Research Speaker Series – Storytelling as Methodology: Anti-Oppression in Teaching and Research

*Note: This session has passed. Please view the resources and recordings below.

About the Series

The BCcampus Winter 2024 Research Speaker Series offers participants and presenters an opportunity to learn and share knowledge and advocacy on research methods, approaches, and pedagogies when it comes to accessibility, access, Indigenous engagement, and equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) in teaching and learning. These livestream webinars, which take place one Tuesday every month from January to March, will allow you to learn and ask questions about new research directly from the researchers involved.

Learning Outcomes

  • Broaden your knowledge and research skills in the B.C. post-secondary context.
  • Learn about Indigenization, EDI, decolonization, and accessibility in research.
  • Be inspired to participate in research communities of practice or explore the themes in your work.
  • Connect with academics and community members who share your interests.

About the Session

Anti-oppressive teaching is not simply more representation of marginalized groups or more inclusive understandings of identity. Anti-oppressive research cannot be only the study of oppression and its impacts or new ways to combat it. Just as being “not racist” is not the opposite of racism, anti-oppressive teaching and research, like anti-racist work, is about more than oppression: it unearths and resists systems, policies, pedagogy, and the colonial roots of academia. Teaching and research are rooted in colonialism, and this fact should be uncomfortable. But what can we do with this discomfort?

What can anti-oppression in teaching and research look, sound, and feel like?

In this session we will explore anti-oppression in teaching and research beyond inclusion. We will interrogate some barriers to letting go of what is commonly viewed as the only acceptable and rigorous approach to research and writing. We will let go of either/or, quantitative or qualitative, reason or emotion, and scaffolded explanation or storytelling approaches and embrace a “yes and” approach to doing and expressing research.

If you have not interrogated your research methodologies for oppression, join us to engage in this vulnerable act. If you have done this work but wonder about other possibilities, come with courage and a willingness to let go.

About the Facilitator

Dr. Lyndze Harvey (she/her) is a Queer settler on the unceded territories of the Lək̓ʷəŋən WSÁNEĆ Peoples. She is an assistant teacher professor in the Faculty of Education at the University of Victoria — or, as her kids tell others, she is a teacher teaching teachers about teaching. She teaches social studies and philosophical and historical foundations in the teacher education program and educational discourse, narratives of leadership, and research methodologies in the graduate program in education studies. Lyndze believes all educators need to be politically educated; they are hired by the state to raise the citizens of tomorrow to shape a better world. She is also a researcher and writer who resists the status quo, as there is no political neutrality in research. Using storytelling, academic narrative writing, autoethnography, and more, Lyndze engages in rigorous resistance in her efforts to answer her questions. Storytelling, identity, and radical love are central to both her teaching and research.

Other Events in This Series:

Resources and Recordings