31.043 - One Step Forward, Two Steps Back: Professors' Struggle for Equity in the Academy

Session Type: Symposium

Abstract

We are the founding members of an equity-focused graduate program at a Western Canadian university. The program was established on the goals of anti-oppressive education and decolonization. Yet as faculty, we are still mired in institutional barriers to a more just curricular, pedagogical, and policy landscape for our students, many of whom are marginalized along at least one axis of Indigeneity, racialization, gender, sexuality, disability, and class. While the program aspires to be inclusive, responsive, and safe, there is the moral weight of bringing students into a potentially hostile institutional space. In this symposium, we examine domains in which we’ve attempted to advance equity practices, and problematize our efforts to dismantle the walls of the ivory tower from the inside.

Sub Unit

• Division G - Social Context of Education / Division G - Section 4: Policy and Mattering

Chair

• Kumari Beck, Simon Fraser University

Papers

• Setting the Context: Equity Studies in Education Graduate Programming Inside the Institution - Kumari Beck, Simon Fraser University; Ozlem Sensoy, Simon Fraser University

• "Us Versus Them": Whose Work Is Equity Work? - Pooja Dharamshi, Simon Fraser University

• Invisible Labor: Supporting Front-Line Education Workers as Equity Work in the Academy - Suzanne Smythe, Simon Fraser University

• The Impossibility of Equity: Challenges of Working in the Ivory Tower - Ena Lee, Simon Fraser University