2 The Significance of Unrecognized and Uncompensated Labour
Uncompensated and unrecognized labour is a salient and central theme in racialized students’ experiences in the classroom and within pedagogy. Students consistently described the disproportionate onus, implicit expectations, and burden of responsibility of having to educate faculty and their peers on racism, racial tensions, and elements of racial identity.
This has taken the form of:
- Informal teaching responsibilities,
- Unpaid consultation roles around course outlines, content, and how to respond to white students’ concerns,
- Being asked to occupy committee or peer support positions due to visible identity markers,
- Mediation of and intervention in racist and harmful discourse in the classroom, and
- Addressing microaggressions in the classroom.
Racial identity is a topic that has been treated as “taboo” in the classroom, which creates opportunities for instructors and professors to avoid, gloss over, or, at times, misrepresent its intersectional components and the need for attention in curriculum and in the classroom. This has left students of colour feeling responsible for ensuring that topics of race and racialization are not erased, misconstrued, or misrepresented, thus forcing them into tense, harmful, and awkward positions of educating their peers and faculty. As racialized students have clearly detailed in our study and in those that came before us, the discussion of racial dynamics and racism has consistently involved responsibilities of mediation, facilitation, interpersonal work, feedback, and curriculum development being imposed onto students of colour for free.