About the author: Nana Osei-Kofi is Director of OSU’s Difference, Power, and Discrimination Program and Associate Professor of Women, Gender, & Sexuality Studies. As a critical feminist scholar, a key area of inquiry with which Osei-Kofi engages focuses on structural shifts in higher education in the service of equity and access through curriculum transformation, change leadership, and faculty recruitment, retention, and development. As Director of the DPD Program, Osei-Kofi leads OSU’s annual DPD Academy, which is open to all OSU faculty. The Academy is designed to facilitate focused and productive engagement with contemporary, multidisciplinary scholarship on difference, power, and discrimination; critical pedagogies; and curriculum transformation. Applications for this year’s academy will be available online in early January 2022.
This fall, I published a co-edited book on curriculum transformation (Transformative Approaches to Social Justice Education: Equity and Access in the Undergraduate Classroom, Routledge, 2021) with two OSU colleagues, Dr. Bradley Boovy and Dr. Kali Furman. As a book that engages with diverse experiences of teaching across a wide range of fields and disciplines, it is a book that I hope will capture the imagination of those within the academy who are interested in taking up teaching and learning from a justice-informed perspective in ways that center on a deep commitment to teaching all students.
As someone who works with faculty development, the process through which the book came into being mattered greatly to me. It was important to me and my co-editors that our process model the type of engagement that the book seeks to advance. As such, we were intentional about inviting a diverse, interdisciplinary group of OSU colleagues to contribute to the book. And when it came time to get to work, our process was highly collaborative. We intentionally and enthusiastically crossed disciplinary boundaries, and we worked to push back against the many silos that all too often hinder attempts at institution-wide curriculum transformation.
Through working on this book project, I both learned new things about the work of curriculum transformation and was reminded of important truths about endeavors that seek to create educational systems that are conceived with all students in mind and that recognize the politics of the production of knowledge, and what we, therefore, view as “legitimate” knowledge.
In no particular order, here are some of the things that this endeavor made salient to me:
- If we are serious about curriculum transformation, faculty must be afforded the time and resources to engage in this undertaking. The work of curriculum, and by extension, institutional transformation premised on justice aims, is disproportionately carried out by those who hold minoritized identities. It is work that either takes place above and beyond “regular” faculty duties or is viewed as situated within the realm of service, making it something that is seen as falling outside “true” intellectual labor, and that is thus undervalued in decisions about institutional advancement. More often than not, both of these things are true. To mediate elements of this reality to the extent possible, my co-editors and I were unapologetic about this as a project concerning the scholarship of teaching. In recognition of the intellectual labor required for this project, we scheduled a three-day kick-off retreat at the end of an academic term, thus creating dedicated shared time for folx to engage deeply with this work, and we also provided our colleagues with a stipend in recognition of the value of their time and labor.
- What we can learn from each other as faculty from different fields and disciplines, once we reject academic hierarchies and a competitive ethos is exhilarating, but it takes time, and it takes effort. There are few mechanisms institutionally that promote collaboration and shared engagement, simply for the purpose of learning. As academics, we are socialized to inhabit the identity of “expert,” and therefore, often resist opening up to learning new things, especially if this learning has significant implications outside of our comfort zone, for what we see as our own particular areas of expertise. That is to say, to learn new things means first having to admit that there is something we don’t know, and for many, this butts up against the identity of “expert” and is thus profoundly unsettling. As faculty, we do come together for different types of learning, but typically these are tied to specific institutional, departmental, or programmatic needs, rather than learning for the sake of learning, and/or learning from other disciplines and fields of study as a way of grappling with our own area(s) of expertise in new ways. And if we do the latter, it is typically tied to my previous point, in that these types of practices take place above and beyond what is expected of us in our roles as faculty.
To this point, in putting together the book, we as co-editors developed a process through which all contributors participated in the review of draft chapters. Following this, each chapter was then workshopped with all contributors present and able to ask questions and provide feedback. By moving outside of the silos of our disciplines and fields of study, and working collaboratively, I was repeatedly reminded of the ways in which ontological and epistemological assumptions inform different disciplinary ways of knowing, I gained new insights in relation to how signature pedagogies function across different areas of study, and I learned the importance of time, trust, and generosity when a group of people with shared interests take seriously what it means the understand a range of varying perspectives. This process of shared engagement, more than anything else, is what I believe allowed contributors to write accessible, jargon-free chapters that aim to stimulate rich, critical, and generative conversations with colleagues across higher education.
- I am teaching a graduate course (WGSS/GRAD 542: The Inclusive Classroom) this term, and as a result, I have had a chance to have some of the critical conversations I hoped the book would spark, with students. The students in the class come from across the University, and most are working as Graduate Teaching Assistants (GTAs), so they live with much of what the book engages daily. As I hear them share their experiences both as students and as GTAs, and as the class grapples with what it means to transform undergraduate teaching, I continuously learn through what are often conversations where we grapple with how to create structural change while at the same time having an impact on teaching and learning. As rich as these conversations are, they remind me of how very few faculty members have any formal (or informal, for that matter) education related to teaching. Most teach the way they were taught, which leaves things to chance, and to me, this is simply not good enough. Engaging in transformative approaches to social justice education is not only about our interaction with students and/or what happens in classrooms. To realize substantive curricular and institutional transformation, this work must be explicitly connected to contributing to the realization of structural changes, whereby among other things, having a deep understanding and knowledge of teaching and learning becomes a requirement for all faculty.
For anyone interested in discussing Transformative Approaches to Social Justice Education, the CTL and the DPD Program will be hosting a Book Club beginning in winter term. All instructors, tenure track, and professional faculty, and graduate teach assistants welcome! Deadline to register is January 7, 2022.
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