Theme

To help address the "Engaging Social Justice" theme of the 2017-18 Innovative Teaching Showcase at Western Washington University, we interviewed Dr. Kristen French and Dr. Verónica Vélez, both of Western Washington University.

Q: Why did you decide to become an educator?

Veró: One of the nice things about working with my wonderful colleague and sister, Kristen French, is that we talk about these ideas a lot as part of motivating our students, many who are aspiring educators. I use the term educator pretty broadly. Some of them want to go into K-12 public schools, some of them want to be grassroots organizers, and some of them want to do youth work with different kinds of organizations. It’s a conversation we have often--what was our journey, what keeps us going, what keeps us in the classroom--especially when we’re talking about topics that can be deemed controversial, or can be deemed just difficult to talk about. In talking about social justice, you’re also having to talk about the inverse which is social injustice, and how we name those injustices and talk about those things.

But for me, I think the journey really started when I was a community organizer for fifteen years, and then returned to graduate school. I think the inspiration comes when you see a teacher who is willing to disrupt whatever possible to love their students in the classroom, to make possible things and topics that we felt couldn’t be talked about, couldn't be accessed, in traditional schools. "I think the inspiration comes when you see a teacher who is willing to disrupt whatever possible to love their students in the classroom, to make possible things and topics that we felt couldn’t be talked about, couldn't be accessed, in traditional schools."

I had a beautiful mentor, Dr. Danny Sorlos, who’s at UCLA, who, every time he walked into the classroom, you knew that space was going to be not only filled with such powerful content, but such joy, and such hunger to delve into topics. For me, he modeled what a critical educator is, and was the first person to really inspire me to think about myself as an educator. When I saw someone who was also a person of color, talking about questions of race and ethnicity, which again are topics we would talk about at home, how to navigate if you will erase this world, and to see him build that and to care for us and to love us, I thought this is something I could totally see myself doing. When we talk about me becoming an educator, I still am definitely in the process of becoming; it’s an intergenerational project for sure. And I know Kristen and I talked about this, too, in terms of our beautiful mentors who we both love.

Kristen: I think that’s one of the things we share, that our passion for education has been built out of love, and mentorship. And similar to my beautiful sister, Dr. Velez, I had mentors, and I think that’s the reason I’m even here. And I would even go farther to say: had I not had mentors, I wouldn’t be here, because I was not a traditional student. I was a little rough around the edges, and didn’t do very well in school; it seemed school wasn’t meant for me. So it wasn’t until I was a pregnant teenager, that I was like, “Now, what am I going to do with my life? I’ve got this person that I’m responsible for and I have to do something differently.” So I enrolled in the local community college, and took a physical anthropology class.

Similar to Veró, here was my teacher, Dale McGinnis. He jumped up on a table and he did this mating call of a gibbon! I was like, “Is he a teacher? Can he do that?” He was such a great dynamic teacher, that everyone was crowding around him after the class. I wanted to say thank you, that that was probably the best experience I’ve ever had in the classroom, and as I was walking by with all these students around, and he said, “Hey, you, what nation are you?” That was the first time in my whole entire life I was acknowledged in a classroom by a professor.

He was extraordinary. He would watch my daughter after I had her so I could go to classes. At the time I didn’t know what he was doing, but he would say, “Hey, I’ve got a doctor’s appointment, I need you to start class for me.” I could not say no to my elder and mentor, and so I would go in and do an introduction to the class and start a film, and I was shaking and sweating and terrified! After that he said, “Oh, you know, someone’s asked me to come do a guest speaking engagement at an elementary school to talk about Native American issues, but I need you go for me.” And so I would go, and I remember thinking, “Oh, I kind of like working with kids.” Then he’d say “You know, we’ve got these international students who are really interested and committed to the course work in anthropology but they are struggling with the English content, and the high academic language, so would you work with some of these students and help them to wrestle with the context and the text?” So, I did. At the end of all of this, he said, “You know, I think you would like education,” and at that point I said, I think you’re right; this is exactly what I want to do. So, he took me, this young person who hated school and hated schooling, and without saying I’m going to inspire you to love education and become a teacher, he did it with his actions.

