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