What Organizing Taught Me About Pedagogy

This week I have been thinking about the organizing spaces that I have been lucky to be a part of in my life. From the labour union spaces in graduate studies and work in the colleges, to the advocacy spaces that I was a part of when I taught in the Assaulted Women's and Children's Counsellor Advocate program (I am still so incredibly sad about the closing of this great program) to the community organizing spaces I find myself in locally now. I have been thinking about how much I learned from being in those spaces, and how much being in those spaces informed my pedagogy and the work that I do. But also how much I have been able to bring back to those spaces from a teaching and learning lens. 

So this week's blog is going to be a reflection on the reciprocal nature of those spaces and how they can be mutually impactful, in the hopes that those who are doing social justice organizing currently can see more ways to bring that work into pedagogy, but also how teaching and learning space can make organizing space even more inclusive. 

These thoughts started after a get together that we had as part of the Radical Care Collective that I am a part of in my region. The Collective is a disability justice group that supports mutual aid and COVID-conscious work, through facilitating a mask block and also lending out an air purifier to those who would like to use it for events in community. I have really felt so welcome since joining this group a few months ago and on Sunday we had a Pride themed get together in the park where we sat masked and just spent time for a few hours. There was even a craft organized, and the craft was the opportunity to paint/colour these tiny wooden bricks and make a key chain or a necklace, because bricks are important to the queer community as a reminder of the history of Pride and how we can narrativize history through symbols and identifiers that tend to take on a life of their own. My friend Emma painted a tiny brick the colour of the lesbian flag and put it on a string for me to wear as a necklace and I have been wearing it all week. I love it so much, because it is a reminder, a reminder of history, a reminder of community, a reminder of kindness, and of possibility. 

So from that reflection on possibility, it took me to thinking about how spaces can inform other spaces, and here we are. So here are 5 ways that I feel organizing can inform pedagogy and vice versa.

1. Communities are built and cannot be assumed

Just being in the same space with others does not a community make. There needs to be shared goals, shared values, and some way of understanding how others navigate through life. In educational spaces that means just because 40, 80, 200 students are in a class that does not mean they will automatically be a learning community, there needs to be a reason why the learners to see themselves as part of a community. This is often done through sharing experiences, or identifying common goals. This is done in organizing space as well, and this is why sometimes groups break off into working groups to work on a specific idea or outcome that some of the rest of the group may not be as invested in, even if they are invested in other things collectively.

2. Communication needs to happen often and in different ways

In 2026, organizing communication has become less technological and more analogue communication. But the need for those communication pieces are there, and some folk can be responsible for the communication pieces in different ways. In pedagogical space that communication in different ways is also important because students may want to receive information in ways that are meaningful to them. We often emphasize this with Universal Design for Learning (UDL) frameworks. For some that may be messages, or social media, or emails, or even in-class only communication. In both organizing and teaching and learning space, one needs to be attuned to the communication needs of the group and individuals.

3. Acknowledgment in the foundation of trust

Acknowledging what is happening in the world is both a foundational element to organizing, but also a foundational element to pedagogy. Neither of these spaces live in a vacuum.  There is a need in organizing space to be aware of who is in the space and what their needs are and to support them. Similarly, there is need to know who the learners are, what they are bringing to the space, and what they would need for supports. Acknowledging that consistently is one of the many ways trust is built in those spaces. Refusing to acknowledge or ignoring those needs and lived experiences can create tensions and a belief that only a single narrative is important to the collective or learners.

4. Know where you came from so you can know where you are going

Histories are so important. In organizing the history of a union, a collective, a group, is an important part of why the group exists and how their goals may have changed over time, with different governments, different policies, and different pressures. In educational spaces, teaching teams are either tasked with making courses relevant in that historical moment, or stuck in some way with teaching a "course in a box" with no opportunity for change or movement. Changes in instructional design of the course, and assessment strategies for example, become part of the history of the course. We used to assign a 10 page essay in this course, now we do explanatory infographics aimed at supporting information for community. There is a story to why those assessment strategies change, and that story becomes the history of the course that should not be forgotten as an important reflective piece.

and finally,

5. Leave space for reflection and feedback

Organizing needs to have active feedback loops just like eduspaces does. Sometimes organizations don't shift quickly enough to the next barrier, gap, or need. Similarly sometimes pedagogical choices don't react to experiential needs. Having opportunities for feedback built in allows for changes to be community informed.

I hope these 5 ideas can help inform the organizing work that you are doing in local or larger levels, but also some things that you may want to consider for your pedagogical design. 

I won't have a blog next week because I am away at STLHE. But if you are at STLHE please come say hi. I will be one of the few folk masked there, so that may help you find me, but if I only know you virtually please introduce yourself, I would love to meet you.