Core Themes
Video:
The video above gives an overview of the resource and an introduction to its key concepts surrounding the Core Themes of our study.
CONTENT WARNING: Depending on your lived experiences and identities, some of the content on this site may be troubling, uncomfortable, challenging, and, at times, triggering. Engage mindfully and intentionally when embarking on your exploration of Learning in Colour, and connect with resources if needed.
Context
The purpose of this project and the creation of our website was to extend the critical work around race, racialized students’ experiences, and conceptualizing safety in the classroom, within pedagogy, and across campus more broadly. Inspired by work before us, such as the RACE report led and authored by Roche Keane and Dr. Ameil Joseph, as well as the anonymous suggestion box, conceptualized by Glenda Vanderleeuw, our project looked to continue to collect the insights of racialized students’ experiences within academia to move into tangible change.
Racialized students have experienced systemic issues within curriculum, microaggressions in the classroom and in the field, conflicting definitions of safety, and lack of attendance to intersectional issues and the nuances of identity. Recognizing these issues to be consistent and cyclical across academic disciplines, our project hoped to validate these experiences and create tangible avenues for change at the peer, instructional, and pedagogical levels. Through obtaining diverse yet collective experiences from students of colour in various disciplines, we located a unified voice across core themes that has dictated the student of colour’s school experience.
It is from these core themes that we have developed suggestions, resources, directions, and reflective points for your consideration to aid in co-constructing safer spaces across McMaster University for students of colour.