Resource Description and Approach

Over the course of four months (May–August 2020), we designed two static web resources along with colleagues in our center, the Transforming Teaching Toolkit and the Teaching Assistant Toolkit, and delivered 24 associated webinars. The main Transforming Teaching Toolkit resource featured six “start here” guides on topics we thought would be most relevant and timely for instructors, while the Teaching Assistant Toolkit had subpages named by topic; both also included overview sections. Appendix A provides further details on the toolkits’ structure, and Appendix B lists the titles for all webinars.

Our decision to infuse rather than isolate discussion of decolonization, Indigenization, and EDI principles was inspired by advocates for curricular change who emphasize the importance of meaningful rather than tokenistic approaches. In disciplines including music (Hess, 2015), psychology (Goldstein, 2005), sociology (Joseph, 2012), dance (Walker, 2020), STEM (Carlone & Johnson, 2007; Espinosa, 2011), and health sciences (Bleich et al., 2015; Razack & Philibert, 2019), authors describe the importance of large-scale curricular change instead of tokenistic relegation of topics outside the white Eurocentric mainstream to a single unit or class period. Similarly, educational developers focused on inclusive pedagogies frequently outline strategies that involve large-scale change rather than additions of single lectures or readings to an existing course (Considine et al., 2017). This widespread rejection of an “add-and-stir” practice for the diversification of curriculum is sometimes associated with feminist scholarship of the 1970s and 1980s that rejected the mere addition of women as a solution to sexism (Mohanty, 2003),¹ but its rejection has been equally firm in other social justice–focused educational movements as well. Marie Battiste (1998), writing about the decolonization and Indigenization of curriculum in the face of “cognitive imperialism,” talks about the importance of questioning “mainstream knowledge” and moving beyond tokenistic inclusions where “the Other [knowledge] is acknowledged as a knowledge, not the knowledge” (pp. 20–21). bell hooks’s writings on radical pedagogy, particularly hooks (1994), frequently emphasize “pedagogical practices that engage directly both the concern for interrogating biases in curricula that reinscribe systems of domination (such as racism and sexism) while simultaneously providing new ways to teach diverse groups of students” (p. 10).

Connected to this attitude is our understanding of EDI and decolonization/Indigenization as separate but related initiatives that share many features but are also unique, an observation that also came out in our research findings. These terms are complex, and local, regional, and national contexts shape their manifestations in practice; readers’ understandings may differ from our own. Decolonization for us relates to the undoing of colonial and settler-colonial institutions, processes, and practices and at its core involves the return of land (Tuck & Yang, 2012) and the fulfillment of treaty commitments where they exist. Decolonization of education is a key step toward that ultimate goal; as Murray Sinclair (Ojibway) has said in the context of Indian Residential Schools in Canada, “education got us into this mess, and education will get us out of this mess” (The National, 2015). Indigenization in higher education is a practice of recentering Indigenous ways of knowing, doing, feeling, and believing within the academy, led by Indigenous peoples (both academics and not). For us as residents of the territory currently known as Canada and Turtle Island, decolonization and Indigenization are strongly connected to the histories and realities of the interactions of First Peoples with European settlers and other arrivants;² and to our own ancestries (Mohawk; a variety of Western European regions). We understand EDI to be the work of promoting and supporting equity, diversity, and inclusion for all people (but centering the needs of equity-denied and underserved groups) with an aim to promote fairness in access and opportunity and a sense of belonging and mattering—rather than simple inclusion into an unjust norm.

As we planned our programming, we held these principles in mind but also needed to rapidly develop new resources in the midst of a pandemic. We wanted to give instructors practical, timely, and straightforward strategies for shifting their teaching to a remote setting. But we also wanted to take advantage of a moment when instructors were attending to teaching and learning far more than usual to promote their critical reflection on problematic existing practices that were inequitable, inaccessible, colonial, racist, Eurocentric, sexist, and more. Finally, we wanted to critically reflect on our own practices as educational support professionals, ensuring that our programming dismantled rather than perpetuated these inequities (Manathunga, 2006).

