Abstract
Feminist work is often memory work. (Ahmed, 2017, p. 22)
In a university lounge, we anxiously pore over a list of community organizations in our city. We are designing the curricula for a “community-based, experiential learning” series in a host study abroad program for Japanese learners at a large Western Canadian University. As mid-program Ph.D. students in the Faculty of Education, we have explicitly been hired for our expertise, and this particular academic setting is proving tricky. We have many questions.
In this paper, we offer an analysis of a remembered experience of cocurricular designing and coteaching an experiential learning pilot project in a university study abroad program (SAP) that carried an emphasis on social justice issues. We look back at this shared experience as a demonstration of what complexities can arise when feminist educators bring their politics and pedagogies to experiential learning and study abroad education contexts; we understand this as significant because “experience” broadly is complex, and, like feminism, “it is always contested, always political” (Fox, 2008, p. 52). Remembrance is crucial to feminist educators because it indicates the development of care, ethics, pedagogy, politics, and priorities, and so, we ask: what pedagogical insights can be gained through revisiting our enmeshed personal/professional memories of cocurricular designing and coteaching an experiential learning series for study abroad students? To explore this, we use self-study and memory work to analyze both memory objects (curriculum materials) and narratives (of teaching) to explore this pedagogical work and what generative tensions emerged as we employed a critical feminist approach to a project not initially conceptualized with this framing.
We are motivated to engage with our memories because of the loss of the SAP pilot project. Initially conceived and implemented in 2018–2019 before the Covid-19 pandemic and then paused for the next year, the pilot will not be resurrected as the larger SAP resumes at full capacity. Likewise, we designed the pilot as Ph.D. students; we have graduated and now work with new students, in new programs as part of our current roles as a postdoctoral fellow and an assistant professor. Similar to Stephen's (2010) scholarship on oral history and feminist memory, we fear that the feminist design and lessons learned through the project might be lost from collective academic memory. We also agree with Ramachandran et al. (2023), who suggest fostering more permanent institutional memories for initiatives no longer linked to those who initiated and organized them, so that insights can become embedded within (academic) culture. We thus critically remember this experience to consider and assert its larger implications for understanding how feminists can approach new experiential education contexts, as “resistant, belligerent, unsettling thinkers, [and] also generous, reliable supportive teachers” (McGregor, 2017, p. 18).
Study Abroad, Experiential Learning, and Social Justice
The community-based experiential learning series was envisioned to deepen learning opportunities for Japanese students attending a SAP at a Western Canadian university. Recognizing the challenge of providing study abroad experiences that foster global citizenship, the learning series was initiated by the SAP's academic director to help develop participants’ global awareness and social justice-oriented values, build intercultural understanding, and enhance civic leadership skills (see Crabtree, 2008). Furthermore, the learning series was undertaken with an experiential learning approach that viewed learning as a holistic process, integrating students’ thinking, feeling, perceiving, and behaving while also providing opportunities to extend their “problem-solving, decision-making, and creativity” skills. The intention was to resist an increasingly “globalized cultural logic and outcomes-driven productiveness in the neoliberal agenda” (Tesar & Arndt, 2017, p. 667), which underpins the global trend to “internationalize” education using primarily an economic lens (Fakunle, 2021). The learning series was to support and extend the SAP coursework on intercultural communication, global studies, and world Englishes.
Within experiential learning in study abroad literature, pedagogical orientations have shifted from positivistic to transformative approaches in the 21st century (Hayden & McIntosh, 2018; Stearns, 2009). The transformative perspective is broadly critical, with goals of self-actualization and social change aimed at creating more just societies. The worldview underlying transformative perspective is humanistic: primary concerns involve the sense of individual identity and personal growth. In recent times, practitioners of transformative pedagogical approaches have been challenged to engage in more explicit praxis. In particular, the increased emphasis on productivity, efficiency, and private funding in higher education has led to intensified calls by decolonial and feminist scholars to decenter dominant forms of knowledge production and practices in postsecondary contexts (Oberhauser, 2019). It is recognized that “structural forms of violence or power may be expressed through inequality of opportunity” and that “symbolic forms of violence stemming from pedagogical intent, content of curriculum, and performance of acquiescence” (Martin & Brown, 2013, p. 384). Educators like us are asked to explore alternative teaching practices that may resist racialized, gendered, and other violent forms of oppression and inequality (Kasun & Saavedra, 2016; Samou, 2022; see also Nagar, 2013).