Another mentor of mine, Dr. Sonia Nieto, talks about the importance in social justice education, that you have high expectations for students, and rigorous demands, but you have to provide them the support in order to be successful. That support is material, it’s emotional, and it’s honoring the strengths they bring to the space. Dale McGinnis did that for me, and he took it one step further, which was the commitment for the long haul. I think we don’t always talk about that, but it’s the long term commitment, just like Danny has provided for Veró, also.

Veró: Yes, Danny still provides that for me, he’s still my teacher, he’s still somebody I can call. I think it’s those commitments. When you make the decision to become an educator, a critical educator, an educator that’s committed to social justice, you make the commitment for life. This is not a gimmicky sort of thing, this is every day.

I love the way our students frame that you check out your ally card, and then you’ve got to check back in, and work at it again. Really thinking about the long haul in this. Danny for me was also healing, because he understood having also been that student. When he became an educator, to ensure that he really saw us and he was really committed to us, he healed us from old academic ways, and made us fall in love with learning in a way that was missing for many, many years. So, we’re really grateful to those who inspire us to do this work.

Kristen: When I was going to be a student here at Western, Dale helped me fill out all the paperwork and the scholarships so I was able to come here. But it didn’t end there. He introduced me to all the faculty in the anthropology department, and he kept coming back throughout the years to make sure I was doing okay, and to make sure I was studying, and not enjoying college too much. Similar to Danny, we feel that way about our students. We’re not just teaching classes, and we’re not just working on scholarship, and our service to the students isn’t considered something that is a requirement of the university--it is a way of being in the world for us to do that work.

Veró: Exactly, thank you. Couldn't have said it better.

Q: What principles guide your classroom and your relationship with students?

Veró: I feel like I’ve learned so much from Dr. French. We co-taught during my first year here at Western. And we decided the university oftentimes can dictate certain parameters through which we have to be faculty and teach. We said, alright, we have those parameters, but we’re just going to do things a little bit our way, as a commitment to the principles we enact. We just happened to have really wonderful staff that put our classes back to back in the same room, and we ended up co-teaching both classes. It wasn’t official, but we can still do some innovative and creative things even within those parameters.

I remember the first time I saw Dr. French teach, and she said oftentimes we have these conversations in classes about class rules, or different kinds of community agreements, but even if they’re done in the best way, they can feel punitive for students, like what are the things you cannot do. I remember Kristen said we’re going to do this a little differently; we’re going to talk about principles of practice, what are our principles in this classroom? The first thing she put up was humor. And I was like, “What? You can laugh in a classroom?” It was just a moment that shifted my thinking about the way we think about the classroom.

But also it reminded me we all have principles. We have enacted it, but to name it in such a way was really powerful, and it was really powerful for the students too when they saw that. And then it was joy, and then happiness, and these are as if not more important than any other sort of classroom norms or rules we put forth.

When I think about social justice education, it really comes down to three things in terms of how we think about the task or outcomes of the work.

Everybody here needs to embrace the notion that they too are educators. What I mean by that is that we have to disrupt this norm that there’s only teacher experts in the room. Our students--and particularly the students we serve in our classroom--have been historically underrepresented and underserved by higher education. They tend to occupy the margins in different ways. They often have been made to feel they have no wisdom to impart in the classroom. I think we have shifted that terrain a lot. They, too, are educators; they, too, are organic intellectuals; they, too, bring a wisdom that without which I don’t think we can even begin or have a conversation on social justice.

We all have to insist on becoming historians. None of this work around injustice happened overnight. There’s a long legacy, a long history that informs it. I always say, “How did we get here?” Insisting on history is an important component of what we do, so we have to become historians. Because we work in the College of Education, there is this notion of becoming translators. Often we delve into this beautiful theorizing around social justice. Then we have a hard time bringing it back home, bringing it back into the communities that we so wanted to serve with this work, that we started thinking about, that they were at the heart of driving us into this field. We have to find ways in which we can engage our communities and our families also as organic intellectuals, building a sort of framework that allows us to translate this work back home.

At least those are the ways I enact it into my own classroom. I’ve learned a lot from Kristen. She has driven me and shaped my thinking about teaching, and has helped me become a better educator overall. So, I’m just so grateful to her.