The Transforming Teaching Toolkit and associated webinars were developed first, since we knew instructors at our institution would use the summer months for professional development and course design in preparation for a fully remote Fall 2020 semester, whereas TAs would need resources just prior to the semester’s start. We explicitly highlighted decolonization, Indigenization, and EDI in the Transforming Teaching Toolkit landing page with our first guiding principle: “maintain and strengthen your commitment to institutional priorities around inclusivity, equity, and diversity; decolonization and Indigenization; active learning; aligned assessment; and experiential learning.” This guiding principle presents an assumption that EDI, decolonization, and Indigenization already are (or should be) users’ first priority in teaching and learning. Even in centers in which these elements are not institutional priorities, putting these concerns at the forefront of any static resource is a sign that they should matter to everyone. Both online materials and webinars emphasized EDI, decolonization, and Indigenization visually by placing them at the top of the initial landing page and prominently displayed in branch pages. Of the six start here guides, the first one listed on the landing page was “Inclusive Community” (not course design or technologies as in many other remote teaching resources); similarly in the 2020 webinar offerings, the first webinar after the general overview focused on inclusion in teaching and learning.

Including these topics at all would be notable, given our impression that most colleges and universities in our region of Canada tended to set them aside in favor of a focus on technology how-tos and rapid redesign of assessments and courses. We explicitly mentioned these topics in webinar titles and descriptions, although not to as great a degree as we could have (of 15 webinars, three had explicit mentions). In a self-assessment tool accompanying the website, we asked early in the survey if individuals had or would incorporate decolonization/ Indigenization and/or inclusion in their teaching, which again promoted these concepts as necessary prerequisites to everyone’s effective teaching and learning.

These topics also appeared in less overt ways. “Transforming Teaching 101” was a web resource and associated webinar (delivered three times over the summer of 2020) that provided an overview of remote teaching and learning. It was difficult to condense our resources into a single webinar; yet EDI, decolonization, and Indigenization remained a part of sessions and handouts. Many “start here” guides and webinars integrated principles of EDI and decolonization/Indigenization, connecting to our own and others’ work on Indigenous pedagogies (Attas, n.d.; Garson et al., 2019; Iseke-Barnes, 2008; Pete et al., 2013). For instance, the “Student Engagement” “start here” guide began with a description of Indigenous pedagogies as forms of active learning that have existed since time immemorial (thus contributing to decolonization by challenging the fallacy that active learning strategies are exclusively white or Western in origin); the “Course Organization” “start here” guide included discussion of accessibility and Universal Design for Learning (UDL) and began the work of Indigenization by including an Anishinaabe medicine wheel as one of many possible models for course organization.

Our collaborative approach to designing these resources led to additional opportunities for infusion. We worked with student support units across campus to highlight academic and non-academic supports for all students, but particularly for those from equity-deserving groups. We explicitly collaborated with offices whose work connected to accessibility, inclusion, and decolonization and Indigenization. We worked with educational technology colleagues in our own center to ensure that our approach informed any advice around technology, reflected in a general philosophy of having technology serve learning and learners (particularly emphasizing accessibility). Finally, our choice to emphasize and promote asynchronous course instruction wherever possible led to greater emphasis on inclusion as we emphasized the needs of students without high-speed internet, in multiple time zones, and in challenging family and home situations.

In the Teaching Assistant Toolkit, developed from May to August 2020 as a “starting point for discussion, and an invitation for further learning,” we collaborated with three graduate student educational development associates, supervised by co-author Karalyn McRae. Yasmine Djerbal, Nevena Martinović, and Andrea Reid demonstrated a passion for and commitment to equity, diversity, inclusion, decolonization, and Indigenization in all their work, and this commitment was manifest in the Teaching Assistant Toolkit. Unlike the Transforming Teaching Toolkit, the Teaching Assistant Toolkit was developed with the intention of creating a permanent rather than pandemic-focused resource.

Our graduate student colleagues used similar strategies for infusing decolonization/Indigenization and EDI. Both websites and webinars explicitly highlighted these principles, embedded them in places beyond their expected locations, gave them priority in web page placement and timing of events, and collaborated with other campus units to ensure that historically marginalized groups were effectively supported. As just two examples, these principles were addressed directly in a section on inclusive spaces highlighting inclusive pedagogies for typical teaching assistant (TA) roles and in a section on leading tutorials/seminars in which topics included the use of gender pronouns, community guidelines, and bias in teaching evaluations. The Teaching Assistant Toolkit also encouraged long-term adoption of these strategies with information on course design that graduate students might use in their future careers.

