For our first seminar in collaboration with the EDI committee, we warmly welcome Dr. Marsha Hinds Myrie on October 10th, 2024, for a talk entitled "Positionality and Curriculum Violence in Building Inclusive Teaching Practice".

Abstract

In this seminar we encourage reflection about inclusive pedagogy not as who is in the classroom but what is our proximity to the axes of difference used to create oppression in our society broadly and education specifically. We also think about institutionally positionality and our specific case at University of Guelph. We are then in a better position to understand how the decisions we make about how we teach and what we teach impact on social justice. We conclude by thinking about curriculum decisions and how those decisions can result in harm to equity seeking communities or aid the process of decolonization and social justice in schools 

Bio

Marsha Hinds Myrie is an educational developer, Anti-oppressive and inclusive pedagogies, Office of teaching and Learning, University of Guelph.   Marsha is a career teacher with over two decades of experience at all levels of the educational system including delivering educational services to neurodivergent and disabled communities. Marsha believes that the core of anti oppressive and anti racist pedagogies is rejecting colonial hierarchies in all forms and renegotiating partnerships of equality and mutual respect that benefit us all.

Marsha’s life and work are an embodiment of dualities and intersections.  She is a Barbadian/Canadian citizen with an ancestral, cultural and intellectual home in Africa. Her career unfolds, sometimes spectacularly and sometimes confusingly at the intersections of activism and education. Her lived experience makes identity and transdisciplinary practice two major components to her pedagogical approach. The philosophical mooring for Marsha’s interaction with anti oppressive and inclusive pedagogy come partly out of her PhD research which focused on the ways in which political and cultural experiences shaped the development and creation of intellectual spaces and intellectual thought in Commonwealth Caribbean tertiary institutions.  Through examining the design and approach to teaching in non-western universities, western universities can find concrete and tried strategies that deliver decolonial, inclusive, anti-oppressive learning spaces.

Hinds Myrie came to the University of Guelph in September 2021 and continues to find ways both in and out of the classroom to highlight the University of Guelph’s connections to Caribbean and Black intellectual movements while also creating space for deepening and widening the engagement. The epistemological values that create disciplines in the Western academy are still immensely uncomfortable for Hinds Myrie but if required, she would classify her substantive disciplinary areas and research as womanism, Black Studies, philosophy as praxis and intellectual history. Marsha in Adjunct professor in the Department of Political Science. She is a public intellectual steeped in the Caribbean intellectual tradition, critical studies and Black Canadian/Diasporic Studies.