PgCert Reflective Journal

This reflection summarises some of the remaining data from my APR and includes my presentation slides.

There was a repetitive reference to emotional support, and I suppose this was loaded in the research question itself, as I brought up the question of tears in the classroom. Several of the participants identified that there was a rise in student anxiety and different instances of students crying in the classroom. One participant recalled an instance of cultural sensitivity, and someone crying about the mention of colonial history, they also recalled how they often found themselves apologising in the instances when people did cry. Another participant stated that they had sought therapy from a combination of dealing with student’s issues, identifying how their pastoral duty was taking a toll on their own mental health. Another participant expressed how they felt very awkward when students started to cry in the classroom. Most of the participants identified the need to receive some more support with this aspect of the job, particularly as conversations about feelings and emotions have become more apparent in the classroom. Several of the participants identified how in order to mitigate this, they often deferred back to the taught materials, hoping to dilute emotional responses, because there was both a lack of time, and they did not know how to moderate such discussions. 

Another emerging theme was around teaching as a performance, seeing as we are part of an education system that has socially conditioned us to think about the teacher-student relationship through a relation of authority. Thus the very practice of being at the front of the classroom, at the podium, has conditioned students to not only listen, but to absorb the knowledge of the speaker – the teacher. And there are pros and cons to that relationship. On the one hand, we can rely on the fact that the students will abide by this disciplinary conditioning, and to some extent listen, but on the other hand, there are stereotypes of what this teacher should look. For marginalised people who do not fit the look of older white man, this becomes complicated, because part of our performance seeks to gain the authority of not fitting the conventional profile. One participant remarked that there were assumptions that a ‘serious academic doesn’t pay attention to what they wear’ and that there was an expectation of a certain level of self-surveillance. I think this conversation was important and contributed to my ARP by identifying that our own relationship and experiences with authority shaped how we moderated the classroom. 

Finally, two of the participants, and three, including myself, identified how ritual practices, or repetitive practices lent to more robust discussions, because students not only had an expectation and anticipation of what a rich conversation was, but by attending classes in a specific environment, with the same people, with a certain set of regulations, they had a responsibility toward the materials, and their fellow classmates – gaining empathy, but also a sense of familiarity in order to disagree (if they wanted to).

Pedagogy: Brave Space, Free Speech

Arao, B. and Clemens, K. (2013) ‘From Safe Spaces to Brave Spaces: A New Way to Frame Dialogue Around Diversity and Social Justice’, in The Art of Effective Facilitations, ed. Landreman, L.M. Sterling, VA: Stylus Publishing, pp. 135-150.

Bacevic, J. (2023) ‘No Such Thing as Free Speech? Performativity, Free Speech, and Academic Freedom in the UK’, Law and Critique 36, pp. 1-19.

Koopman, S. and Seliga, L. (2021) ‘Teaching peace by using nonviolent communication for difficult conversations in the college classroom’, Peace and Conflict Studies 27:3, pp. 1-29.

Martinez-Cola, M w English, R., Min, J, Peraza J, Tambah, J, Yebuah, C. (2018) ‘When Pedagogy Is Painful: Teaching in Tumultuous Times’, Teaching Sociology 46:2, pp. 97-111.

Malcolm, F. (2021) ‘Silencing and freedom of speech in UK higher education’, British Educational Research Journal 47:3, pp. 520-538.

OR Books (2025) Norman Finkelstein in Conversation with Cornel West and Nadine Strossen on Free Speech and Gaza. 7 August. https://www.normanfinkelstein.com/norman-finkelstein-in-conversation-with-cornel-west-and-nadine-strossen-free-speech-and-gaza/ (Accessed: 23 Sept 2025).

Palfrey, J. (2017) Safe Spaces, Brave Spaces: Diversity and Free Expression in Education. Cambridge, MA and London, UK: The MIT Press.

Verduzco-Baker, L. (2018) ‘Modified Brave Spaces: Calling in Brave Instructors’, Sociology of Race and Ethnicity 4:4, pp. 585-592.

Methodology: Interviews, Autoethnography 

Ellis, C.S. and Bochner, A.P (2006) ‘Analysing Analytic Autoethnography’, in Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 35:4, pp. 429-449.

