Month: December 2025

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.