Meeting people where they are, without meeting them in hell: A tempered radical approach to teaching equity and justice in risk-averse environments

Abstract

The work of teaching equity, diversity, inclusion, and justice is rarely simple in any context. Teaching these concepts often involves the work of unlearning, a process that challenges the harmful socialization of people living in a white cis-heteropatriarchical capitalistic society (Evans-Winters and Esposito in International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 31: 863-876, 2018; hooks in Writing beyond race: Living theory and practice. Routledge, 2013; Rodriguez in Radical Teacher 111: 30-34, 2018). This chapter seeks to equip higher education social justice facilitators with andragogical tools to assist in teaching concepts of social justice to higher education professionals who are situated within risk-averse environments. Typical methods of delivering education on equity, diversity, and inclusion, which we call justice-based education, in higher education include but are not limited to diversity workshops, implicit bias trainings, safe space trainings, anti-racist seminars, social justice institutes, and other one-time or sustained teaching engagements that seek to mitigate harmful acts and experiences for members of minoritized communities in higher education (Applebaum in Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy 32(4): 862-875, 2017). Using (Meyerson and Scully in Organizational Science 6: 585-600, 1995) tempered radical framework as a theoretical underpinning, we grapple with what it means to employ strategies of teaching social justice in environments that actively counter and contradict liberatory work.