Kristen: The feeling is mutual. When we were co-teaching together, it wasn’t a traditional co-teaching. We weren’t sitting around together like how are we going to do this, we really came to it organically together. It was a shared experience of love and support. For me, ultimately, we used the principles of practice to provide some frameworks for students in that particular course. It was a decolonizing education course. Trying to understand that, we provided them with examples of indigenous schooling spaces that had certain principles, principles like humor, a happy way of life, good living, joy, honoring our ancestors and the knowledge they bring, and so I think from that perspective, for me, teaching is all about love. It’s all about love. So co-teaching was all about love. Not love in the touchy-feely hug and all that, but love as a profound social movement. That loving someone truly, loving each other truly, from a Bell Hooks kind of perspective, which is with respect and responsibility and commitment and open and honest communication, care, affection, all those things, then we can get places with each other.

Angela Venezuela talks about it in Subtractive Schooling, the difference between Aesthetic Care and Authentic Care. I think that principle is essential. One of the things I really value about our friendship and the ability to work with each other in this space, is that we have an authentic relationship and an authentic love.
I value the actual education space that is quarter long, and I wonder what can we do together in these ten weeks that will last long after the books are closed and after Canvas [our learning management system] is shut down? What will students take into their lives that is transformative? How do we create relationships and develop critical friendships? I was really inspired last quarter by a group of students who are taking the course that next step. They decided they weren’t done after ten weeks, and so they’re organizing together in a critical friends group. We did well together; we honored those principles.

Q: As educators with doctorates in social justice education, and with longstanding commitments to historically underrepresented and underserved communities in higher education, what message can you share about the importance of creating justice-producing classrooms?

I value the actual education space that is quarter long, and I wonder what can we do together in these ten weeks that will last long after the books are closed and after Canvas [our learning management system] is shut down? What will students take into their lives that is transformative? How do we create relationships and develop critical friendships?

Veró: One of the things that we are faced with right now in higher education--and I want to say that it does come in many ways from a good place--that people are wanting to transform their classrooms and transform their practice. We’ve gotten really good at some of the language, whether it’s diversity, equity, or inclusion. I think that those have become almost very commonplace in the way we think about higher education. One of the things I think about a lot in my work is: What does it mean to live that every day? It’s a shift to thinking about it in our own work. The investment for us in pursuing degrees and also in rooting it in our own lived experiences was a commitment to see this work as completely unfinished. We are by no means done. By no means do we see that this work can be captured in a workshop. It doesn’t mean we can’t have entry points, we can’t have a conversation that is fundamentally transformative that leads us to ask much deeper questions. It requires a much deeper commitment to the work. It’s very much rooted in relationships and building collectives. I remember my mentor would always tell me you’ve got to continuously build your library--the constant reading, the constant study around it, and learning from young people.

One of the things we say a lot in our ESJ classes, is that there are two groups of people that lead movements: youth and women. When we’re able to listen to young people and the questions that they ask, then, we too have to be willing to learn alongside them. My students are always saying, “How can we fix this?” So, I always start my classes by saying, this class is not going to be about Monday morning solutions. We are all quick to try to get there. This is fundamentally about first understanding how we ourselves are situated in the context. Whether we’re aware of it or not, we’ve become complicit in the very things that we’re trying to disrupt. Until we can build that and really understand and build collectives to help us think through these questions, it becomes hard to even begin to think about how we can help others out there. The work is really personal, it’s intimate, but it’s a commitment to do the lifelong work. I start my classes saying, “I may not have all the answers; in fact, I have very few, if any. But I am committed as a critical educator just struggling alongside you, to figuring out what those answers are.

When I think about social justice in the classroom, it’s less about an outcome and more about a process. I’m less concerned if students learn all this content, because if I’m committed to these students, then the classroom goes beyond the ten weeks. It’s a much more porous context. It is about a commitment to a process, a process that refuses certain constraints of education, and that you can only learn in these particular ways. This content must be tested. We have to think innovatively in the classroom if we are going to do this work. For me, that has been something I take home. How do I honor what’s going on right now in the shift in the conversation, while I am also concerned that we only see this as being able to be captured in a workshop, or a one-stop shop, and not really making the deeper commitments to really wrestle with the complexities of this.

