Modified Brave Spaces: Calling in Brave Instructors

Abstract

In recent years, instructors teaching about controversial issues such as race and ethnicity have drawn increasingly on the ideas of “safe” and “brave” spaces to encourage and facilitate dialogue during class discussion. Unfortunately, these concepts have limits when taken out of the dialogic social justice workshop and course contexts where they were initially developed—contexts with very different power dynamics than those in conventional college classrooms. I review these differences and their limits, then propose an alternate set of strategies to better adapt the “brave space” concept to conventional, disciplinary-specific, academic courses. Specifically, I urge instructors to avoid relying on marginalized students to publicly share personal experiences of oppression, to practice “calling in” which offers a productive way to challenge problematic beliefs or statements in the classroom, and to model being “brave” in their own responses when they are “called in” themselves. These strategies aim to give instructors more confidence in their ability to handle difficult conversations, while ensuring they do not burden some students or allow others to appropriate the language of “safety” to avoid challenges.