Classroom Community: Creating a Classroom Space for Anti-Racist Learning

Smiling students engaged in discussion around a table in a classroom with books and papers

By Dr. Kirby Manià

Promoting authentic learning experiences is key to creating an anti-racist classroom environment. The education our students receive, and the writing activities we assign to them, must be relevant to their lives and the world around them. As instructors, helping to support the development of students’ own agency is a necessary step towards creating an authentic learning environment. To achieve this, many scholars agree that students should be offered a degree of ownership over their learning.

How can this be done?

  • Create a space where students feel safe sharing their opinions, which means that the classroom must allow for a diversity of experiences to be shared.
  • Students can be offered moments during the course to direct their own learning (i.e., choose a topic/reading/documentary to discuss as a class).

Instructor Reflexivity

Reconnecting with content covered in an earlier section of the toolkit (see “Shifting Your Mindset”), instructors need to consider what they, themselves, bring to the classroom, before being able to foster an antiracist classroom environment. This might mean unlearning Eurocentric frameworks and paradigms (when it comes to both course content and pedagogy). This process of reflection, or unlearning, is especially important for Writing Studies instructors who can (sometimes unwittingly) perpetuate colonial standards of what supposedly constitutes “appropriate” style and unitary usages of language.
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Writing for a secondary school context, Erika Niles (cited in Ferlazzo, 2020) presents a number of strategies that we can adopt in our promotion of an anti-racist classroom:

  • she calls, specifically, for white/settler instructors to listen to their students (particularly students of colour),
  • to work on decentering themselves when doing so,
  • and to take it upon themselves to learn more about the history of racism and colonialism as a means to more fully understand how to promote equity.

Since making provision for the anti-racist classroom is an exercise rooted in good practice, this entry will be focused on presenting various strategies to instructors, to help us think through ways to restructure our syllabi and teaching approaches.

Strategies

“the only way to undo racism is to consistently identify it and describe it” (Kendi, 2019, p. 12)

Collaborative Community Agreements

Various anti-racist teaching resources suggest setting aside time at the beginning of term to co-design a collaborative community agreement with students as a means of promoting an inclusive space that values their agency. These agreements can cover:

  • shared expectations;
  • boundaries (between peers and between peer and instructor);
  • an outline of how to navigate disagreements and breaches using a “restorative justice approach” (James, 2020, p. 1).

Resource: Berkley’s Graduate Division provides some guidelines for creating clear community agreements: https://gsi.berkeley.edu/gsi-guide-contents/discussion-intro/discussion-guidelines/

Asynchronous Content and Online Resources

Theresa Capra (cited in Ferlazzo, 2020) suggests that instructors actively bring race into the classroom and that virtual learning—where a blend of synchronous and asynchronous learning might make it easier for students to navigate difficult topics—can be used to constructively do so. Asynchronous sessions can provide access to online resources for a deep dive into sensitive material, and can present opportunities for careful, individual reflection.

Equity and Inclusion Statements

The inclusion of an equity statement in course syllabi can help to promote a welcoming environment for students, fostering a sense of inclusion and respect for diversity. Inclusivity statements can be a place where instructors outline whether they incorporate Universal Design for Learning (UDL) approaches in their teaching and how they intend to create an accessible learning environment to accommodate students with disabilities and different learning needs.

Chapter 2 of Margaret Price’s Mad at School: Rhetorics of Mental Disability and Academic Life (2019) is an oft-cited source when it comes to mapping out syllabus language for this purpose. Price adds the following to her institution’s boilerplate disability statement:

“I assume that all of us have different ways of learning, and that the organization of any course will accommodate each student differently. For example, you may prefer to process information by speaking and listening, so that some of the handouts I provide may be dificult to absorb. Please communicate with me as soon as you can about your individual learning needs and how this course can best accommodate them” (p. 90).

She recommends using first person (over the alienating alternative of third person), and also avoiding wording that makes the “responsibility for accommodation” solely the student’s.

Examples of inclusive teaching statements:

Agency, Belonging, and Group Work

Many scholars and instructors agree that the anti-racist classroom is one in which self-directed learning should be embraced. This can take the form of setting aside one lesson in your syllabus and asking for students to volunteer to design/present/deliver that session in line with the community agreement established at the outset.

Students collaborating and studying together in a classroom settingAgency goes hand-in-hand with belonging, and educators (like James, 2020) recommend allocating 15-30% of class time to interactive and collaborative activities. Ample discussion time should also be set aside for group work. Group work is an excellent pedagogical tool to get students to work through problems/ideas together, thus disrupting top-down methods of problem-solving and knowledge transfer. Before group work sessions start, you can model acceptance of divergent perspectives in order to make it clear that different voices and positions are accepted in your classroom. Your community agreement could also include some tips on how to welcome different points of view.

