Anti-oppressive pedagogies in online learning: a critical review

Supporting anti‐oppressive education using Zoom chat during lecture

“…Despite targeted anti‐oppressive curricular efforts focused on faculty development, lapses in language during live teaching sessions are still common. We found Zoom chat to be a useful technologic feature for promoting faculty and student critical awareness 1 . This approach would clearly not be appropriate for overtly racist or prejudiced language and should be accompanied by comprehensive efforts to rid curricula of microaggressions.…”

“…Anti‐oppressive education approaches are critical to promote social justice 1 and to equip future healthcare providers to provide patient‐first, equitable care. Medical education leaders at our institution recognise frequent instances of oppressive language in curricular materials, including the inappropriate implication of race as a cause of disease and association of gender with biologic functions, and have called for their removal.…”

“…Technology can be harnessed to support anti‐oppressive education in remote learning environments 1 . We leveraged Zoom chat during lecture to correct oppressive lapses in real‐time.…”

How should we respond to the life-altering crises that education is facing?

“…Instead, it is a call for more critical and speculative writing and practice. Such critical efforts are gaining broader visibility and interest and can be found in recent work in both this journal (e.g., Valcarlos et al, 2020) and elsewhere (e.g., Lambert, 2018). To imagine possible educational futures, some researchers are turning to speculative methods as "research approaches that explore and create possible futures under conditions of complexity and uncertainty" (Ross, 2018, p. 197 (Ross, 2017, p. 220).…”

Radical Flexibility and Relationality as Responses to Education in Times of Crisis

“…In practice, what radically flexible education may look like is better support for all academic workers-many of whom are far more unfavorably resourced and precariously positioned than others, irrespective of location-which includes everything from reasonable and sustainable working hours, support in technical skills and pedagogy development, support for parental leave, and adequate care during times of illness and disability, for example. More broadly still, it means actively dismantling the institutional forces that contribute to illness and disability, like racism, sexism, and transphobia, and given the lack of supports for anti-oppressive pedagogies and practices (e.g., Valcarlos et al 2020), expanding supports for them, specifically in the context of postdigital efforts. In the case of disability, for example, this means refiguring the ways by which 'excellence' is anchored in individualistic notions of self-reliance and independence, given that too often disabled scholars are expected to perform such a circumscribed form of excellence in spite of their disabilities (Merchant et al 2019).…”