Creating Equitable Classrooms: Power and Knowledge in the Classroom

Facilitators:
Professor Ahmed Allahwala, Department of Human Geography, UTSC
Dr. Jennifer Esmail, Director, Centre for Community Partnerships

The intent of this lunch and learn is to collectively examine power as a central feature of classroom dynamics and teaching-learning processes. As instructors, we have to strike a delicate balance between our institutional, pedagogical and subject-matter authority and our desire to create genuinely open and inclusive learning spaces for collective meaning-making and knowledge production. In this interactive session, we will invite participants to reflect on how to move towards more inclusive teaching by productively reimagining power-knowledge frameworks.

This session will also allow participants to collaboratively generate pragmatic ways to engage thoughtfully with power and knowledge in and outside of classroom learning spaces. We will present concrete examples from our shared experience teaching community-engaged university courses, including a youth-led participatory action research course in East Scarborough and a Walls to Bridges course, an innovative learning community in correctional settings for both incarcerated and traditionally-enrolled students. Despite the facilitators' experience in community-engaged learning, the broader conversation about power and knowledge and equitable classrooms will be relevant to all instructors and course formats.