The push for critical approaches to experiential learning study abroad programming is especially relevant in light of ongoing evidence of racism, xenophobia, and intolerance in North American university campuses and society at large (Arora et al., 2023; see also Hartman & Kiely, 2014; Ladenson et al., 2023). Contemporary scholarship suggests that social differences and experiences of marginalization are naturalized and essentialized through language and actions that contain elements of racism, sexism, and nationalism in coursework (Laliberté et al., 2017). Such evidence was also reflected in our context, wherein students shared about racism and othering in ways new to them during the SAP. Through learning from them during our experience in the program overall, we came to understand that, in a strictly Japanese context, the students held a great deal of power—the dominant racial group, high socioeconomic status, Japanese language speakers, and high education. Those positionalities shifted in Canada, wherein students discussed feeling racism and discrimination from multiple cultural groups for the first time. We witnessed students’ reflections on these experiences both in terms of positionalities in Canada and how they might carry lessons home to Japan, which highlighted the varied resonances possible with critical social justice work.
The topical importance of the program rendered its discontinuation difficult to accept. In short, it was indicated to us that while student feedback was very positive about the experiential modules, the resourcing required for educating an average of 5–7 students per module did not make the pilot sustainable. In processing this news, we toggled between acknowledging how planning efforts and students’ participation were limited by competing pressures (e.g., very limited scheduling blocks; modules were noncredited and optional) and wondering if our feminist design and activism had perhaps shifted the series outside an initial transformative vision agreed upon by the two global universities partnering on the SAP. Such answers were not available to us as student employees, but with reflection and time, we have clarified the value we see in the series’ implementation and our remembrances of it that live on.
To Begin: Feminist Educator Positionalities
Feminist memory can become a counterinstitutional project. (Ahmed, 2019, p. 216)
The work of how to enact the objectives of the social justice-focused and community-based experiential learning in practice was offered as a development opportunity for us. As we highlight below, we were selected for this project due to our critical language and literacy pedagogical lenses and respective skill sets.
Kaye's Positionality
I teach and learn in many academic and community settings. Across all, I am motivated by a strong desire to constantly become a “better” teacher. I strive to enhance my classroom communities, connections with students, and pedagogical practices and engagements with scholarship. I ground my critical and feminist pedagogy on my readings of Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire and Teaching to Transgress by bell hooks. I believe that the purpose of education is to challenge oppressive systems that produce inequalities and marginalization—especially those in which I am implicated. I recognize that the systems propelling such conditions are multiple and complex, and teaching practices must continuously be reworked to reflect increasingly nuanced antioppressive actions. I include reworking my own perspectives, as informed by my white, settler, feminist identity, in this pursuit.
Amber's Positionality
I have been an educator my whole adult life, as a volunteer health teacher, teaching assistant, secondary English teacher, and now in postsecondary, teaching teacher education, and literature. My feminist pedagogical priorities include practicing ethics of care, being transparent about goals and the politics of education I am always enmeshed in, privileging dialogic approaches that hinge on criticality and generosity, fostering solidarity building, sharing power, being flexible, encouraging creativity, taking restorative action when I have done harm, and understanding the significance of precarious moments (Brigley Thompson, 2018) while also halting oppressive happenings. The list grows, especially because I am a cis and straight white woman with unearned privilege, and as such, I must be vigilant about what violence I can be complicit in, perpetrate, and ignore.
Collaborative Feminist Pedagogy: Six Community-Based Experiential Learning Modules
As we began the preparatory pedagogical work with much autonomy, we agreed that our feminist sensibilities would largely inform the SAP experiential learning series. Existing at the crux of these two scholarly fields, we understood our primary goal was to help students critically engage with knowledge production that attempts to dislodge hegemonic power relations within and across sociopolitical and economic contexts (Parisi & Thornton, 2012). We also saw synergies with experiential learning frameworks that emphasize the democratization of knowledge through forming meaningful relationships between our university group and community partners (Hartman & Kiely, 2014). Finally, we wanted to implement a feminist approach to develop immersive experiences that reduced a sense of hierarchy (where possible) to facilitate engaged self-reflections about progressive change (Deckert, 2020).