Hume, A. and Young-Loveridge, J. (2011) ‘Using professional colleagues as interviewers in action research: Possibilities and pitfalls’, Waikato Journal of Education 16:3, pp. 111-124.

Kalekin-Fishman, D. (2017) ‘Interviewing colleagues’ in Practicing social science: sociologists and their craft. Milton Park, UK: Routledge, pp. 81-88.

Lewis-Beck, M.S., Bryman, A. and Liao, T.F (2004) ‘Snowball Sampling’ in The SAGE Encyclopaedia of Social Science Research Methods [online] Available from: https://methods.sagepub.com/ency/edvol/the-sage-encyclopedia-of-social-science-research-methods/chpt/snowball-sampling (Accessed: 7 Jan 2026).

My ARP plan was shaped by two trajectories to address my initial problem/reflection, which I map out in the first blog post (and draw in the first image). To summarise, I was faced with a difficult moment in the classroom where one student’s remarks about cultural appropriation, which were culturally insensitive, erupted into a fierce debate which left some students incredibly upset. While I was running the class with a colleague, we both did not know how to address the moment, and have reflected upon it over and over as an expression of contemporary political polarisations. In an attempt to gather information from colleagues about seminar-based practices and their experiences with training, I developed this ARP in hopes to identify best practices, identifying training that was both available and needed. After interviewing my participants, I transcribed the interviews (two examples are posted in the previous post), taking the yellow highlights and creating a comparative table (image below).

I then highlighted common themes and reiterative reflections in a colour system, which included blocked highlights and highlighted squares to discern patterns in the data (see image below).

I identified the following themes which I make sense of in my final presentation:

1. emotional labour/pastoral care needs
2. drawing upon lived experience vs. critical theory (or taught materials)
3. neoliberalism and its constraints = no time, job precarity
4. training experiences
5. ritual practices in the classroom
6. performing teaching, including values and integrity in practices
7. student anxieties, discussions: cultural appropriation, cancel culture, white guilt

My ARP employed semi-structured interviews from six participants who were recruited using a purposeful sampling method. Participants were approached due to their experiences as seminar-based lecturers. These two transcripts are examples of the data collected, with the black used to redact any identifiable information, and the yellow highlights used to highlight relevant data.

Autoethnography is also used to draw upon my own practices in the classroom as a case study of seminar-teaching practices and the training that is accessible and available to me, as a lecturer (Ellis & Bochner, 2006). Admittedly this was less extensively focused than the interviews though. One trajectory of my ARP included setting an intervention which was drawn from my training from the Nonviolent Communication workshop that I attended at (online) UAL on October 1 and 8, 2025. Listening exercises were practiced in those workshops, and while the limited time of my own classes was a broader issue (which I discuss in the next post of the findings), I brought in a rule for the students to listen to, and address the previous comment, hoping to instil some of the active listening skills. Oftentimes my seminars unfold into one-on-one student-teacher addresses, as the students want to demonstrate their knowledge of each subject/question, but seldomly do the students build upon each other’s comments. The listening practice, which was initially effective, began to erode with every successive seminar. I think drawing upon a set of ritual practices at the beginning of each seminar, which include active listening would be helpful in the future – this one seemingly minor intervention encourages students not only to think about their relationship to me, but also the broader dynamic of the classroom. It is interesting to think about how the students can focus in to answer a question posed by the teacher, yet find it harder to address the answers, questions or statements posed by their co-hort.

Works Cited

Please see blog post with Reference List

PgCert Interview Questions:

1. How long have you been teaching for? And in what capacity?
2. Throughout the years, what kind of teacher training have you received or had ready access to?
3. I was wondering if you could reflect on some difficult moments within your teaching – if you could describe some challenging scenarios in which you have not been certain of how to proceed.
4. Have you noticed any shifting patterns since when you first began teaching versus now?
5. Are there specific societal/political concerns that have emerged in the classroom?
6. How do you moderate difficult emotions or conversations in your classroom?
7. What are your thoughts/knowledge about free speech in the classroom?
8. How do you consider your own positionality in relation to the classroom and its practices?
9. How do you negotiate cultural differences in conversational topics and discussions?
10. Are you familiar with decolonial pedagogies? If so, what is your understanding, and how, if any, techniques do you employ in the classroom? 
11. Are you familiar with non-violent communication? If so, what is your understanding, and how, if any, techniques do you employ in the classroom?
12. Are you familiar with brave space theory? If so, what is your understanding, and how, if any techniques do you employ in the classroom?
13. Do you know about ‘Chatham House Rules’? If so, what is your understanding?
14. Are there any emerging trends in the classroom that are noticeable in your seminar discussions?
15. Have you had any training with the aforementioned pedagogical approaches? If so, what worked and what would you have wanted more of?
16. Are there any areas of training or support that you wish you had more access to?
17. How do you move forward after difficult moments in the classroom?

My semi-structured interviews were gathered by initially recruiting from an open email to seminar-based instructors inviting participants to volunteer for my ARP, which I outlined in the email and through a Participant Information Sheet. Alongside this, I also sent out Consent Forms to comply with ethical practices of interviewing subjects.

The questions I asked sought to initially explore how the classroom dynamics have shifted throughout their years of teaching. Most of my participants had been teaching for at least 8 years, so would have experienced the shift into an online teaching space under COVID and its aftermath. While not my intention, one of my participants likened the questions to a job interview, but it was my hope that the improvisational script would have allowed for informality. That is, I did go off script, if I felt that there was more information to be gathered. I think one of my biggest problems was trying to find in-person space for the interviews to unfold. There is limited space within CSM, and I observed that some of my participants were reluctant to share information. Moreover, interviews conducted on Teams were recorded, so this obviously adds a layered of surveillance. I wondered whether providing an intimate space to converse and more time would have helped to encourage the discussion. That said, I learned a lot from the process, and should I continue to develop the project, I would try to snowball the sampling, which means to gather more research subjects from the initial subject pool (Lewis-Beck et. al, 2004), and also to engage with the participants for at least two interviews, perhaps after implementing an intervention from their suggested training needs.

Works Cited

See blog post of reference list

My ARP was developed from my IP proposal: which sought to explore how seminar leaders moderated difficult emotions and free speech in the classroom. My intervention was two-fold: 1. To ask how staff were trained for seminar teaching, and what training staff needed; 2. To employ my own training from a Nonviolent Communication (NVC) course taken at UAL in my classroom and reflecting on this through autoethnography.

Initial research into this project included Finlay Malcolm’s (2020) essay on free speech, where he highlights the university as a space in the public sphere for the sharing and debating of ideas and opinions (p. 524) and Norman Finkelstein in conversation with Cornel West and Nadine Strossen about the history of free speech in America (OR Books, 2025). Drawing on John Stuart Mill, Malcolm cites that ‘a society should not merely tolerate speech that is objectionable, but should embrace it for the purposes of discovering what is true, and showing what is false’ (2020, p. 523). We are living in polarising times, however, where the university is not only increasingly driven out of the public sphere under neoliberal agendas, but social media has become an archive to interrogate personal and past merits and positions. While debate and discussion should be a ground to distil complicated positions, create empathetic connections, discover truths encouraging us to grow and shift, we are increasingly living in a culture that seeks to cancel one another at any hint of digression from a path of moral ‘good’ness. Cancel culture assumes us to be static in our politics, which is not only reductive, but a detriment to goals of learning. And this moment shaped the context which underpinned my reflections and actions.

I ask(ed) if tears are OK in the classroom, but more importantly, what tools we as staff have to moderate these tense and polarising times. Rather than seek to resolve these difficult issues, I asked what training seminar leaders had, and what training they needed, simultaneously scoping for myself what was readily available for staff. My readings included pedagogies of brave space theory (Arao and Clemens, 2013; Palfrey, 2017; Verduzco-Baker, 2018) and NVC (Koopman and Seliga, 2021; Troisi, 2025; meenadchi, 2021) alongside methodological readings about interviewing colleagues (Hume and Young-Loveridge, 2011; Kalekin-Fishman, 2017) and thematic analysis (Clarke and Braun, 2017). Two padlets (A and B) were forwarded via my line manager from a new member of the College Education Team, however, the visibility or access of these materials for staff was an overall issue which instigated the project, despite these sources existing.  

