Overcoming resistance and fear Sometimes resistance pops up when you all recommend my course on whiteness and anti-racism to a person you think could benefit. They may label my work on deconstructing whiteness and supporting white ally action as “radical” as a way to dismiss it. I get it. My approach diverts from popular diversity trainings …
Ever feel like you are not doing enough as an ally? I am talking to white people here. Anyone else feel like your internal values and beliefs about how the world should operate is not showing up enough in your own daily behaviors? Ever feel like an imposter because you did not make it to …
Real Talk on “Imposter Syndrome” or why Kim is procrastinating Hey y’all!! I should be writing a talk right now that I will be giving in four days. Instead, I am writing you so that I can avoid feeling like I am an unqualified outsider who is going to be found out. No joke. This …
As social justice academics, we rarely feel we deserve time for our own re-alignment and reconnection with our own true selves. This post is about how much you truly deserve time to re-imagine. Over the last two months of 2021, I felt compelled to make time to re-imagine, re-flect, re-align, re-member, re-think, re-juvenate, re-calibrate.This resulted in a …
Increase policy transparency The Syllabus Challenge provides critically reflective questions and practical ideas for inclusive teaching in action. Check out Tips 1-5 here. Tip #6 asks you to consider course policies as a source of inequity in our courses. Policies are generally accepted as neutral, though I am guessing this crowd applies critical analysis to policies more than most. So let’s …
Offer public-facing projects The Syllabus Challenge provides critically reflective questions and practical ideas for inclusive teaching in action. Check out Tips 1-4 here. Tip #5 challenges our assumptions about the target audience of student assignments. Are your professor eyes the only ones that see what students create to demonstrate their learning? Could that maybe have an impact on their engagement …
Enhance visibility; highlight strengths. The Syllabus Challenge provides critically reflective questions and practical ideas for inclusive teaching in action. Check out Tips 1-3 here. In this issue, we shift our focus to what reading materials we require students to read over the course term. When we choose a text or reading, we are sending cues about what is valuable, worthy of …
Show students you are a real human. The Syllabus Challenge provides critically reflective questions and practical ideas for inclusive teaching in action. Tip #1 covered updating terminology and Tip #2 focused on inclusive learning goals. Check out Tip 1 and 2 here. In this issue, we are going to challenge ourselves to let some of our academic walls down, …
Rewrite your learning goals. The Syllabus Challenge provides critically reflective questions and practical ideas for inclusive teaching in action. As I mentioned in the Tip #1 issue, no matter the discipline, this one could apply to you. Tip #1 focused on updating our terminology and phrasing throughout the syllabus. For tip #2, I want to move into the …
Update your terminology and phrasing. Some of you may be familiar with a pedagogical tool I began developing back in 2017. This living document continues to evolve four years later and will continue to evolve. In fact, I edited it this morning. The Syllabus Challenge provides critically reflective questions and practical ideas for inclusive teaching in action. …
