The Teaching and Learning Innovation Digest - May 2023

cites many examples during the pandemic when
being on land for Indigenous people was met
with white violence, such as the experiences
of Haudenosaunee land defenders at 1492
Land Back Lane in Caledonia, Ontario, lobster
fishers of the Sipekne’katik First Nation,
and many pipeline protestors in western
Canada. Around the same time, the Mi’kmaq
scholar and activist Pam Palmater was showing
how the pandemic was being used to break
up lawful protests at Wet’suwet’en and impede
the investigations of murdered and missing
Indigenous women and girls (2020). Where Brand
unsettles our assumptions about normalcy,
Betasamosake Simpson and Palmater trouble
the notion of a return, of movement on and over
stolen land, and geographies of violence.
By way of preface to this issue of the Teaching
and Learning Digest, I want to offer two of my
own disruptions of returning to normal, drawing
on the more unsettling aspects noted by the
writers above. While many of the amazing
contributions in this edition of the Digest
rightfully celebrate the return to campus or
use the experiences and knowledge gained of
teaching and learning through the pandemic
as productive interventions that challenge
staid assumptions and lead to better and more
inclusive practices, I want to linger for a moment
on the more unsettling aspects and the tension
and uneasiness they produce. For a moment,
let’s consider instead how conflicts that predate
the pandemic, and more specifically, demands
for justice, continue to bubble up, unresolved,
and bristle against our teaching and learning
practices and environments.
The first of these disruptions is to consider our
return to campus in relation to our recognition
or acknowledgement of Land: what does it
mean to be able to come back to campus to
teach, learn, and work together—on stolen
land? On the one hand, we might use this
question to re-examine our positionality,
recentre our commitments to the Calls
to Action of the Truth and Reconciliation
Commission, and meaningfully act upon the
goals of Centennial’s Indigenous Strategic
Framework. With the surging return of
international students, we might consider
how Land acknowledgement can be used as
a teaching strategy and to situate learning in
place on Land, and in the social and historical
context of colonialism as we seek to decolonize
our curricula and teaching practices.
On the other hand, we might note that those
interventions are predicated on a privilege
of movement, of being able to lay claim to a
place without it being contested, in this case,
a place of learning. However we choose to
position ourselves on campus, to acknowledge
our place on Land, the demands for justice
in relation to Indigenous land rights and
sovereignty remain unresolved. I suspect
many of us feel that uneasiness in reading
the Land acknowledgement, even a sense of
something approaching hypocrisy, when setting
it alongside the colonial legacy of land theft,
the ongoing protests for Land Back, very real
restrictions on the movement of Indigenous
peoples, and the geographies of violence that
surround us. Do we feel that same uneasiness
when making a claim to the importance of
being and learning on campus, of having that
campus experience? It’s in this context that
we should ask: what assumptions are we
making about our own privilege of movement
and sense of claim to place and that of our
colleagues and students? How can we take
that sense of urgency that some of us might
have felt about getting back to in-person
learning and apply it to the incompleteness
of our work in realizing the goals of the
Indigenous Strategic Framework?
The idea of examining and interrogating the
privileges we assume in returning to campus
also opens up the possibility of a further
disruption of normalcy, a disruption that helps
to further uncover the systemic ableism of our
teaching and learning environments. When the
pandemic first happened and courses shifted
to remote delivery, many disabled student
groups noted that the interventions that were
being made—increased flexibility, recording
of lectures, providing course materials in the
Learning Management System—had been the
key demands of campus disability advocates
for many years. The pandemic was a crisis of
access to education on a large scale, and the
irony was often noted that a shift in the culture
of access was possible, that interventions
could be put into practice effectively overnight,
but only when they served the needs of the
majority learner.
At the same time, disabled students also noted
how the shift to remote learning amplified
barriers to access related to technology and
online learning (Loeppky, 2022). Even more so,
because academic accommodations tend to be
focused on the needs of disabled students in
physical spaces on campus.The shift to remote
learning had the effect of making the needs of
disabled students less visible. At my previous
institution, when we surveyed students
about their learning experiences during the
pandemic, many cited their own mental and
physical disabilities in relation to their individual
learning needs. Writing from their homes, their
bedrooms, their makeshift workspaces, what
surfaced with immediacy and urgency were
the many ways their learning experiences
intersected with their lived experiences, as well
as the intersectionality of disability with race,
gender, and sexuality and material conditions
such as food and housing insecurity. With the
return to campus, while these needs persist,
many students are concerned about losing the
flexibility and accessibility that were put into
place during the pandemic.
Thinking through the lens of the needs
of our diverse student populations, and in
particular those of disabled students, has really
crystallized how our teaching and learning
environments are designed with normative
assumptions about our students—that is,
based on what we assume typical or normal
students need or require. These assumptions
are ableist because they position the needs
and experiences of disabled students as
exceptional, requiring accommodation, and
intervention. The writer and activist Jay
Dolmage has coined this particular brand of
normative bias as academic ableism (2017).
12
13