I focused on brave space theory. Arao and Clemens (2013) describe how they found the students in their classroom to regularly deploy safe space rules when the dialogues moved from polite to provocative, seeming to conflate safety with comfort (p. 135). While issues of identity, oppression, power, and privilege were imperative to tackle within the classroom, Arao and Clemens argue that ‘authentic learning about social justice […] requires […] qualities of risk, difficulty, and controversy that are defined as incompatible with safety’ (2013, p. 139). I began with this framework to wonder how seminar leaders ran their own respective classrooms, asking about their own positionality, and how comfort shaped the handling of conflict. 

My ARP employed semi-structured interviews from six colleagues which were anonymised and recruited using purposeful sampling. The participants volunteered from an open call based on their role in seminar teaching. I used participant information sheets and consent forms. The data was qualitatively distilled through thematic analysis (Clarke and Braun, 2017). 

Simultaneously, upon Mallika’s recommendation, I also attended the NVC workshop via UAL run by Ceriden Buckmaster, which was a two-day workshop employed theories drawn by Marshall Rosenberg. meenadchi (2021) critiques traditional NVC as a ‘liberal form of language-policing, that it denies and ignores invisible systems of power and privilege’ (p. 2). Offering a workbook to decolonialise NVC from coloniality, meenadchi also informed my practice.

Works Cited

Please see Reference List blog post.

Introduction 

This report builds upon my proposal to introduce concepts and strategies of ‘brave space’ discussions within the classroom, which germinated from the difficulties I recognised within my own and my colleagues’ teaching experiences. In an increasingly polarised world, stoked by the incendiary models of digital media platforms, which encourage conflict and disagreement as central to our everyday lives, I ask: how do we navigate difficult conversations in the classroom? How do we encourage disagreement without shutting down discourse? How do we avoid cancel culture? My intervention aims to provide staff training in the form of a workshop that teaches about brave space pedagogies through practice-based strategies and also draws on ritualised practices to employ within the classroom. 

Context

As a lecturer of cultural studies in the BA Fashion, Jewellery and Textile programme, as well as in BA and MA Fashion Histories & Theories, an aspect of my role is to facilitate seminars which explore gender, bodies, sexuality, colonialism, racism and histories of power, oppression and resistance. Social justice and decolonial theory are at the core of my own teaching areas and strategies, my own positionality as a British-Canadian woman of the Korean diaspora shapes my research interests. Lately, my classroom conversations have been filled with difficult and emotionally fraught perspectives that have questioned gender/sex identifications, histories of racialised violence in America, and so on. I found that I did not have the tools in my pedagogical training to thoughtfully cater to these alternative (and sometimes problematic) positions. This intervention thus offers staff training as a discursive workshop and suggestions for ritualised practices which encourage challenging conversations in the classroom by using theories of the ‘brave space’.  

1. Workshop

Facilitated by a convenor of ‘brave space’ workshops, this will comprise a taught component which explores the histories and theories of safe space and brave space (as highlighted in ‘Inclusive learning’ section), expansive discussion, and practical exercises, including difficult scenarios to navigate in the classroom using persona pedagogy. This framework employs strategies to overcome exclusionary biases without having to reveal one’s own identity (in case of threat), developing instead an archetypal persona to perform in a range of scenarios to better explore the systemic asymmetries through varied identities (Thomas 2022, 1-3).

2. Rituals Practices 

These would be discussed as strategies to employ in the classroom on a day-to-day capacity. The repetition of which would establish familiarity with common goals and ideas about conversation within the classroom. This would then be folded into everyday pedagogy, rather than as a contained workshop. 

Inclusive learning

John Palfrey’s Safe Spaces, Brave Spaces asks ‘[m]ust a community tolerate intolerance?’ (2017, 16), arguing that it is crucial for free expression to be upheld alongside principles of diversity, equity and inclusion. Situated in a time of student activism in the aftermath of BLM and MeToo, Palfrey discusses how there is growing polarisation between a traditionalist way of thinking which uses ‘free speech’ to justify antagonistic language, and worst xenophobia and hate speech versus student activists who sometimes deploy cancel culture to ensure ‘a faster route to social justice’ (Palfrey 2017, 1). A further critique of free speech lies in its historical foundations which have privileged those in power, and more often affects (negatively) those who have been historically marginalised and oppressed.  