With these goals in mind, our collaborative feminist pedagogical work emerged through six modules of instructor-guided field trips, pretrip lessons, and posttrip debrief and reflection sessions, scheduled during a single school year. Modules were optional and free to attend (e.g., activities were free; we traveled on foot or used public buses where fares were covered by SAP tuition; snacks were provided), and sessions were scheduled according to the SAP course schedules. We wanted to provide a range of opportunities for learners to critically and creatively consider significant issues such as class, critical disability, gender, Indigeneity and colonialism, and social determinants of health. Further, we wanted to do so in a dialogic, interactive, and participatory way. The corresponding modules are outlined in Table 1.
Our Six Community-Based Experiential Learning Modules.
The modules reflect that we planned and delivered a series of community-based experiential learning trips that generally fulfilled our feminist goals. However, despite the synergies of experiential learning in study abroad and our feminist theoretical orientations, a number of tensions arose. We found that responding to the previously highlighted calls for alternative experiential learning practices involved specific negotiations of feminist pedagogy into a program not explicitly ideologically designed for this pedagogy. As we reflect back now, we put forward that there is a great deal of value in understanding a number of tensions that arose, including personal, community, and racial, as they provide key insights into how oppression and inequalities can enter SAP experiential learning spaces.
Methodology and Method: Self-Study and Feminist Memory Work
Memories aren’t enough. We have to connect them to culture, to history, to zeitgeist—and then be as clear and specific about our unique perspectives as possible. (Dark, 2022, n.p.)
Participants
Because this is a self-study that uses feminist memory work and feminist remembrance to explore our past experiences as teachers, the authors are the participants in this project. As such, no formal ethics approval by an IRB at our respective universities was required for this research.
Design
For this work, we employ both self-study for our methodology and feminist memory work as methods to reflect on our remembrances of a shared teaching experience and the loss of a feminist intervention—that is, our learned lessons are the unit of analysis here, into and for the SAP.
Self-Study
We use self-study because we are inspired by work such as Hernández-Saca et al. (2020), who drew on Coia and Taylor (2009), and find self-study to be dynamic and helpful for examining personal pedagogies. It is also an avenue for creating knowledge about effective teaching, as self-study practices emerged in education research as scholars explored action research, practitioner inquiry, and reflective practice. Central tenets of it include attention to identity (Coia & Taylor, 2009; Loughran et al., 2004); improvement-aimed self-initiated inquiry often done collaboratively (Ritter & Quiñones, 2020); dynamic theory, method, and purpose; being data-driven and focused on process, knowledge production, and paradoxical (Loughram, 2018); and seeking to understand “the person in the profession” (Berry & Kitchen, 2022, p. 119). Although there are broad applications and understandings of self-study, we appreciate its capacity to “provoke, challenge, and illuminate rather than conform and settle” (Bullough and Pinnegar in Samaras et al., 2004, p. 818). This rejection of complacency resonates with us as feminist pedagogues, making self-study a methodology that pairs well with feminist memory work as a method.
Feminist Memory Work
Guiding our self-study, we engaged in a kind of feminist remembrance. This is inspired in part by feminist memory work—that is, a “highly open” (Haug, 2008, p. 537) research developed by Haug (1992, 2008; Haug et al., 1987) and others since the 80s, focused on feminine socialization and “working on narrative and memory to intervene in and denaturalize dominant history from a sociological perspective” (Hemmings, 2022, p. 2). According to Haug (2008), In working with our memories, we are trying to do two things: to find out how we actively conform with existing power relationships; and also, where in the past there are “sparks of hope” in which we recognise ourselves “as the ones who are meant.” (p. 538)
These two goals are important because we seek to constantly interrogate our power in education and search for avenues for how power more broadly can be shared and/or relinquished through initiatives like the SAP.
