Building a Brave Space

Rather than fostering “safe spaces,” instructors advocate for building “brave” spaces (Shannon Leddy) or “care” spaces (Cook and Belliveau). The idea of a safe space has sometimes been misused to mean protecting students from adverse emotional responses. However, that is not something we can actually control and may lead to self-censorship or conscious avoidance. What is more important is knowing how to respond when words, stories, or images resonate with a traumatic response, produce negative feelings, or cause listeners (be they students or a more general audience) to withdraw. It is incumbent upon the instructor to learn how to navigate these spaces in loving or caring ways that call people in, rather than call people out, and to teach students how to enter a space bravely, with compassion and a mindset of being ready to exchange thoughts and learn from each other. 

Students should be given the opportunity to learn how to sit with and be able to identify their own emotional or physiological responses to material, and to be given the choice to leave the room if they need to. However, it is equally important to recognize that none of the survivors who are compelled to give testimony were given the same generous space and that compassionate witnessing, while possibly uncomfortable and distressing, can be an important act of testimony to a person’s lived trauma. The act of re-giving these stories of historical violence and experiences can also be a re-traumatizing process.  

When planning these lessons, we can look to Indigenous methods of teaching:

• The medicine wheel: Each of the quadrants represents one aspect of our humanity: our intellectual selves, our spiritual selves, our emotional selves, and our physical selves. Here, the goal is to challenge both the students and instructor to think about what it would mean if we thought that way in the classroom. If you were to honor each of those aspects in your work, what would that classroom look like for your students? 

• The seven sacred teachings (Anishinaabe teachings): love, honesty, humility, respect, truth, courage, and wisdom. What would it mean if you planned your lessons, your research, your day, with those values in mind? How would that manifest in your life, in your work with your students, in your students' lives?

• Circle pedagogy: In order to decolonize the classroom space, educators can learn to prioritize cultivating relational meaning-making through circle pedagogy, teaching students to practice reflexivity when listening and speaking. 

• Eco-pedagogy: Think about the land as a teacher, as medicine. “The land does not belong to us, I think we belong to the land” (Dr. Shannon Leddy)

How to Approach Teaching with Compassion and (“Self”-)care

Acknowledging limitations from the outset. As educators, it should not be expected that the burden of knowing all the answers falls on the shoulders of the one person standing at the front of the classroom–nor should there ever be any expectation of always having the perfect response. Rather, encourage students to practice active engagement and critical thinking, and to learn how to work through immediate and reactive emotional responses.

First- and second-hand trauma. This can affect not only  students who may be hearing or re-hearing stories of trauma or violence, but researchers and educators, too. Remember to care for yourself when conducting research or planning courses around difficult work – particularly when that difficult work is your own. Sometimes researchers or journalists carry out fieldwork in high-risk locations, places where there is ongoing warfare, political upheaval, and various kinds of violence. These experiences can lead to first-hand traumatic experiences. Listen to Kjell Anderson talk about the emotional effects he experienced after visiting mass gravesites in war torn Iraq in 2016 [37:51]. Listen to Kathy Gannon describe her experience reporting in Afghanistan where she was shot and nearly killed while simultaneously witnessing the death of her colleague Anja Niedringhaus in 2014 [40:53]. Listen to Christina Cook and George Belliveau talk about the way veterans acted out their own war stories as a therapeutic process in “Contact!Unload” and how more senior veterans of the project were able to mentor and support newer actors through a community of care that acted as a kind of group therapy [27:03].  

From an Administrative Standpoint

With academic institutions, even within the humanities, continuing to trend towards a “publish or perish” mindset, researchers with administrative roles or institutional power need to help cultivate space and a support network for junior faculty/early career scholars/students to receive proper ethical or methodological training. It is also imperative for senior researchers, academic supervisors, or teachers to help set the context for the discussion/research and notify students, junior researchers, and/or student collaborators of where and how to access support if they need it. This should be built into the research process or course pedagogy from the very beginning.

Grants

Be on the lookout for grants that will allow you to pair up university faculty, and staff, and students with people in communities who are often doing really innovative public education work. Find internal funding initiatives for early-career scholars that create more room to take risks, to get people on the ground, to start these conversations in community partnerships, that they might otherwise never have an opportunity to do within the limits of tight completion deadlines and budgets.

UBC

• UBC Community Engagement Awards & Funding https://communityengagement.ubc.ca/engage-with-ubc/awards-funding/  

• Centre for Community Engaged Learning

  • Student grants: https://students.ubc.ca/career/community-experiences/grants-community-projects/connect-community-grants  

  • Faculty grants: https://ccel.ubc.ca/faculty/advancing-community-engaged-learning-fund/   

UVic

• Grants for community engaged learning, https://onlineacademiccommunity.uvic.ca/LearnAnywhere/cel/funding/  

• Work with UVic as a community member, https://www.uvic.ca/career-services/build-your-career/community-engaged-learning/index-community.php  

Canada-wide

• SSHRC storytellers grant, https://www.sshrc-crsh.gc.ca/society-societe/storytellers-jai_une_histoire_a_raconter/index-eng.aspx