because there was a group of people that were actively sabotaging the course and it was in this case I would say ignorance was not really, it was very political in the sense that they chose not to know what the experiences of trans people and others were. So I took over the class and I walked into the back row of people all in mega hats which did not spark joy I must say but you know about 9 or 10 of them with mega hats and so I'm just wondering I don't know that I handled it in an awesome kind of way but it's you know I think that there are there is a kind of element also here that it's not about talking and it's not about compassion it might be about naming you know this is racist this is inappropriate this is and I'm seeing a little bit more but it also could be because I'm in a social justice institute and we're maybe you know getting a few more incidents like this but our faculty I think in some ways pay a heavy price because they are constantly having to educate and constantly having to have these conversations and not talk about you know how awesome Milton is or some other thing not that Milton is awesome but whatever just saying so I'm just wondering if anybody has any thoughts on that you're right Janice I mean there's a point at which and maybe that's because I've spent years in administration lately that I keep coming back to guidelines and we are bound by human rights guidelines and that's not okay and so naming it is not okay however respectfully we do it in our classrooms and sometimes we do it aside from an administrative perspective or you bring an administrator in to help has to happen because that message is a message to the perpetrator but it's a far more powerful message to everyone else around that you actually stand up for you've explicitly stated your values and guidelines and then you've held to them and I think that's completely defensible particularly if everyone is on board and you just say it the onset of a course these are the guidelines that in this class and then you live by them and you ensconce them in your syllabus and then you you name it and you deal with it and if someone is not abiding by and is not willing to abide by the guidelines of the course they don't have a right to continue in it so good for you for defending and supporting someone in distress good for you for even knowing about it because sometimes these things are happening and that's not a microaggression that's full on happen and nobody shares they suffer alone or they suck it up because they feel that they can't complain so we have guidelines and we need to enforce them that's a hard line from an administrator so other comments yeah I want to add I mean essentially I agree the metaphor of the hammer has already been used and I kind of think that the law or the policy or the guidelines are the hammer I don't want to use it very often like you know most of my tools are I don't know shovels gardening kind of tools right but like every once in a while I need a hammer as long as it's not everything becomes a nail because it's actually that way of saying this actually doesn't belong a line has been crossed and this doesn't belong in this classroom is a line we need to draw actually if we include absolutely everything no entity can survive so we do need to draw these lines I think what the panel has expressed is like that is a hammer that we keep in the back of our pocket and use only as necessary that's how I see it we have just only a few minutes left so is there any quick question Hi my name is Steve Mulligan and I just wanted to mention one of the things that Dr. Carr mentioned and it came up yesterday in the student panel and that was the idea we've been working on a video which talks about inclusion across campus specifically around sexual orientation and gender identity but many other types of inclusion are relevant as well. One of the things that both the Dean of Medicine mentioned in his interview with us and the Dean of Education was the idea of professional competencies and it may be a bit of an elephant in the room because of academic freedom etc yesterday in the student panel someone mentioned the idea of instructors, university instructors having to go through a course or some sort of prerequisite of learning about harassment. And my question is what about the idea of professional competency around inclusion for university instructors and is that something that could fly and how in a university setting? Sarah Jane just shrunk in her seat there No no I'd actually be looking over to you for comment about that Should there's a mic? Thank you Steve that's a really good question and something actually that we're in active discussions about it's certainly easier to think about doing that for staff positions putting in some kind of requirement for inclusion skills or baseline diversity competencies that have to be fulfilled it is a little bit more difficult with instructors but it is a live conversation in terms of having expectations around equity and inclusion and it may be that the way we get to that at first is through rewarding inclusive teaching practices and so finding ways in which to enhance the esteem of people who are doing that kind of work through rewarding it in our merit and tenure and promotion policies So with that I'm aware of the time and I'd like to continue the conversations but I have to be respectful of your time so I'd like to close by thanking everyone here especially the panelists for taking the time and sharing your wisdom and experience so thank you and thank you everyone for coming