Oct 28, 2017 | 11:00 AM - 12:30 PM | Main Loft

Moshoula Capous-Desyllas, PhD, Briauna Johnson, MA, Jonathan Rich, MA, Earl Houston MA

Strategies students to navigate and reconcile personal and professional value tensions: Lessons from teaching social justice. Co-Authored by Briauna Johnson

This presentation will highlight the findings from a qualitative research study with undergraduate sociology students enrolled in a course titled, Diversity and Social Justice. This course exposed students to an intersectional analysis of privilege, power and oppression, relying on intergroup dialogue, discussion, and personal reflections to understand the social construction of difference and various forms of oppression. In this research study, we were interested in capturing the ways in which students acquired a heightened sense of consciousness and exploring how students’ experiences in the classroom transformed their thinking around diversity, privilege, power, and oppression at the individual, cultural and institutional level. The purpose of this research project was to understand how students navigated and reconciled tensions and challenges related to learning about issues of privilege, power and oppression and identifying any ethical issues that the students faced in their personal life and in their interactions with family members, friends, and community. In order to capture students’ complex and multilayered thought processes, we facilitated a focus group with 10 students and engaged in 8 individual in-depth qualitative interviews. Our findings revealed strategies, perspectives and praxis of 18 diverse students at the micro, mezzo and macro level. The student participants in this research study engaged in various techniques in order to address values tensions related to the reparation or complication of relationships. Students also shared how they reconciled the ways in which their socialization process coincided with their newly acquired knowledge of the social construction of difference, privilege, power, and inequality. This presentation incorporates student voices and their responses to social justice concepts, and concludes with pedagogical implications for teaching and learning from an anti-oppressive and decolonizing approach.

Marsha Barrett, MA, Saima Hussain, MA

Understanding Islamophobia through Narrative Empathy

Our presentation will focus on the transformative power of personal narratives to inform and educate others about marginalization, discrimination and prejudice, with a particular focus on Muslim women.

We will examine the issue of Islamophobia through learnings in a recent (Winter 2017) Social Justice course for Early Childhood Education students at Humber College. It seemed timely and relevant to infuse the course with an understanding of Islamophobia, to assist Early Childhood Education students to reflect on their own biases and assumptions about Muslims and challenge the views that were being reflected in the media. Islamophobia was being reported in the news both in United States and Canada; hate crimes against Muslim-Canadians had more than doubled in 3 years (Global News, 2016), a shooting at a Quebec City mosque on January 29, 2017 had killed 6 people and injured 19 and a vitriolic anti-Muslim campaign was being conducted against prayers in the Peel District School Board,

One of the key learning outcomes in the course was to analyze how values, beliefs and attitudes of ‘self’ and ‘others’, influence understandings of social justice issues to appreciate multiple perspectives in diverse early childhood communities.

Embarking on the idea of understanding the “other” through personal narrative, a newly published book of short stories The Muslimah who Fell to Earth (October 2016) edited by Saima Hussain was selected as a text for the course. The book includes 21 personal stories written by local Canadian women and challenges many assumptions about what it means to be a Muslim.  The stories offer perspectives from a diverse range of Muslim women; traditional, non-traditional, queer, straight, married, single, disabled.  The book was required reading for the course with small group discussions (reading circles) and written reflections forming the basis of a graded assessment.

What transpired from this experimentation was a transformative learning experience.  Students shared in class and in their individual reflections their lack of knowledge about Islam, what it means for a woman to wear a hijab and/or niqab and how these choices are made.  Misinformation, assumptions and biases were replaced with understanding, empathy and a desire to read and learn more.

Editor Saima Hussain and three authors visited the class at Humber College to read their stories and share their perspectives and experiences. Our presentation will describe the above experience from our unique perspectives as an editor and an educator working to address Islamophobia in our current Canadian climate.

Jaspreet Bal, PhD and Juanita Stephen, CYC-P

Undoing identities: Using the self to deconstruct privilege in the classroom

As women of color who are educators in the post-secondary system, the proposed paper will talk about the various tools we use to address privilege and oppression. We will start with our lived experience in which we have worked to deconstruct privilege from a grassroots perspective. We will then move into how we differently teach the deconstruction of privilege from the position of professor. For example, from a lived experience of being in racialized groups, anger has been an effective tool in mobilizing others to create change. Also, guilt associated with privilege has mindfully not been given space in these conversations. However, as professors, when working with students who have many intersecting identities, some of which are privileged, experiences of anger have been used strategically and our classrooms have become a space for mindfully exploring guilt and privilege. This purposeful double standard is rooted in a pedagogy of the privileged as well as a pedagogy of the oppressed. We will conclude with tools other educators can use in their own practice.