Crossing your T's and Minding Your C's

Yet another week of interconnecting pieces that seem obvious to me, but may not be as obvious to others. I am writing this after a long work day, and long work week filled with many meetings, and many conversations with people, both geographically close and distant about what is and is not happening in HigherEd space. It is a rainy, windy, coldish night, filled with spooky, but the only spooky I am really feeling is the silence that continues in some areas, and the lack of critical engagement in others.

I have been thinking about the words that keep getting repeated when it comes to HigherEd at the moment. Some words are repeated so much that they have stopped meaning a thing anymore. So today's post is going to focus on some of those words and how they appear in different places and get emptied out of meanings. I am finding a lot of T and C words pop up so here are a few to consider.

The first of course is Truth. I think we are at a time where any mention of truth in HigherEd, needs to be accompanied by the follow up question, "whose truth?" Because I read so many articles and studies that want to convince folk that this is reality of a situation, but that contextual truth cannot be generalized. Oral assessments can't be gender affirming for certain genders when we live in a time where some spaces will not even acknowledge Trans existence you know, another important T word in our spaces.

Another T word is Trust. This is one that gets thrown around a lot so much so that it has pretty much been emptied out of meaning because no one wants to do the work of fostering trust. Because like allyship, or community (one of the many C words), trust doesn't just happen because it is declared as I have written and said many times in workshops. Trust must be fostered and it comes from an awareness of positionalities, an awareness of impact of action and words, and a real commitment (another C word) to consistent (yay C words) practices that will allow for trust. Trust isn't a one and done, it requires relationality and maintenance of trusting space over time.

Okay so those are the T words. What about C words? Well I have already named a few Community (which is not created it is built) and commitment (which means knowing that work needs to be consistently done and awareness consistently present). Another C word I was thinking about this week is Consultation. So I decided to look up the etymology of consultation and I was expecting the concept of bringing together from the Latin, but what I was not expecting and made me really think is the emphasis on "considering maturely." That need for maturity in the consultation process makes so much sense when you think of it, and so much sense as to why consultation has become another word emptied out of meaning. Because there is no maturity in consideration now, no awareness of interconnectedness and impact. Consultation has become a rubber stamp word that probably means that an email was sent after the thing was written.

I also went searching because I figured if there was any one who had written about the failure of consultation it would have been Sara Ahmed and I wasn't disappointed. Here is a gem from her blog written in 2017 "you can say no in a consultation exercise or a feedback session without that no being taken up or even in order that that no does not get taken up [...] when you get no out of your system no is out of the system." (Ahmed,2017). There is such truth to this. Whose truth? The truth of marginalized and multi-marginalized folk in academe.

What other C words can we find in HigherEd. Well of course there is complicit and complicity.  And this week made me laugh because I realized how narratives and discourses repeat. In July of 2022 I wrote this blog post about the Pedagogy of Complicity and it has been my most read blog post to date, with more than twelve thousand views. It focuses on what happens at conferences, and how the truth comes out a lot in those conference pictures that folk gladly post about being at conferences. I wrote that 2022 post watching so many people saying they really cared about COVID and disabled folk, going to conferences and taking their selfies without a mask, not caring or in some places even realizing who was being excluded from those conference spaces at that time through organization (or should I say disorganization and exclusion).

But again this week, the same narrative, the same kind of discourse. A conference on ethics and ed tech. Pictures posted. Lots of smiles. Massive ed tech company logo in the background. Those ethics conversations, sponsored by AI tool with questionable ethics. It is laughable really mainly in how folk don't know how much their true selves show in these moments. The lack of consistency (C word) in their actions and words. Or maybe they just don't care because it stopped being about relationship building a long time ago for them, now it is just about climbing ladders, and more marketing and pictures with the "right" people at the right time. Pun intended.

So these T words and C words they do a lot of work in the spaces that we are in in education. Or at least they are supposed to do a lot of work, or used to do a lot of work. At a time where folk are watching spaces constrict (a great C word with great etymology of forcefulness and compression) where their words of critique and conscientious objection will be accepted and published, our ability to analyze images for what they are is also decreasing. So it was so lovely to see the change the narrative resource that I am sharing below published yesterday. And I am sorry if you can't get access to this piece because it is not open access published, but it is my hope that even the abstract will give you a bit of hope that there is still a small space left for sharing ideas that go against the massive uncritical yes-manning happening in HigherEd right now.

[Content activation warning for mention of death]

And before I end for this week because this is already very long, I want to ask you a favour. I want you to try to remove the phrase "drinking the Kool-Aid" to refer to what is happening in HigherEd right now with technology adoption. I want you to read where this phrase comes from and reflect on if the death of many folk is the way that you want to position your discussion of what is happening technologically. I know it is a convenient phrase, and pretty much everywhere, but "uncritically accepting" is also a transparent (another great T word that has lost meaning in HigherEd) and bit more respectful way of phrasing what is happening.  Thanks!

Change the Narrative Resource

Bedeker, M. (2025). Navigating the university PedTech Wonderland: a Freirean critique of technology-enhanced learning in higher education. Teaching in Higher Education, 1–16. https://doi.org/10.1080/13562517.2025.2581970