Impact

Our intentional approach to infusing decolonization/Indigenization and EDI into our remote teaching and learning resources helped us uphold our commitments to these areas as institutional and personal priorities in teaching and learning despite the demands of the pandemic. We noted informally that our approach seemed rare among teaching and learning centers regionally, nationally, and internationally. Yet equally important to our intentions was the impact this approach had on those who engaged with these resources. Did anyone notice our efforts? Even if no one noticed, did it have an impact on the degree to which individual instructors integrated attention to EDI, decolonization, and Indigenization in their own teaching during the pandemic?

To explore these questions, we conducted a web-based survey with institutional ethics board approval, administered through Qualtrics.³ Potential participants were identified as instructors and graduate students who engaged with our center’s Transforming Teaching and Teaching Assistant Toolkits along with webinars offered in Summer 2020. Participants were invited to complete the survey through a direct email invitation and public promotion in our center’s newsletter and social media accounts. The responses we received offer perspective on our research questions and nuance our assertion that EDI, decolonization, and Indigenization were aspects of our COVID-19 remote teaching resources that had an impact on instructors.

We received 22 responses, a low response rate given that we invited 389 people who we identified as engaging in some way with our resources and programming. Even though our survey missed a large percentage of potentially impacted individuals, our respondents’ roles on campus were distributed in roughly similar proportions to the population we typically serve in our CTL: two tenure or tenure-track faculty members, seven adjunct faculty members, seven PhD students and one master’s student, two educational support professionals, and three other staff members. Also typical was that most respondents declared less than five years’ teaching experience and that respondents’ disciplines reflected proportions on campus.

A complete list of survey questions is included in Appendix C. After several questions about demographic data, we grouped survey questions into three areas: (1) participants’ own understandings of EDI, decolonization, and Indigenization; (2) the degree to which participants saw evidence of EDI, decolonization, and Indigenization principles and practices within toolkit resources and webinars; and (3) questions probing the impact of our resources specifically on participants’ teaching approaches and practices.

It was important to us to understand how respondents themselves understood EDI, decolonization, and Indigenization, given that these concepts are complex and variously defined. In an open question where we asked respondents to describe their own beliefs, most agreed that it was important (n = 13), with terms such as essential and central recurring often. Three responses used the term learning environment in particular, perhaps reflecting a view of these concepts as relating to the ability of students to be a part of a learning community or “show up as their authentic selves,” as one participant wrote. There is also clear variety in participants’ understanding: one mentioned both “accessible” and “anti-oppressive” as two separate foci, while another defined it as “treating everyone fairly.” Although no major trends emerged here given the small sample size, it is clear to us that there were differences in how participants understood these theories and practices.

When we asked survey respondents whether they noticed EDI, decolonization, and/or Indigenization in resources and webinars, eight remembered one or all of these principles as part of the Transforming Teaching Toolkit, four remembered them as part of the Teaching Assistant Toolkit, and 14 remembered them as part of webinars. In a later open-ended question, one participant added, “I have noticed that these aspects are brought up more often in live sessions. Perhaps they can be incorporated more and more in permanent sources online.” This comment suggests that our efforts were indeed noticed, although free responses temper that conclusion somewhat. Some respondents couldn’t remember where exactly they’d seen the references, which could suggest a few things: that our reputation as a center that supported these initiatives prior to the pandemic influenced respondents’ perceptions; that our programming since the summer of 2020 may also have influenced perceptions; and that other things respondents consulted during the pandemic may have blurred into their memory of the resources we targeted with the survey (two responses directly mentioned this possibility). And, of course, given our small sample size, it could be that those who were motivated to complete a survey about EDI, decolonization, and Indigenization in teaching and learning were more likely to notice these efforts than the general campus population.

A related point of influence could also be which resources participants accessed or attended: if they engaged with resources that highlighted EDI, decolonization, and/or Indigenization more strongly, they could have different memories than if they engaged with resources in which our approach was less visible. In the Transforming Teaching Toolkit, the “Assessment Strategies” start here guide was most accessed (n = 9), with the “Inclusive Community” and “Course Organization” guides a close second (both n = 6). In the Teaching Assistant Toolkit, the most popular sections were those related to instructional strategies as a TA (“Leading Tutorials, Seminars, and Guest Lectures” and “Teaching as a Laboratory TA”; both n = 3), with “Creating Inclusive Classrooms” and “Assignments and Exams” coming second (both n = 2). Again, there needs to be the caveat that respondents may not remember their participation accurately. Indeed, when this information is compared with generalized data on web page hits, results are slightly different: the most popular Transforming Teaching Toolkit start here guide is “Student Engagement” (1,030 hits), with “Inclusive Community” and “Assessment” second and third (899 and 730 hits, respectively). Our own data on webinar attendance over the summer of 2020 suggests that participation rates were, perhaps, more influenced by timing than topic: webinars offered in May and June had considerably higher attendance (around 80–100 participants) than those in July and August (around 30 or fewer participants). Here, then, it seems our decision to put webinars on inclusive pedagogies early in the schedule may have resulted in higher uptake than if we had scheduled them as “extras” later in the summer, suggesting that timing is an important component of an infusion rather than isolation approach.