Safe spaces were created in the 1990s by women’s and LGBT movements. However, activist Minnie Bruce Pratt revealed that one’s notion of ‘safe place’ was rooted in one’s own history, identity, and privilege; she recognised safety in early women’s movements were defined by ‘white, heterosexist notions that sought safety and security for a few women at the expense of many women’ (Fox and Ore 2010, 629). Inclusive learning thus needs to consider the intersectional privileges of safety, for as Fox and Ore highlight ‘safe space discourse continues to operate within a normalizing gaze of a white, masculinist, middle-class subject, rendering queer subjectivity in a most simplistic and reductive manner’ (2010, 631). The safe space is now reiterated in the classroom and in our own PgCert discussions to assume that a universal safety is achievable, but we seldom question the term or what it means. Safety has also become conflated with comfort (Fox and Ore 2010, 632).

According to Arao and Clemens (2013), ‘authentic learning about social justice often requires the very qualities of risk, difficulty, and controversy that are defined as incompatible with safety’ (139) That is, recognising oppression, hearing stories of pain and struggle, holding accountability, feeling guilt and hopelessness are the embodied by-products of understanding oppression, and should not be negated. Safety (and/as comfort) can shield privilege. Drawing on Wise (2004), Arao and Clemens argue that deploying safety as a condition of cross-racial dialogue about racism is the ultimate expression of White privilege, particularly as Whiteness once again, gets to articulate how these conversations should unfold (Wise 2004, 15 IN Arao and Clemens 2013). We should acknowledge that our institutions have never been safe for those oppressed by supremacy systems.  

The brave space then emerges from Boostrom’s (1998) critique and assertion that learning not only involves risk, ‘but the pain of giving up a former condition in favour of a new way of seeing things’ (399). By drawing on a framework of courage, Arao and Clemens note the process of actualising the brave space includes: establishing ground rules, employing collectivist approaches – which reflects the practices of IP Session 1 – to develop discussions around social justice. Additionally, my own intervention would not only outline these histories, but also establish rituals, habits, everyday practices to build collaborative conversations. In these practices, I am reminded of Foucault’s ideas about discipline, who theorises how our everyday actions, in reiterative replay reinforce identities and/or beliefs (see Foucault 1995 [1977]). Erica Keswin’s defines rituals as ‘something which we assign meaning and intention […] a regular cadence […] goes beyond its practical purpose’, the latter meaning that there is a symbolic or signifying meaning (2022). By developing unifying rituals that move beyond what is practically necessary, a bond is forged to enhance teamwork, and hopefully an atmosphere of challenging but collective learning.

Reflection

My discussions with Amberlee encouraged me to draw upon ritual practices and persona pedagogies to further shape the brave space intervention. We spoke about how workshops can silo learning into contained moments, that we can forget about, separated from our everyday classroom practices. This is certainly the case in my own learning, as my requirements to learn fire safety rules or GDRP regulations on the ESS platform, never become fully absorbed until I need to apply them. Rituals, in contrast, are regular, helping to build ‘psychological safety, purpose, and performance’ (Keswin 2022). Within these reiterative practices, we can become habituated in the intentions and beliefs of our actions, which can be applied to building and moderating challenging classroom conversations. Amberlee also encouraged me to to inject as much play into the intervention as possible, which I understood as a form of experimentation with the staff training. One exercise that I thought about was how medical students play out scenarios to diagnose patients. Employing persona pedagogy, the staff training could have us perform different identities to work through challenging classroom moments, working collectively to consider and converse about the best practices. 

In my group presentations, it was recommended that I could speak about previous mistakes. I think this would be a great opportunity to highlight how our intentions may not match up to our practices as they unfold, discussions within the team about how they may have confronted these same scenarios can help us to think about more effective strategies to moderate those challenging perspectives. It was also flagged up that rules around accepting disagreement were important; Amberlee also suggested that depersonalisation was important – drawing from the academic research and theory to enrich students’ contributions, which I always try to instil. One further recommendation was that I could encourage discussions that may take place in the workplace, which include scenarios of disagreement and risk – teaching diplomacy in conversational skills is also important. 

Action

I will develop this staff training programme as part of the upcoming Action Research Project, deploying the approaches within the contained setting of my cultural studies team. I aim to analyse the practice through semi-structured interviews with the team that I will collect before the sessions begin, after the workshop, and after the first semester of teaching to reflect upon the introduction of the strategies in classroom practice. If there is a wider need for the training, I will hopefully introduce it to the wider contextual study teaching staff. 

Evaluation of process

This process has allowed me to review literature on brave space and persona pedagogies, which have been fairly new terms to me prior to the PgCert programme. These readings have illuminated critical reflections on how we use or understand ‘safe space’ in the classroom, situating it within a historical context and critiques of universalism. The metric of the practice ‘working’ would be harder to qualify – although I would be taking semi-structured interviews, the real success would be following difficult conversations in the classroom, and to see whether these teachings helped. 

Conclusion

This process of reading, developing a programme, presenting (to multiple audiences), revising, reading further, and writing up this report has allowed me to synthesise my knowledge with an actionable plan and edit this according to audience suggestions. Working through these reflections was an almost collaborative process, which considers the wider classroom settings beyond my own experiences (of seminar focuses), which has been helpful. I have learnt new pedagogies, including persona and brave space. 

Works Cited

Arao, B. and Clemens, K. (2013) ‘From Safe Spaces to Brave Spaces: A New Way to Frame Dialogue Around Diversity and Social Justice’ in The Art of Effective Facilitation. Sterling VA: Stylus Publishing, LLC., pp. 135-150.

Boostrom, R. (1998) ‘“Safe Spaces”: Reflections on an Educational Metaphor’, Journal of Curriculum Studies 30(4), pp. 397-408.

Foucault, M. (1995 [1977]) Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Sheridan, A. New York: Vintage Books.

Fox, C.O. and Ore, T. E. (2010) ‘(Un)Covering Normalized Gender and Race Subjectivities in LGBT “Safe Spaces”, Feminist Studies 36(3), pp.629-649. 

Keswin, E. (2022) ‘How to Create Powerful Workplace Rituals’, IDEO U, 20 Sept 2022. Available at: https://www.ideou.com/en-gb/blogs/inspiration/how-to-create-powerful-workplace-rituals?_pos=5&_sid=598964a17&_ss=r (Accessed: 10 July 2025)

Palfrey, J. (2017) Safe Spaces, Brave Spaces: Diversity and Free Expression in Education. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 

Thomas, C. (2022) ‘Overcoming Identity Threat: Using Persona Pedagogy in Intersectionality and Inclusion Training’, Social Sciences 11, pp. 1-15.

Wise, T. (2004) ‘No Such Place as Safe’, Columbia University, 23 July 2004. https://www.cc-seas.columbia.edu/sites/dsa/files/handbooks/Tim%20Wise%20Reading.pdf (Accessed: 10 July 2025)

The Telegraph is a known as a conservative or right-wing publication, and this tone was quite evident in the assigned YouTube clip called ‘Revealed: The charity turning UK universities woke’. From the dramatic soundtrack to the upper-class cadence of the narrator, there was an overarching scepticism toward AdvanceHE’s Athena Swan initiative and the findings of the University of Cambridge as institutionally racist. Dr. Vincent Harinam argued that the statistical evidence was not conclusive (Orr, 2022). I am dubious about Harinam’s assertions, as decolonial scholarship would define the university as an institution of coloniality, which was constitutive of racism, however some of the critiques about anti-racism and diversity policies are echoed in Sara Ahmed’s On Being Included. 