Kristen: I would like to add that social justice has become sexy. I remember a time here within this university when the term social justice was frightening. I remember in those days saying, Well, if you look at definitions like Sonia Nieto’s that it’s a philosophy and actions around respect and responsibility and honoring one another, how can that be frightening? So, it’s interesting to see within a decade the shifts, and now social justice has become a term that is being used in strategic plans, and it’s being used in classrooms, and websites, with varying degrees of understanding of what social justice is.

I feel like I’m constantly learning from Veró, and from our students. One of the beauties of working at a university, is that our students are constantly teaching us, which I love. I feel like in that process, too--that becoming a multicultural educator, or a social justice educator, or an educator that’s anti-colonial--that we have to wrestle with our own biases, and our own struggles with the ways we’ve been socialized. We have to learn more and we have to be agents for change.

What that looks like is going to be different for different folks, but I think we have a responsibility to understand the fundamental historical, academic foundations of social justice, and the ways that communities are justice-oriented--because that is the work.

Right now I’m very amazed and impressed and a big fan girl of a woman named Christi Belcourt, who is a Native artist, educator, and author. She did a presentation and said, I’m not doing anymore keynotes ever again. The time is over for that. She does it in a very beautiful and respectful way, but haven't we been to enough conferences? Haven’t we spent our money at these places? Even though they’re wonderful, and she grew up in these places. I was really inspired by that, because I feel like a lot of what is going on right now within our nation around indigenous movements has been very powerful. Our responsibility to water, land, place, and space understandings and education is essential: understanding our human rights and our more-than-human rights. Those things are resonating with me very deeply.

A lot of that is coming from the work that we’re doing around the Since Time Immemorial curriculum and laws. Washington State just passed the law that requires all educators, all teacher educators, at the college/university levels, too, to be trained with this curriculum. But, I think some of the ways that we’ve appropriated social justice takes away the meaning. Often in institutions, we can take away the things that might cause us to be wrestling with one another and grappling and shifting and changing ourselves.

I would love for us all to have some common understandings of what social justice is, and be able to take actions not just personally, and not just collectively within our departments or our colleges, but also structurally--and then outside the structures of our institution. We have a strong belief that this work isn’t an outcome, it’s a process. We’re in process, our colleagues, our students, our administrators, our universities, our communities are all in process too.

There’s going to be points where we’re going to come together on certain issues, but our long term goals might not always be the same. But, we can stand and walk with each other if we have that framework of justice-oriented work from that deep, meaningful place. Then, we can do more work with one another if that comes from a place of love--even though these things are going to be hard. Justice work is not easy. It kind of looks easy when we do it, because we have a loving relationship with one another, and we walk this work together in a good way, and we do our best. But it’s hard. There’s tears and pain and heartbreak, and we have to be willing to go on those painful paths together. We may not have an ultimate goal, but the imperative of justice: not just reacting to colonialism or oppression, but keeping those principles and working towards that justice.

Veró: As I’m hearing this, I’m reminded of the other thing we do a lot. When we make this commitment to do justice work in the classroom, it’s a commitment that comes with joy and it comes with heartache. Our work is so rooted in relationships with our students, and with the content and with each other. When I see students come in, I see that so much of why they’re here is because they’re trying to make sense of their own lives. Their pain is our pain, our community struggles are our struggles. The work is always personal. There are some challenges that we have to wrestle with. If you’re the only one in your department or your college who is doing this, it’s ten times harder. What does it mean to build collectives in the work? We need each other to hold each other up in those moments, because there’s some days where teaching is really, really tough. It’s really hard. The pain is so palatable in the classroom around these topics, and for some students in our classrooms, they’re here because they just want to learn, they want to build. For some students the knowledge in our classrooms is about life and death. And we know this probably all too well. What then becomes the task of the critical educator? There are times when we’re just going to put content aside--we have to think about process--because this is the work.

Those are challenging moments when you’re on the quarter system that has very lineated markers and you have to think about this commitment to justice work as educators. It is about being very attuned to what’s happening in your students’ lives, and that is as important to your work and your craft as it is making sure they read all the content of a book. Those are the things that we wrestle with a lot, and I know we share those commitments."

I think we also have to be honest about the cost of justice work. I don’t think we could imagine doing anything else, and at the same time it comes with the cost of carrying that pain, too. