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.