Joint feminist memories are a rich resource for evidence about the experience of feminist education, and we understand these memories not as truths, but, rather, as technologies that produce knowledge through their capturing, sharing, and recording (Clift & Clift, 2017). The interactive approach of memory is a “celebration of subjectivity as an important tool of analysis, rather than…a shortcoming (Stephens, 2010, p. 82). As the designers, implementers of the modules, and the remembrances, we demonstrate a feminist rejection of separating the researched and researcher. Like Cornforth et al. (2009) who have done similar work via collective biographical memory work as a feminist practice, we also found that analyzing our joint memories enabled us “to deeply engage with our subjectivities […] in the contemporary and historical educational landscape” (p. 69). Our analytic talk included exploring one another's reflections, thereby pushing us to deepen our theoretical understandings and avoid “the binary logic” of academic “accounts tallying the successes and failures of feminism” (Stephens, 2010, p. 83) in initiatives like the pilot project.
Materials
Because memories are our initial data, to spark them, our sources include (1) our cocreated curriculum materials including six lesson plans with accompanying planning notes, slides, and prepared classroom materials (e.g., social determinants of health role-playing activity) and (2) a 128-page transcript from a 1 h and 40 min long feminist dialogue that we engaged in to purposely reflect on the lessons/losses of this collaborative pedagogical experience.
Procedures
Together, we first reviewed our curriculum materials to refresh our memories, took notes, and compiled ideas and impressions. Then, as critical feminist friends and colleagues, we dialogued about the experience as a whole, with a deliberately loosely structured talk. Because personal narratives are central for forming and articulating identities (Guest, 2016), we took turns storying how we entered into this project and what our expectations and experiences were of planning and running the six field trips. This resulted in an hour and forty minute–long conversation of coconstructed memory work via Zoom that was audio-recorded and transcribed verbatim.
Analytic Strategy
To analyze this data, we engaged in three phases of memory work: writing, discussing, and theorizing our memories (Onyx & Small, 2001), although in less of a linear, procedural way. Because “memory does not work like a computer” (Fraser & Michell, 2015, p. 323), we allowed our analysis process to “ebb and flow” (Coia & Taylor, 2009, p. 11) by engaging in analysis and reanalysis (e.g., Cornforth et al., 2009). We used Google Docs, text messages, and dialogues to collaboratively write and rewrite our anecdotes, memories, and stories from this experience and reflect upon revisiting our curriculum materials and transcript of our feminist dialogue. We also analyzed our writing over text and phone calls and in-person to coedit our work over time. We attended to the inequitable dynamics (Hobart & Kneese, 2020) that characterized the tensions of the experiential modules as a means of pulling forward this memory work.
Limitations
Self-study and feminist work can present challenges, namely, because they tend to be a kind of disruption and/or intervention. A first limitation was the difficulty in stepping back to ensure that our critical reflections were generative about the tensions in the learning series; our strong personal perspectives and foundational pedagogies including what we value in education are deeply entrenched in this work. We relied on our feminist friendship to navigate this limitation; we critically held each other accountable for sharing alternate perceptions and interrogating memories and meanings anew. Furthermore, because our self-study analyzes a unique pilot project that did not have generalizable programmatic tensions, we remained mindful that our scope was to outline insights into what can unfold when bringing critical, feminist pedagogical approaches to an experiential learning program. Second, we grappled with data constraints. There were some points when integrating specific student reflections that may have enhanced our remembrances, but while those data were collected, they were (a) not part of our self-study methodology/ethics and (b) earmarked for use by others. As a result, it was not possible to integrate those data into this paper.
Findings: Three Tensions
Our attention to tensions emerges from understanding that “memory itself should be conceived of as contested; it contains hope and giving up; above all, memory is constantly written anew and always runs the risk of reflecting dominant perspectives” (Haug, 2008, p. 538). As such, to diminish this risk, we explore three central tensions (personal, community, and racial) to trouble emergent issues related to difference, discourse, and positionality. Further, because feminist memory scholars such as Fraser and Michell (2015) address the importance of artifacts in how memories move across time and space in unexpected and unstable ways (see also Ohito, 2021), to add dimension to each tension, we follow Kaye's strategy (e.g., Hare, 2020) to pepper this paper with ephemera, images, and words that represent emotionally charged memories. Indeed, these fragments are items we both find resonant with that particular tension.
