2020-2021 Examen

At the end of the 2020-2021 academic year, the productive discomfort cohort watched the 15-minute video Eyes to See: An Anti-Racism Examen and discussed the following questions:

What regret(s) do you have about discomfort in the classroom this year?

Macro – How does this keep happening at the social/systemic level?
Micro – At Gonzaga, we have worked on these issues and resources, without COVID could we have done more?

What do you do when you don’t give a trigger warning. Do you go back? Group discussed that it’s okay to go back and speak about the need for trigger warnings later.

Difficult to hold a space for student sharing. When you create space, how do you make sure it’s used by those who need it?

What do you need to be better prepared for next time?

A ping when something happens that we need to speak about with students along with resources on how to do so. Perhaps we have an informal Padlet to populate when harmful things happen to the community.

Discussion of how to mediate a space for all to lean into conversations (especially when a current incident/event happened)…ideas around using anonymous technology to help all voices have the chance to talk came up.

It would help when we have those conversations to make them heart space conversations and not so much “head” space …where we live as faculty.

Resource shared:

Video from University of San Francisco speak about being a white ally
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6sJUc-b5knk