Turning to participants’ teaching practices, some areas of inclusive, decolonial, and/or Indigenous pedagogies emerged as more important than others. Strategies such as emphasizing diverse perspectives and viewpoints in curriculum and the syllabus, diversifying instructional methods, and fostering a sense of community and belonging among all students were rated as slightly more important, whereas using accessible technologies (close captioning, materials available in multiple formats, etc.) was rated as slightly less important. Yet when asked about their own practice over the previous year, more instructors indicated that they had “often” used accessible technologies and UDL principles, whereas diverse perspectives, instructional strategies, and a sense of community tended to be rated lower. Many participants cited a lack of time as a barrier, with one person who self-identified as an educational developer sharing, “I am just trying to hang on right now … and this next year looks like it will once again be about managing to make it through.” Perhaps technological and accommodations-related pedagogies are easier for instructors and support professionals to adopt in general and in times of crisis.

Finally, we note interesting trends regarding the impressions and practices of respondents on the topic of integrating Indigenous pedagogies. As indicated previously, we see EDI, decolonization, and Indigenization as separate but related, and this understanding seems borne out in the data. When participants were asked about the importance of various aspects of EDI, decolonization, and Indigenization, they rated Indigenous pedagogies and ways of knowing as almost exclusively moderately or very important (although one participant ranked it as “not important,” and three said “I’m not sure”). Yet when asked which aspects of EDI, decolonization, and Indigenization had been incorporated into practice over the previous year, Indigenous pedagogies and ways of knowing ranked considerably lower than other elements, with the majority of respondents (15 of 18) stating “never,” “rarely,” or “sometimes.” This finding contrasted with other listed aspects, such as UDL, use of accessible technologies, and fostering a sense of community and belonging among all students, which were rated by the majority as being incorporated into practice “sometimes” or “often.”

In another open-ended question in which participants were asked to describe their beliefs on these topics (Q15), several participants expressed a similar split. P5 said all aspects were “central, though I spend more time thinking about EDI than decolonization,” and P11 shared various strategies they used relating to UDL before remarking, “I want to do more, but have limited knowledge of indigenous [sic] worldviews and legal systems.” Furthermore, when we look at our webinar attendance statistics, the only toolkit webinar facilitated exclusively by our Indigenous pedagogies educational developer received one of the lowest attendance scores. This data might suggest that the topic was not a priority for people redesigning their courses for remote teaching, but it also might be a result of poor branding (the lead title “Let’s Sit Together” didn’t clearly define the workshop’s focus), presence of other non-toolkit offerings on Indigenous pedagogies with higher attendance, or survey questions that did not provide clear examples of Indigenous pedagogies as with other topics.

Still, we believe these responses point to two key issues in decolonization and Indigenization of higher education. They likely reflect the politics of the conversation in Canada currently, where themes of reconciliation and redress are increasingly common in national and local media and on campuses across the country. Movements such as #IdleNoMore, work by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (2008–2015) and the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (2016–2019), and events such as pipeline protests and findings of human remains at increasing numbers of residential school sites have maintained a focus on the importance of these concerns. Canadian public opinion increasingly favors the need for reconciliation (Bricker, 2021; Environics Institute, 2019; Kirkup, 2021; Reconciliation Canada, 2017), so it is perhaps not surprising that our respondents indicated those topics as an important priority for teaching and learning. Unfortunately, perhaps it is also not surprising that when it comes to action, positive progress is more limited, a finding that seems to reflect realities in Canadian higher education (Gaudry & Lorenz, 2018; Pidgeon, 2016) as well as the difficulty of the work and the need for focused attention and ongoing supportive guidance.