‘Decolonising’ seems to have replaced diversity and anti-racism in a rebranding attempt that funnels money into initiatives that silo the project (of anti-racism, decolonialising, diversity) into departments or teams of diversity. One of Ahmed’s arguments is that when we institutionalise diversity it can become a performative speech act, wherein the recognition itself seems to absolve the institution, while simultaneously doing the bare minimum: ‘we have institutional racism!’, which she parallels to an addicts’ confession, as if the recognition will be the first step to absolution (Ahmed, 2012, pp. 55). Last session’s assigned reading by Ramadan highlighted how ‘BME academics continue to be positions at the bottom of the ladder vis-à-vis contract-types, seniority and salary bands’ (Ramadan, 2021, p. 34), then this week’s review of the UAL Anti-Racism policy offered evidence to the point as the document encouraged more staff hiring at the level of Visiting and Associating Lecturing (UAL, 2021). UAL recognises that it is institutionally racist, but does the bare minimum. What about senior management? What about full-time positions which hold job security? Racism is reinforced through unequal distributions of power, so recognising how power is distributed through racism is probably a good place to start dismantling. 

This discussion filters down through so many aspects my lived experiences, from getting rejected from funding to the casually racist remarks about Chinese international students from staff (which I witnessed in a staff symposium last week) to being the expert on race. I could go on and on and on. These beliefs are so ingrained in the public thinking that its casual nature often slips by me until after the event. In our recent class we discussed how the data metrics often don’t match up to the policies, but what about the data that is not quantified, or not easily quantifiable. Imagine if I were to report every microaggression that I witnessed, how could I even do that? I don’t even know who to report that to. Then I think about the labour that one would have to endure to report this constantly, instead of trying to forget it. I wonder if we could create a microaggression box – an anonymous comment box for every time someone said something in the school to them (maybe a plausible intervention). 

Works Cited

Ahmed, S. (2012) On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life. Durham and London: Duke University Press.

Orr, J. (2022) Revealed: The charity turning UK universities woke. The Telegraph [Online]. Youtube. 5 August. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FRM6vOPTjuU (Accessed on: 5 June 2025)

Ramadan, I. (2021) ‘When faith intersects with gender: the challenges and successes int eh experiences of Muslim women academics’, Gender and Education 34(1), p. 33-48

UAL (2021) Anti-Racism Action Plan. [Online] Available at: https://www.arts.ac.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0032/296537/UAL-Anti-racism-action-plan-summary-2021.pdf (Accessed on: 5 June 2025)

It has become increasingly clear to me this year that the tensions of our contemporary political climate are entering into the classroom. Teaching in an arts institution has previously allowed conversation in my taught seminars and classrooms to unfold without much controversy, sometimes seemingly like an echo chamber of liberal leftist ideas, in this year I have witnessed more conflict – varied opinions that brought more heated debate, and worst into the classroom. Yet, the solution is not to quash these conversations from occurring as they exist in the world, but it would be useful to develop strategies for brave spaces, where we could hold oppositional views in a co-existing space, to unpack and develop our understanding of these viewpoints with empathy. This intervention begins with a workshop about facilitating brave spaces for teaching staff. 

‘Safe spaces’ have been co-opted by dominance and privilege, to in many ways, deny accountability for social justice or quiet discomforting conversations and feelings. Arao and Clemens describe how White privilege can use the framing of safety to mitigate how issues of race and racism should be talked about. ‘People of color are then expected to constrain their participation and interactions to conform to White expectations of safety – itself an act of racism and White resistance and denial’ (Wise, 2004 in Arao and Clemens, 2013, p. 140). It is necessary to recognise that conversations about privilege and accountability may cause discomfort, thus ‘brave spaces’ have defined a newer framework of social justice in learning that may cause discomfort. My intervention includes introducing a workshop for facilitators to explore how to implement these practices in classroom, particularly strategies of how to mitigate and moderate difficult conversations. 

Works Cited

Arao, B. and Clemens, K. (2013) ‘From Safe Spaces to Brave Spaces: A New Way to Frame Dialogue Around Diversity and Social Justice’ in From The Art of Effective Facilitation. Ed. by Lisa M. Landreman. Abingdon: Routledge. pp. 135-150.

Additional Sources

Center for Research on Learning & Teaching, University of Michigan. Hot Moments. https://crlt.umich.edu/taxonomy/term/113 (Accessed on: 27 May 2025)

Palfrey, J. (2017) Safe Saces, Brave Spaces: Diversity and Free Expression in Education. Cambridge, MA and London, UK: MIT Press.