Resource: James (2020) has devised a helpful anti-racist classroom rubric for the Otis College of Art and Design that might be worth consulting: https://otis.libguides.com/tlc/anti_racist_rubric.

Student Feedback

Instead of solely relying on student evaluations of teaching (that are performed at the end of the course), rather provide students with frequent and ample opportunities to provide feedback during the course. These can be used as a means of checking in with students regarding content comprehension but also their well-being. It’s very important that students are made to feel that their contributions and feedback are acknowledged and valid.

Representation

Representation matters and so, at the level of course content, our syllabus (and our readings) should represent “underrepresented cultures in a responsible and justice-oriented manner” (James, 2020, p. 2). Additionally, keep in mind that low-level examples provided in class should “decenter the western canon and acknowledge the structures of colonization” (p. 2). A place where we can often forget to apply this principle is in our use of visual aids, which should also be informed by a diversity of representational modes, and should actively avoid playing into stigmatizing or erasure of marginalized social groups.
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Here are some questions to ask yourself when creating slides or visual course materials:

  • Think reflectively about the kinds of images you use in your slide decks – do they reinforce norms, stereotypes, or ways of being in (or ways of knowing about) the world? How could these images work to silence or marginalize members of your classroom?
  • Consider what other visual aids could be drawn on to feature a more diverse representation of your topic (whether they are used in the classroom or on Canvas).

Tools Specific to the Writing Classroom

Felicia Rose Chavez (2021) advocates that writing instructors:

  • build community through deep-listening (the type of listening needed to try and understand someone else’s perspective) and frequent check-ins that are incorporated into class activities (some deep listening tips include: maintaining eye contact; positioning one’s body towards speaker; providing frequent non-verbal cues to show that you’re listening to what they say; and focusing on the content of communication as a means of better understanding where students are coming from);
  • embrace multiple different writing genres that go beyond the research genres. Chavez suggests adopting freewriting activities that prompt students to write about themselves to build a sense of agency and belonging in the writing classroom. Freewriting, according to Chavez, can help students practice expressing themselves through different low-stakes written tasks as a means to help them find their academic “voice.” If choosing to include such activities in your class, instructors would need to frame and unpack freewriting carefully for students who might not be familiar with this writing genre;
  • practice mindfulness to encourage students to be fully present in the writing classroom. She describes both verbal and written tasks to get students to reflect on their writing habits (i.e., where, when, and how they write) and makes suggestions about new routines that might help them write more productively (e.g., write at night, take frequent breaks, schedule a walk in the middle of a writing session). In bringing one’s authentic self to the writing classroom, she also emphasizes the importance of being aware of the needs of our bodies: during longer teaching sessions, she encourages frequent comfort breaks, sips of water, and administering short breathing exercises;
  • get students to embrace writing as a messy and generative process. She argues that the embodied characteristics of putting pen to paper (along with its messier resulting product) help to shift focus away from perfectionism and a “product-based mentality” (p. 55). Instead, she advocates for embracing writing as a process of generative thinking: “The physical, forward momentum of the pen compels us to write now and edit later” (p. 54). In the interests of promoting accessibility, we don’t advocate that students have to write by hand quite as Chavez advises, but rather that activities that involve planning, brainstorming, and rough drafts can be a way to shift attention away from writing simply as a product of thinking and rather towards writing as a process of thought;
  • help students face their fear of writing by sharing these fears in a non-confrontational way at the beginning of the course. She recommends that instructors share their own anxieties too, to underscore shared experiences. Chavez then goes on to explain how instructors can reframe those fears through exercising generosity toward their students; this can be further fostered by providing frequent low-stakes peer review activities.

Three Things to Try for Now

  1. As an instructor, think about your own position in the classroom: what privileges, biases, or types of knowledge might you bring into that space? Of that, what can be acknowledged, shifted, or unlearnt in order to help promote anti-racist approaches? What assumptions have you made in the past about student learning that could be harmful to creating an anti-racist classroom?
  2. What is one small change that can be made to your curriculum that could help promote an anti-racist classroom community? Perhaps a collaborative community agreement or a statement of inclusivity in your syllabus might be a good place to start putting this into practice?
  3. Incorporate a thoughtful land acknowledgment into your syllabus (and teaching) as a means of thinking collectively and responsibly about how settler academic activities continue to impact Indigenous communities in Vancouver and across Canada. Find a way to link this to UBC’s ISP and the TRC’s Calls to Action. (click here for more resources and information)

References & Recommended Reading

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