Last week, I attended the Creating Change Conference for the first time. One important message that I took away from the conference was the importance of recognizing the healing that students (like other individuals), may need to experience as they engage in learning. Although it may not seem like the "job" of an educator to facilitate students' healing, I aspire to nurture the whole learner, and therefore believe that part of my role is helping learners to recognize, reflect on, and heal from various sources and outcomes of internalized oppression (like self-efficacy, impostor syndrome, stereotype threat, and respectability politics). Related to that, I learned that although we may like to introduce our learning spaces as "safe" spaces, truly "safe" spaces may not exist, particularly in higher education and other historically exclusive (and perhaps in some cases, oppressive) spaces. We should instead, aspire to create safer spaces, in which we recognize the vulnerability that are learners have experienced or are experiencing and seek to do what we can to make the space as "safe" as possible.
2 Comments
2/11/2015 03:14:03 am
Hi Natalie,
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Miko
2/11/2015 08:03:15 am
Thanks Natalie for making us think about the idea of "safer spaces." I think whenever we are designing and developing a course we should keep in mind effectives ways of fostering these types of spaces for our students.
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GEDI BLOGI am taking a Contemporary Pedagogy, a Graduate Education Development Institute (GEDI) course towards the Preparing Future Professoriate (PFP) certificate. In this section of my blog, I will be posting about topics related to innovation in teaching and learning. Archives
April 2015
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