Personal Tensions
The first tension is how we initiated the pilot concerned about navigating multiple positionalities of challenging institutional work as close coworking feminist allies and professionals. Our critical feminist friendship runs deep, and SAP leaders recognized our closeness; they understood us as pedagogically and politically aligned. As Amber laughed, “I really think that we were brought together because the program recognized that we worked very well together.” Despite this confidence, we were wary. The project was a demanding job that we were not ultimately in control of and to be undertaken at the most stressful period of our doctoral program, right as we started data collection for our respective research and were each to begin teaching a course for the first time. As Kaye shared, “I think what was a big thing for me, maybe even more so the trips, is just that I wanted to make sure that you and I were always okay out of this.” Furthermore, as Kaye noted, “We work together more than I think a lot of friends do,” gesturing toward how although feminist scholars often work with an acceptance of the blurred boundaries of personal–professional relationship (Nagar, 2013), doing so can be challenging in the face of disagreements or conflicts.
Responding to this tension, we spoke about potential implications before agreeing to work together and then practiced rigorous transparency and joint decision-making throughout. We also formed a habit of openly incorporating our whole lives into planning, as all experiences had to be held on evenings or weekends. We needed to (a) be able to plan the experiences and our lives effectively and (b) know when one person needed to “pick up the slack” for the other due to other commitments. Interestingly, a legacy of the learning series is that we both are more open about the uneasy process of balancing professional and personal responsibilities in academic settings, having realized how disembodying academic norms can be interrupted through self-conscious and deliberate pedagogies, methodologies, and tactics (Nagar, 2013). Likewise, a return to these memories functions as liberatory (Onyx & Small, 2001) for us to reinvigorate and strengthen our intimate, connective tissue—a welcome tightening as we continue to work and move through academia (like in Figure 1) together.
Screenshots of text conversations we had while designing and coteaching the experiential learning pilot project.
Map from Module 2: Feeding healthy communities.
And yet, this tension did not begin and end with us. Rather, an item we both considered is how our friendship would be on display as we cotaught. In our dialogue, we mused about how our obvious relationships as coinstructors and friends could be educative—a kind of ongoing example of professional friendship; as Kaye said, “in a way we were modeling what professionalism and friendship can look like in this context.” Amber called this a kind of “hidden curriculum” (Jackson, 1968)—that is, what can be present in an educational context but is often complexly assumed, coded, hidden, ignored, implicit, indirectly enforced, inferred, overlooked, unspoken, veiled, and so forth; for example, an element of a hidden curriculum might be how whiteness is embedded in school policies (e.g., see Wooten, 2017). As such, we considered the affordances and possible consequences of such modeling, deciding that, ultimately, our friendship helped to combat possible tension, such as what can surface when dominant understandings of professionalism in education reign. Professionalism is reliant on normative understandings—that is, “assumptions that fit within the behavior paradigm of white, male normativity” (Edwards & Marshall, 2020, p. 11) of what actions, attire, behavior, communication, and so forth, is appropriate in public spaces such as learning and work environments. Mindful of this, we found that our friendship was useful with troubling dominant notions regarding academic “professionalism” by sharing intimacies such as through storytelling, being mindful of our bodies and physical setting(s), inviting students to sit and snack with us, and laughing a lot—a key feature in our feminist pedagogies (e.g., Kolenz & Branfman, 2019). Said another way, we endeavored to use our friendship to help make our learning spaces as welcoming as possible to disrupt (but understand that they cannot be completely done away with) typical power dynamics and create small moments where students might feel at ease with their peers and us.
Community Tensions
We both remember that a paramount concern was being complicit in a kind of neoexperiential education (Roberts, 2008), wherein practices center on market logics such as efficiency, individuality, and consumerism at the expense of key feminist and critical tenets like reciprocity, long-term relationships, and respectful engagement. This was especially present during our curriculum design process, as institutional restraints such as budget, scope of engagement, and scheduling resulted in modules that were tightly bound and efficiently controlled in this “‘one-off’ experiential program” (Roberts, 2008, p. 30). Moreover, the SAP director asked that the learning series contain multiple thematic entry points for extending coursework rather than exist as singular, prolonged engagement with a community partner. This likely came about due to past student feedback about the broader SAP and requested experiences of “service-learning.” We understood service-learning to be a challenging requirement because it is one of the most intensive forms of experiential learning that involves a long-term commitment, community partnerships, and clearly defined goals (Mooney & Edwards, 2001). Grappling with this disjoint, we realized that the modules would need to be, in many respects, isolated experiences; we could only begin to guide students through critically contextualizing and historicizing social justice actions. Although everyone involved—us as instructors and other leaders and members of the SAP—were generally aligned ethically and politically with a critical perspective, we feared that “edutainment” (Roberts, 2008, p. 30) might creep into the curricula.
