The Place for Refusal in Our Systems of Knowledge and Being
It is a beautiful weekend here this weekend and I want to make sure I enjoy maximum amount of sunshine today so this post may be a bit shorter (but who knows really because I tend to go on when I care about a topic).
Today's post is inspired by this great article I read this week by Michalinos Zembylas "Refusal as affective and pedagogical practice in higher education decolonization: a modest proposal". This article had me thinking about what refusal could look like in educational development practice and seemed to connect nicely to what I was already thinking about in relation to educational development in terms of positionality and systems of knowledge.
The big questions I have been grappling with for a few months now, one of the perils of picking the word "meaningful" as your guiding word for the year, is what is it to "be" an educational developer? Or more pointedly, what is it to embody educational development? And second, what knowledges should an educational developer have?
I certainly do not have the answer to these massive ontological and epistemological questions, but I do think these are questions that should be contemplated and are questions that should be returned to, not just for EDs but also for those who are part of the ED ecosystem: instructors, administrators, graduate students, etc.
To get to the ontological part first, I suppose the bigger idea here is one of presence. What is it to be present for someone you are supporting, and how do you demonstrate that presence? Certainly listening carefully and meaningfully is one way to show presence. It is also a way to show care. There are definitely other ways to show presence. However, what we do need to keep in mind is that there is a tendency to want to equate how we show presence in the virtual with how we show presence in a face-to-face learning environment. To do this is problematic, to do this creates ethical issues, to do this is, I would argue, ableist. Presence and absence have different practical and aesthetic positioning in these spaces and context, as always, is so important. So let us refuse to conflate presence and absence online and remotely to presence and absence in a physical learning environment.
Maybe we should be going towards more forms of relating that refuse or reposition the systems that we take for granted. Maybe this is the ethical, inclusive, and accessible way to think about this. It is an unsettling feeling to be sure, but haven't we just experienced about a year and a half of unsettling?
To move to the epistemological part, there are certainly things that an ED needs to know. There is content knowledge, and content knowledge is also contextual to institution, and to job description. But this knowledge is also in perpetual flux (especially now). One has to keep reading, keep relating, keep sharing, and as mentioned above, keep listening, so that frames of reference expand, so that ability to support remains constant. EDs, like instructors, work on the premise (or should work on the premise) that there is a perpetual need for knowledge accumulation, resource and knowledge curation, and ultimately different ways to share this knowledge (in true UDL fashion). So let us refuse to be satisfied with the knowledge that we have as the limit of knowledge. Let us refuse to be complacent and support accessibility in a comprehensive manner.
As Zembylas suggests, there could be some hope in refusal. Hope for something different; hope for something better. Hope for an awareness of all instructors' and students' needs. Refusal is also empowering, and thus trauma aware. Refusing to be happy with what is, means closing yourself off to possibility. So many being happy with status quo is why social justice movements are so important. Refusal is the difference between being proactive and reactive.
There is clearly a lot still to be said about this and I know I will be returning to these ideas as someone committed to life-long learning. But for now I refuse to be inside any longer, and will go out to enjoy the bit of sun we have here.
Books I Read this Week
Who Gets In and Why by Jeffrey Selingo
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