Discussion

It seems obvious to say that the more we emphasized EDI, decolonization, and Indigenization in toolkit websites and webinars, the more noticed it was. Yet our analysis reminds us that getting the message out is not the same as changing teaching practices. We did not ask participants to indicate what specific changes (if any) in their teaching were made in response to our programming and hesitate to draw clear conclusions. We also do not want to over-emphasize the impact of a set of mostly static resources; there are certainly better models of developmentally oriented programs that focus on long-term change in practice (see Ebert-May et al., 2011; Yeo et al., 2019).

Yet we see great potential for educational developers to adopt our approach for other static resources, infusing EDI, decolonization, and Indigenization across their work for meaningful rather than tokenistic impact (an approach recently promoted by Dietz et al., 2022). To this end, we offer a few concrete suggestions:

• As individuals and/or as a center, do the necessary self-work and self-education to better address these topics in your work and personal lives. Start a reading group, attend a workshop with a few colleagues, and explore other options for personal development as appropriate to your context.

• Include discussion of these topics within all resources and workshops as well as in specialty programming. Analyze which programs are most popular and consider infusing those programs first. In resources and workshops focused on other topics, start with a discussion of EDI and/or decolonization and Indigenization.

• Consider the visual design of any resource. Introduce concepts early in the material and build on them throughout the content. If you have a series of resources that include portions related to EDI and/or decolonization and Indigenization, put those portions first in your series.

• Consider developmental trajectories for these topics: What are easier first steps? Which strategies will take more time? What other supports might instructors need?

• Collaborate with colleagues within your center and across your institution whose perspectives differ from your own, working to help one another rather than working in isolation.

• Promote the importance of EDI, decolonization, and Indigenization as critical work for all educational developers rather than the responsibility of a select few.

Those of us who have remained at the center where we did this work together also note that this experience motivated us to work more cohesively to create frameworks that emphasize the interrelatedness of all these important commitments. We recognized that to promote approaches to teaching and learning founded on collaborative and action-oriented solutions to changing our praxis as educators, we needed to collaborate to create frameworks that leveraged each of these areas of importance, and our individual areas of expertise, to provide more practical resources and exemplars for how to go about infusing these theories and concepts into practice. We initiated weekly conversations and shared educational resource development time to braid together our wisdom. Our collective development of the toolkits taught us that working together continuously to create resources is a practice that allows us to keep our institutional, collective, and personal commitments to this work top of mind and at the heart of all we do.

Conclusion

The COVID-19 pandemic could be seen as a barrier to incorporating pedagogies relating to EDI, decolonization, and Indigenization given the unprecedented demands in both work and home life that it wrought, and certainly comments from our respondents bear this out. Our strategy of infusing these topics within timely and targeted resources seemed to help participants overcome at least some of the barriers that the pandemic provoked. Yet it is also clear that there is much left to do, particularly in participants’ focus on easy-to-adopt strategies and their expressed lack of time and resources to adequately engage with more complicated practices. We are also mindful of Ahmed’s (2012) point that “too much research [on diversity initiatives] becomes translated into mission speech, turning stories of diversity and equality into institutional success stories” (p. 10), and we certainly do not see our research as supporting any claims that our institution or our teaching and learning center was successful in keeping EDI, decolonization, and Indigenization front of mind in the rapid pivot to remote teaching prompted by the COVID-19 pandemic. Indeed, there have been many frustrations and failures at all levels of our institution and in our own individual experiences.

We do, however, see our research as pointing toward an important lesson: With determined effort, these concerns can become more important for more instructors, and the impacts can be felt by more students. We find ourselves encouraged by the possibility that emerged in this research for individual agency in fostering systemic and institutional change. Our respondents made choices about which approach to take and what to emphasize in their teaching. As educational support professionals, we also made choices, and those choices may have influenced our campus community. Writing specifically about gender impacts during the pandemic, King et al. (2020) present a disheartening view of gender equity during the initial months of the pandemic but also offer some hope, stating, “the gender norms and beliefs that help shape our gender systems are not immutable. They can be transformed” (p. 81). Inspired by the work of Manathunga (2006, 2011), we believe that centers for teaching and learning can be key places to expose and challenge power dynamics in institutions and ourselves and can serve as sources of transformation for equity, diversity, inclusion, decolonization, and Indigenization of teaching and learning—if those of us who work in these centers choose to act.

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to acknowledge colleagues at Queen’s University’s Centre for Teaching and Learning who contributed to the development of the resources and programming discussed in this article, particularly Dr. Sue Fostaty Young, director of the CTL at the time of the toolkits’ development and implementation.