One strategy we considered to counter “edutainment” was to center our university in the modules—attend to the university as a community and consider relevant themes accordingly. However, as highlighted in our reflective discussion, this strategy was not pursued because the definition of community being institutionally operationalized was one that existed outside the university; Amber remarked, “I think another expectation that was on us that was maybe not said, but kind of felt, is that we were supposed to take them off campus. Like, take them out into the ‘real’ community, right?” Kaye also remarked, “Sometimes I felt like when we did do [university] things, it was maybe not…seen as, as exciting.” This was not a perspective enforced or even explicitly voiced by the SAP director but was communicated through documentation like the funding application, the programmatic justification for the trips, student feedback, and relevant academic literature (VanWinkle, 2022; Wood, 2022). Both of us understood that the “community” basis for the experiential learning meant the urban city to the east of the campus. More specifically, and particularly in the case of service-learning, the specific community that was to be targeted was an impoverished, highly marginalized area outside of the city's downtown core. Here, it is possible to understand that via neoliberalized discourses that often shape higher education's engagement with community, the purpose of partnering with community spaces is often viewed as addressing their (primarily socioeconomic) “problems,” rather than partnering to learn from peoples and organizations. The implications of this problematic framing are significant in light of the lack of alignment with the strength-based perspective guiding many community organizations (Brough et al., 2004).
In our curricular designing of the experiential learning series, the intended, externally desired focus on the impoverished community presented further challenges. The university campus was not only separate from this community in terms of ideological and ethical considerations detailed above but also physically separated. As exemplified by Figure 2 the university (circled on the left) is separated from that particular community (denoted by the circle with pinpoints on the right) by sprawling parks, First Nations’ land, and multiple affluent neighborhooods; it takes over an hour to commute between the two communities by bus. This physical distance helped sharpen questions about why this space should be considered a “best” space for the students to learn. Adding to this, organizations working in the downtown community are not often open to short-term volunteers, not having the time or resources to train people who are not interested in forming long-term relationships. Instead, many organizations redirect those looking for volunteer opportunities to consider engaging in short-term fundraising initiatives.
Personal photograph of Amber’s, from Tokyo’s Tsukiji Fish Market and included in the “What do we know about Japan?” slide for Module 5: Elementary school class visit: Coteaching poetry.
Seeking to find a balance of community engagement in the immediate term, we, after much searching, found that the *Redacted* Food Bank had set up a specific program to accommodate corporate/educational service-learning requests like ours. We were able to book the one remaining slot for the year—on Halloween—with the understanding that we need to provide significant scaffolding in advance. The module was the most attended and received very positive feedback from students; photos taken were also used in the final reports about the experiential learning series. The module's extremely positive reception likely reflects that it conformed to a style of service-learning that was anticipated and desired by the students and funders. Although we were pleased to have found an appropriate organization for the desired service-learning, we found delivering the module to be bittersweet in that it contrasted to light uptake of some of the other modules, like the one detailed below, wherein we took up notions of community and learning in more expansive ways. We saw the long-term path forward for the experiential learning series to be to form relationships with organizations to allow for more reciprocal, impactful experiences; as Amber said, “In the future if this is done, the people who are going to be carrying out this curriculum really need to foster good relationships with the community spaces that we would be visiting.”
Racial Tensions
Finally, probably the most concerning tension that emerged was the way in which racial dynamics surfaced. Returning to our articulations of positionality, we are both white settler women, which affords us a great deal of unearned privilege in the academy, classroom, and beyond. As such, there were two primary issues that created ongoing tension for us, prompting critical reflexivity both during the experience itself and in our memory work: planning the first module, Indigenous stories on the land, and the enduring dynamic of having two white instructors deliver this programming for Japanese exchange students. As feminist educators dedicated to antiracist and antioppressive work, we wish to be clear that we understand this tension as necessary, generative, and continuous into the writing of this paper and our lives.
