The University of British Columbia’s School of Journalism, Writing and Media (JWAM) brings together Journalism and Writing, Research, and Discourse Studies (WRDS) in the teaching and practice of a range of innovative approaches to journalistic and academic writing and other forms of communication. WRDS, the writing and composition studies unit within JWAM, teaches academic research and writing to over 5000 first year students from Arts and STEM fields. Our courses are one of the very first explicitly research and writing focused courses they take at university. As with other writing and journalism programs across North America, JWAM is currently interrogating the systemic racism and white language supremacy upon which the fields of writing studies and journalism are built. As a result, JWAM faculty are committed to the intersectional, anti-racist work of theorizing and developing pedagogical models for a fully inclusive and equitable teaching of writing and communication.
If as teachers, we cannot alter . . . pervasive unequal distributions of resources and opportunities in our students’ lives, which affects who they are and what they bring to our writing classrooms, then I think our best strategy as antiracist educators is to change the way we understand and do writing assessment, while simultaneously building arguments and movement to change the larger structural racism in our society and schools. But this antiracism project begins in our classrooms because it is the only place we, as writing teachers, can begin. (Asao Inoue, 2015, Antiracist Writing Assessment Ecologies)
Commitments
The group of WRDS faculty involved in designing and developing this toolkit are of European or Chinese settler Canadian backgrounds and bring a diversity of other identities and experiences to the unlearning and learning of reconciliation, decolonization and anti-racism work. We have kept Kimberlée Williams Crenshaw’s definition of intersectionality at the forefront: that race is a part of “a dynamic of oppression in which multiple structures intersect such as issues of [disability], class, economics, culture, and race” (Crenshaw, 1991 ,as cited in Inoue 6). We recognize that UBC is a diverse community of people from many different parts of the world and from many different backgrounds who come to live and learn together at UBC on the traditional, ancestral and unceded lands of the Musqueam people, Vancouver campus, and the Syilx people of the Okanagan Nation, Kelowna campus. We also recognize that colonialism is ever present in the systems and structures of UBC as an institution. Many members of systemically and persistently marginalized communities, including BIPOC, 2SLGBTQIA+, Disabled, and low-socioeconomic status (SES) students, staff, and faculty, will often not find themselves reflected in the classrooms and workplaces (including writing classrooms) of UBC. Scholarly research writing is itself understood to act as a tool of colonialism in maintaining colonial hierarchies by ensuring that membership to the scholarly community is granted only to those whose use of language and writing practices adhere to white supremacist standards.
As settler Canadians, our work on this antiracist toolkit has been deeply informed by and shares UBC’s commitment to the goals and actions of UBC’s Strategic Equity and Anti-Racist (StEAR) framework and the Indigenous Strategic Plan (ISP). In particular, we have adhered to and incorporated Goals 2 (Advocating for Truth), 3 (Moving Research Forward), and 4 (Indigenizing Our Curriculum). As writing instructors, researchers, and colleagues, we continue to be engaged in the process of unlearning and learning required for the vital work of reconciliation and decolonization and offer this toolkit to other writing instructors as a process that will be further shaped as it is taken up and used in writing classrooms.
We thank our colleagues in Writing, Research and Writing Studies for their feedback on earlier drafts of the toolkit as well as UBC’s SoTL Seed Program.
Core Contributors
Laila Ferreira
Katie Fitzpatrick
Tara Lee
Amanda Lim
Kirby Manià
Kimberly Richards
Web Design
Danielle Burrell-Kim
Ryosuke Aoyama