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Day 1: Keynote Session
Thumbdrives, software, post-it notes, bandwidth: Teaching and learning as a relational, more-than-human entanglement
When we assign assessments, set an activity, or provide guidance and instruction for success in academic life, little attention do we pay to the other possible agents with whom our students work toward the achievement of pedagogical prescriptions. Students do not skate, unhindered, through tech and “context” to complete requests to “reflect”, or “write an argumentative essay in five paragraphs”. The journey to knowing and meaning-making is strewn with materially situated negotiations, manipulations and reciprocities with and between human and non-human actors. Inside of these dynamic, raucous assemblages—entanglements of tech, objects, texts, spaces, campuses, networks and pedagogy—attributes of teaching and learning encounters are tenuously made and re-made. How might attention paid to materiality illuminate how desired attributes of the teaching and learning dynamic, such as belonging and inclusion, materialize? What expansion of our teacherly sensitivities might we experience when we conceive of inclusive teaching as a social andmaterial practice, in which we are but one of the multitude of actors involved?
This talk will engage sociomaterial, posthuman, and new materialist bodies of theory to discover how “matter comes to matter” (Barad, 2007) in teaching and learning, and what that might mean for identity formation, belonging and inclusion. Through greater attention to, and loving regard for, the non-human and object world, inclusive practices expand to include situated responsiveness to the more-than-human dynamism within teaching and learning relationships.
Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the universe halfway: quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Duke University Press.
About the S
peaker:
Kate Crane is an educational developer in online pedagogies at Dalhousie University’s Centre for Learning and Teaching. She consults with instructors around the online, digital and virtual aspects of courses and programs and the unique pedagogical challenges and opportunities these present. In her work, she seeks to understand teaching and learning as both a social and a material phenomenon, recognizing the student as part of an entangled web of human and non-human relations, and exploring how this may help us realize more ethical teaching practices.
Day 2: Keynote Session
“What’s Love Got to Do with It? Revisiting Love as a Pedagogy that Liberates Us All”
Do we like our students – as people? Are we curious about the worlds they inhabit? Are we ourselves having fun in the classroom as educators? Do the structural constraints we all operate within bring us closer to our students, or pit us against them?
These are some of the questions we will reflect on together in this keynote through a revisiting of the notion of love as an organizing principle in pedagogy. The conversation serves as a response to the call that has come from transgressive scholars/educators such as bell hooks. Rather than seeing love as an additional layer of care work that educators must shoulder, love is positioned as a liberating force and humanizing practice that leaves all of us better off.
Granted the odds are stacked against us. Cultural and technological gaps often alienate educators from our students. We also often find ourselves entangled in structural forces that reduce our teaching to managerial and transactional processes, including DEI mandates that can feel performative or disconnected from the heart of our work. Amidst the structural forces that have shaped our current educational landscape—forces that alienate, fragment, and often reduce the very essence of learning—we ask: What does it mean to center love in our teaching in ways that benefit students, and also (re)connect us to the meaning in our work? This love-driven pedagogy invites us to genuinely like, see, and understand our students, and also resist the alienating forces that threaten to rob us all from the joyful and liberatory possibilities education provides.
About the Speaker:
Dr. Alpha Abebe is currently an Associate Professor at McMaster University with the Faculty of Humanities, where she teaches a range of interdisciplinary courses focused on equity and social justice, migration studies, and critical inquiry and methodologies. She is also the Lead for Africa and Black Diaspora Studies at McMaster and involved in a number of social and pedagogical change initiatives on campus.
Dr. Abebe is a Toronto native of Ethiopian descent, and these roots and routes inform her community, research, teaching and creative interests. Her doctoral work, completed at the University of Oxford, focused on the diasporic identities and practices of young people of Ethiopian descent in North America. Her ongoing research interests include African diasporas, transnational identities, critical pedagogies, and Black community engagement.
She has extensive experience as a community-based practitioner working in a diversity of roles ranging from front-line support to strategy and program development. The thread that connects most of her advocacy, research and professional efforts is a focus on engaging and championing young people from racialized, Black and under-resourced communities.