We agreed that the first step of the pilot would be facilitating the newly arrived exchange students to learn about and reflect on the ancestral, traditional, and unceded territories that they would be spending the next school year on stolen lands appropriated by settlers for generations. We also recognized that experiential work requires consistent negotiation of settler colonialism, whiteness, and white supremacy—we want to express gratitude to the Indigenous scholars whose insights helped us to do so here (e.g., Belcourt, 2020; Davidson, 2014; Tuck & Yang, 2012). To this point, because fraught, muddy notions about wilderness is central to Canada's national identity, Canadian universities must interrogate their ongoing participation in Indigenous land occupation, especially in experiential learning that so often takes places outside (Gauthier et al., 2021; Vander Kloet, 2010). As university representatives then, this is exactly the kind of work we attempted with Module 1—the Indigenous storytelling module. As such, using place-based learning pedagogy, first guiding students on a walking tour of Indigenous art, landmarks, learning centers, and signage felt nonnegotiable. We also tried to promote intertextual work during our walk by incorporating complementary texts at several stops; for example, at one art installation, we paused to view a YouTube video of a poetry performance by an Indigenous poet (Abel (2019)) inspired by the same spot.
Poetry writing prompt slide from lesson plan in Module 5: Elementary school class visit: Coteaching poetry.
Texted photo of Kaye and late-arriving artificial cherry blossoms for Module 5: Elementary school class visit: Coteaching.
We then arranged for a public library field trip for an Indigenous storytelling session with a local elder. However, as we planned, much difficulty emerged in critically considering what it meant for white women to lead this learning. We deliberately drew from a former Ph.D. student colleague (Bridge, 2018) and fellow white woman to inform this pedagogy; as Kaye noted, it was “Because she did it from the lens of a white woman trying to grapple with this, and we were like, ‘Well, I guess that's what our identity is too.’” She was a fellow teacher who had similarly led place-based learning while also interrogating her social location and power while doing so, all in the context of the teacher education program at our university.
We take up whiteness here not to center it but, rather, to acknowledge and confront how we need to be vigilant to continually think critically about intersectionality (Crenshaw, 1989; Hill Collins & Bilge, 2016), power, and white supremacy in our pedagogies. We reject the tendency for white people to fall silent or grow defensive as a result of discomfort and fear, especially in learning spaces; rather, understanding that education functions as a significant context where race is constructed, we kneaded our discomfort through ongoing reflexive conversations. For example, this issue arose in our dialogue, when Amber reflected, “[A racial dynamic at play] reminds me of the conversations we’ve had about, like, the kind [white] female teacher.” These conversations emerged from Magnet et al.'s (2016) paper, which Amber found deeply illuminating for understanding of herself as a feminist teacher, a politics of kindness, and whiteness. At another point, Kaye exclaimed that thinking about whiteness in this project is so “important” because she has “never felt so white in this space,” further noting: “We had to actively confront that in our trips.” This led to us grappling with how we think of ourselves as white and feminists—at one point, Kaye was asking, “What am I then?” and Amber laughing wryly and answering, “A white woman who's feminist and trying to do better.” And so, we critically examined how we differently struggled with what meanings emerged from us as white settler feminists authorized to introduce and generate learning about Indigeneity, land-as-teacher, settler colonialism, and white supremacy—especially in the very first module. However, in the same breath, we strived to not allow our experiences of this tension to, as Patton and Bondi (2015) might describe, “paralyze and prevent [us] from focusing more intently on social justice work” (p. 490). Our aim was to foster space for learning about Indigenous art and knowledge(s), while also promoting critical considerations of the land and reconciliatory relationships between Indigenous peoples and settlers.
The second portion of challenging cultural/racial work was when the students were asked to operationalize their Japanese identities during a trip to a local elementary school. Leveraging the SAP director's long-standing professional programmatic relationship with a local elementary school teacher, we decided to take the Japanese students to help in a grade-five classroom. Specifically, the Japanese students were invited to participate in a single session wherein they shared about their Japanese identity to support the class’s regular curricular programming about culture. The elementary school teacher asked us to work with the theme of cherry blossoms, as a well-known part of Japan's cultural imagery. We understood the reasoning; however, we had initial concerns about the Japanese students’ experience of this theme and what may be accomplished with a short-term visit. We worried that the theme might feel similar to a reduction of Canadian identity to moose and maple syrup, while recognizing this is an imperfect comparison. Likewise, it was not cherry blossom season, emphasizing that cherry blossoms were being used as a conspicuous form of cultural representation. Adding to our unease, as discussed earlier, some of the Japanese students were experiencing discrimination and racism on-campus. We did not want to contribute to an exoticizing or orientalizing discourse about the Japanese students, which might also extend to students of Japanese heritage in the elementary school classroom and/or contribute to similar racial othering more broadly (Inokuchi & Nozaki, 2005). We felt our whiteness profoundly during this negotiation of how to invite the Japanese students to participate in this module, not wanting to contribute to ongoing problematic racial dynamics (Figure 3).
