As a Canadian settler born to South African and Zimbabwean parents on the traditional territory of the Anishinaabe peoples in what is now known as Toronto, I am cognizant of my positionality and privilege. I try to use this awareness as a pedagogical strength by foregrounding the importance of situated knowledges (Haraway 1988) and standpoint theory (Harding 2004) in my teaching. Feminist STS scholars argue for the importance of embodied and situated understandings of the world, and I believe that these epistemologies empower students to approach learning with a greater awareness of the richness of their own personal experiences and knowledge.

 

In my teaching, I combine situated and place-based approaches to learning, while providing a safe space for my students to explore their ideas and identities. For example, in the Spring of 2018, I took my first-year English students to the First Nations Longhouse and the Japanese Gardens at the UBC Vancouver campus to discuss the complicated history of Canadian colonialism and white supremacy. On this outing, I urged my students to think through how the Musqueam First Nations land was used as a reconciliatory space between Canada and Japan following the expulsion of Japanese students at UBC during WWII. I also asked my students to consider how other settlers were interpolated into this history. As one of my students later wrote in my evaluation for this course: “because [Sara] was such an open teacher, some of us were able to talk about our backgrounds as diasporic people as well.”

 

My goal as a teacher is to bring course material to life—whether that be in person, or in a virtual classroom. I am committed to fostering connections between the texts my students read and the worlds we live in. Part of my approach to cultivating a community in the classroom also involves elevating the voices of historically marginalized people by bringing their perspectives into my syllabi and classroom discussions. However, I also recognize the importance of teaching my students canonical texts in critical ways. I encourage my students to talk back to texts, and to consider various vantage points from which we can approach them. Under what sociopolitical conditions was this text written? With whom is this art engaging? And how might a character be portrayed differently if there were a different narrator?