Module 4: Sustaining Change: Critique and Care
Figure 1: Sustaining Change Trailer
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Story
Objective: To spark and sustain equitable system-wide change and adaptation in higher education.
Change is hard. Academia, as an institution, was built to resist change and uphold established practices. The flaws in the system — false scarcity, exclusion, rigid hierarchy — are not new, but they have been exacerbated throughout the pandemic and demand address. Numerous innovative experiments in more inclusive, future-friendly learning have met insurmountable barriers and failed to thrive. How do we sustain change, complexity, and care in a system that was not designed for what our society currently demands of it?
How can we foreground care, hold the gains of learning that we may have made during the strange years of the pandemic, and sustain change? In this module, we’ll return to the liberating structure of what/so what/now what to review:
- Reflect on changes you’ve made during the past twenty months that focus on care (for students and self)
- Reflect on changes you’re working toward or want to see (particularly in higher education systems)
Session Topic Introduction: Sustaining Change, Care, and Critique
In previous modules, we’ve looked at a convening topic through the lens of two key provocations or ideas. In this module, we will look at the question of sustaining change through the lenses of care and critique. In Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom, bell hooks explores how fundamentally classroom practices need to be rethought in order to build people’s capacity to be free in a democratic society and to contribute where they are coming from. Hooks’s pedagogy is focused on care and on the development of practices of critique, and has informed this module.
Figure 2: Photo by Andrik Langfield on Unsplash
We wanted to think about this project not just as something that happens and then ends, but rather something that educators who’ve engaged in our sessions — and those who will only encounter the sessions through the modules later — can use to build on, to inform their own practices. And so, this final module will draw on something called an Open Space Technology Facilitation format. A core principle of Open Space Technology is that the right people are always in the room. So, we will close out the project by spending time together aiming to connect and maybe share some ideas for sustaining change together through co-design, collaboration, or even potentially another grant project.
Critique and care are both part of change. Critique and critical inquiry into the way things are enables people to see possibilities for change, and caring, connected relationships support us in taking the hard and risky steps to try things differently. But it’s particularly when we’ve made that first step that care and critique come into play in makin