To tackle these issues, we took a two-pronged approach: (a) to highlight culture in a dynamic way and (b) to facilitate opportunities for the Japanese students to teach about their cultural identities on their own terms. The classroom session started with Japanese students introducing themselves and sharing a favorite part of their culture. We then provided enhanced context for the joint cultural exploration about cherry blossoms, highlighting the shared link between Japan and our host city—trying to connect the global and local in a historicized manner. As part of this, we included in our framing how our host city's first cherry blossom trees were gifts from two Japanese cities in the 1930s. Then, recognizing the power of arts to help capture and communicate intangible components of culture (Finley et al., 2014), the Japanese students helped small groups of elementary students complete a poem about cherry blossoms. As detailed in Figure 4, the poems were about the senses and allowed for the cocreation of a cultural product. We concluded by having the groups read their poems aloud to the class.
The memory of the poetic teaching and learning in this module is perhaps captured best by Kaye's wry reflection: “I still have the bag of fake cherry blossoms.” In an attempt to ensure there was a shared material for the students and Japanese leaders to work with for the poetic prompt, we authors had decided to bring cherry blossoms into the elementary school classroom. As the flowers were not in season, Kaye visited multiple stores to purchase artificial cherry blossoms. When this proved unsuccessful, she ordered artificial cherry blossoms online. However, due to a shipping delay, they did not arrive until the day after the workshop—as documented in Figure 5. Scrambling at the last minute, Kaye bought artificial pink and white hydrangeas to be “fake cherry blossoms.” When we showed the Japanese students the flowers with an apologetic and red-faced explanation during the presession, the students responded with recognition and laughter, as they gamely agreed to play along with using the hydrangeas. In the classroom session, the elementary school students engaged their imaginations for the smells and sounds of the flowers. The resulting poems were beautiful. The fake cherry blossoms became an agreed upon working imperfection, which reminded us that cultural identities are negotiated, ever changing, and adaptive, just like feminist pedagogical practices.
Conclusion
…I learn again and again how precious it is to have memory. (hooks, 2009, p. 5)
Because contradiction is pertinent to feminist memory work (Haug, 2008), in this paper, we strived to closely attend to three central tensions we experienced as coteachers in a SAP not explicitly ideologically designed for feminist pedagogy. As we designed and implemented the learning series, in Amber's words, “we produced what we did based in large part on our lived experiences and what we think is going to be valuable or what we think is critical work.” Said another way, our pedagogical capabilities and feminist priorities largely informed how we went about choosing module topics (Ahmed, 2017). Drawing from our funds of knowledge, as Amber recalled, we constantly perseverated over: What are we bringing forward? How are we bringing this forward? Is this the right way to do it? Like, are we thinking about this, you know, through the proper lens? We asked these questions again of our coconstructed memories, while querying what was lost when the pilot was discontinued.
Through our remembrance, we are reminded of Ahmed (2017) who discusses how we “become attuned to the ghosts of past suffering” (p. 77)—words also cited by Mandalaki and Daou (2021) in their arts-based feminist memory work. In this way, we found our tensions to be useful, propelling us to engage in a deeper praxis than we originally envisioned when tasked with designing the learning series, bringing in forms of intellect that might challenge the ways in which academia can function as a system of violence, in Nagar's (2013) terms. Our resulting pedagogical practices contained challenges and helped provoke, trouble, and illuminate the students and us. We are hopeful the insights shared here can help other scholars do the same in experiential and/or study abroad teaching.
Footnotes
Acknowledgments
We would like to express our gratitude to the educators, leaders, and students of the SAP that we discuss in this project. Thank you for teaching and learning with us.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by the Banting Postdoctoral Fellowship program.
