Ethics and Power

I’m a graduate teaching assistant (GTA) who works with Bachelor of Education students (elementary teacher candidates). One of the activities in the course was doing a land acknowledgment. The purpose of this activity was partly to introduce ourselves and learn more about our peers and our instructors. This was also a good opportunity for teacher candidates to think about how they would do a land acknowledgement in front of students in an elementary classroom. The prompts for this activity included sharing something that students are comfortable for their classmates to know about them. This might include (but is not limited to) their name, homeland (where their family and ancestors are from), something they learned about the Indigenous nation(s) on whose lands they grew up, and an experience where they learned from the land (could be where they currently live or somewhere they have visited). Lastly, students could attach to their land acknowledgment a piece of artwork, an article, a picture, some audio, or a video file. Students first wrote their land acknowledgement as a discussion post. Then, in each class, we’d ask for a volunteer to present their land acknowledgement to the class.

Having co-developed the activity with the instructor, I decided to demonstrate the activity by writing and presenting my land acknowledgement on the first day of class. I talked about where I was born, my positionality and how I learned from the land. After I did my land acknowledgement, the classroom space immediately felt more personal. Some students came up to talk to me. After class, students posted about their background, positionality, and shared rich and diverse experiences and knowledge. Students in their weekly reflection survey commented on the classroom being a safe community and how they felt supported by their instructor and TA. I realized that part of teaching is the ability to speak truthfully about our positionality and the history of the territories we are on, de-center Eurocentric and “expert” knowledge, allow sharing of knowledge from diverse communities, and connect on a personal level with students, all of which helped to build community and to demonstrate that teaching is an ethical practice. (Graduate Student) 

Academic writing is a vehicle for accessing power in academic spaces. It fosters bonds between scholars, reflects and perpetuates shared values and ways of knowing, and offers opportunities to critique dominant beliefs and concepts. Thus, it is an ethical imperative to teach students how to approach writing equitably and how to critically participate in disciplinary discourses.  

Whether we abandon the stories around us, fully embrace them, merely suffer their effects, or actively imagine other stories in their place, we must recognize their existence and power. When we do so, we have the opportunity to choose our response, rather than to surrender our intellectual and ethical sovereignty to circumstance. I’m honest with my students about my own socio-political position, but I’m also clear about my expectation that the classroom is a location for all to engage in robust, generous, and generative intellectual work” (Daniel Heath Justice).

Inclusive teaching of writing within the contexts of academic disciplines means that students are enabled to participate fully in the discourses of their fields. A first step is to recognize the necessity of teaching writing in explicit ways. The assumption that students will simply know how to write according to disciplinary norms perpetuates a colonial, gate-keeping function of writing at university. When writing practices are implicit rather than explicitly taught, students who are not preloaded to succeed in academia are excluded due to aspects of their socioeconomic status, cultural background, educational training, and social and personal circumstances. Engaging with issues of ethics and power in the teaching of writing necessitates a critique of the presumption that English is the default language of academic discourse. Standardized English, per Missy Watson, “works to exclude groups from public discourse, education, and employment opportunities.” Vershawn Ashanti Young and colleagues critique code switching when students from minority backgrounds are encouraged to “use their dialects of English outside the classroom, but are required to switch to Standard English in formal contexts” (Young et al., 2011, p. xxiii) and propose code meshing as a form of linguistic democracy in which students are supported in blending standard English and their home languages (Young et al., 2018). An ethical approach to the inclusive teaching of writing attends to and facilitates these processes of blending. The inclusive teaching of writing (and any pedagogy for that matter) is fundamentally a reflective project—we arrive at inclusive teaching of ethics and power by reflecting on our social position as instructors, on our use of language, and on the background and experiences we bring to our teaching (such as our privileges and/or belonging to a minoritized community).

Inclusive teaching of writing shows students how writing functions within disciplines and why it matters. This involves teaching the forms and strategies of scholarly writing while encouraging critical examination of the power dynamics behind expected writing conventions. By acknowledging the socio-political dimensions of writing and by supporting practices of code meshing, we create space for diverse voices and challenge gatekeeping norms that exclude marginalized students. As instructors, we need to model self-reflexivity and transparency about how our backgrounds shape our teaching and writing. In curricular design, instructors can incorporate diverse writers who challenge traditional norms and provide activities for students to reflect on their own experiences with writing. Foregrounding questions of ethics and power requires rethinking assessment to focus on students’ application of writing strategies over adherence to standardized English.

Suggested activities

• Model self-reflexivity for your students by reflecting upon your own positionality throughout the term during lectures and class discussions. Consider writing a positionality statement that you can include in your syllabus or other classroom materials.
• Develop classroom activities that encourage and support students in reflecting upon their own positionalities and how they inform their approach to academic writing.
• Encourage students to think critically about how structures of power, both institutional and ideological, shape dominant understandings of what academic writing is, should be, and should not be.
• Seek out and incorporate readings by a diverse range writers, especially those who are marginalized by exclusionary writing norms, to expand students’ understanding of what academic writing can look like and to provide more students with opportunities to see their own identities and perspectives represented in academic discourse.
• Evaluate students’ performance based on their understanding and implementation of the writing strategies you are teaching them and not their command of standard English. 

Use cases

Annotated Bibliography

• Crey, K., and Perrault, A. (2008). What I learned in class today: Aboriginal issues in the classroom. The University of British Columbia.  
• Justice, D.H. (2024). Teaching philosophy. Daniel Heath Justice: Imagine otherwise.
• Kovach, M. (2021). Indigenous methodologies: Characteristics, conversations, and contexts. (2nd edition). University of Toronto Press. 
• Watson, M. (2018). Contesting standardized English: What harms are caused when we insist on a common dialect? Academe, 104(3).  
• Young, V.A., Barret, R., Young-Rivera, Y.S. and Lovejoy, K.B. (2014). Other people’s English: Code-meshing, code switching, and African American literacy. Parlor Press. 
• Young, V.A., Martinez, A.Y. and Naviaux, J.A. (2011). Introduction: Code-meshing as world English. In V.A. Young & A.Y. Martinez (Eds.), Code-meshing as world English (pp. xix-xxxi). National Council of Teachers of English.