This blog post is inspired by Dr. Sunny Man Chu Lau’s recent BILD piece and her connections between Cesar Millan’s animal-centric approach to posthumanist and new materialist ways of being and belonging in the classroom. I am particularly drawn to these words,

Discipline is not about punishing, but rather supporting the animal to understand boundaries and structures so that they can feel safe and protected, as they respect, and are respected by, their humans in the spaces they share” (para. 6)

I’ll return to the idea of safety and respect in a moment, but first I want to share a story.

During the pandemic lockdown, my partner, Chris, and I joined the many others in adopting a dog. Meet Lychee:

Lychee is a Korean Jindo-mix rescue dog. We received little background information on Lychee’s history. What we did know was that she was taken in by a local dog rescue center 5 days before her scheduled euthanization.

Having had no experience raising a dog, although we each had had one as children, Chris and I turned to celebrity dog trainer and star Cesar Millan to learn the ins and outs of living with canine companions. We also received some advice from the rescue center: be careful with sudden movements; do not look Lychee in the eyes; don’t approach her, let her approach you; and when outdoors, never, EVER let go of her leash!

We also learned about the 3-3-3 rule when adopting a dog.

On day three, after approaching me, Lychee permitted me to touch her. Not on her head, as this was up out of her sight and thus could cause her distress, but gently on her chest, just under her neck. The subsequent first few weeks were spent intentionally ignoring her, waiting until she was ready to share a space with us. For quite some time, she remained in the center of the living room, which provided her a peripheral view of all parts of the apartment.

In the third week, we began to notice progress. She was happier on her walks, and less afraid of noises and sudden shifts. People noticed and commented that she was showing her personality and was more confident. Then, in the third week, while out for a walk with Lychee one morning, Chris dropped her leash.

Still asleep, I awoke to a frantic and nearly inaudible phone call from Chris gasping between breaths, “She’s gone, she’s gone…I can’t find her!” So shocked and out of breath was he, he could not even articulate his location.

Here’s what happened: When putting on his mask to come back into our apartment after taking Lychee on her morning walk, he accidentally let go of her leash. When the leash hit the ground, the plastic on the handle hit the pavement, making a loud bang, startling Lychee and causing her to bolt across a 6-lane intersection. Running 5 blocks on the sidewalk of the main road past a bus stop and shopping center before turning into a residential street, Chris lost sight of her.

We began our search for Lychee where Chris thought she might have been. For an hour in the dark, walking up and down the streets, we called her name. Then, my phone rang: “Do you have a dog named Lychee?”  Lychee’s name and our phone numbers were listed on her collar.

Lychee had been found by a neighbour who was out for a walk with her dog next to our apartment. After all that, Lychee had managed to navigate her way back home, without physical harm. We couldn’t have been more relieved. This story could easily have had a different ending.

That day shifted something within us. When she returned to our apartment, Lychee wouldn’t leave our side. Wherever we went, there she was. And as unhelpful and unproductive as it was, Chris and I could not shake the worst possible scenarios from our minds, even after Lychee was safely back within our possession.

This experience connects with an idea that I’ve been grappling with as I currently write my dissertation. I often think about what it means to create safety in my classroom. I think of classroom spaces as bringing together diverse and complex relations, histories, identities, and affects, and I’ve come to realize that whether or not we, as teachers, attune to the complex interplay of dynamics, they exist. Pace (2015) articulates that frictions and emotional discomfort and insecurity are continually in play in these teaching and learning relations.

My dissertation project examined EAP students’ experiences engaging in spoken word poetry. Engaging “voice, movement, and gesture for creative self-expression” (Burton & Van Viegen, 2021, p. 75), spoken word poetry is written on a page but performed for an audience. Spoken word poetry is highly personal. It is often, also, political. Nancy (an ESL instructor and friend) and I co-designed a spoken word poetry curriculum that she taught in an EAP language classroom, where we were visitors. In 11 hours dispersed over 7-weeks, we introduced students to the genre of spoken word poetry and then through a series of curricular activities students created and performed their own spoken word poems. But our goal was greater than that. We desired to have students’ sharing serve as an entry point into more critical discussions around injustice and inequity. Nancy and I conversed at great length about how to foster a space where students would feel safe trusting us and other classmates with their stories. How do we build trust with a group of students we’ve just met? How can we ask students to take risks and feel safe doing so?

Nancy was the first to make herself vulnerable. She began by sharing her personal story about being bullied by her boss. Such intimate sharing marked a felt shift in the classroom dynamics between students and instructors. Several students connected to Nancy’s story, sharing their experiences with bullying. Rania, a 20-year old student who self-identified as a Pakistani woman who had been living in Saudi Arabia, stated:

Yeah, I learned that she also went through a bullying experience like me. I didn’t know that things like this also happened in the workplace. So I was really shocked when I first heard that she was bullied by her boss. She’s a nice and sweet person. She didn’t deserve it.

In many ways, Nancy’s sharing was a risk which according to her, challenged her to think about her positioning and how she previously showed up in the classroom:

The experience made me consider my teaching philosophy, to be honest. Because it’s like, am I enacting, in the classroom, the kind of teacher that I want to be, or perceive myself to be? Or am I projecting that but maybe not taking it up? And it raised questions for me, like, even in this situation, this wasn’t my class, right? And so I thought, did that change something in my willingness to be more open? Like I said, I think I’m still processing and thinking.

The risk of sharing personal struggles with her students simultaneously opened up new ways for students to see Nancy as a relatable human, in place of an all-knowing teacher. Humanizing the classroom space in this way, we feel, led to remarkable co-learning experiences and shifts in power between students and teachers, which helps to disrupt the dominant narrative in which knowledge flows from teachers to students. It also revealed a tension between our desire for safety and the risk of bravery. As I analyze my data now, I cannot help but feel this work is more in line with the concept of brave spaces as proposed by Arao and Clemens (2013) who question the “degree to which safety is an appropriate or reasonable expectation for an honest dialogue about social justice” (p. 139). The authors propose a shift to brave spaces as an alternative to safe spaces. Guided by four common rules, brave spaces help better prepare for dialogue on issues of power, privilege, and oppression in socioculturally diverse groups by emphasizing the need for courage in place of the illusion of safety. They state, “We aim to encourage participants to be brave in exploring content that pushes them to the edges of their comfort zone to maximize learning” (p. 143). I hope to explore this idea further in my dissertation.

After reaching a plateau with Lychee’s progress, we hired a dog trainer to help us better understand how to assist her in overcoming her fears. We learned that we needed to push her out of her comfort zone and for her, that is terrifying. Here is an example of her trying stairs:

But, what a brave (and smart!) dog she has become. Here are two examples.

References

Arao, B., & Clemens, K. (2013). From safe spaces to brave spaces. The art of effective facilitation: Reflections from social justice educators, 135-150.

Burton, J., & Van Viegen, S. (2021). Spoken Word Poetry with Multilingual Youth from Refugee Backgrounds. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 65(1), 75-84.   https://doi.org/10.1002/jaal.1178

Pace, J. L. (2015). The charged classroom: Predicaments and possibilities for democratic teaching. Routledge.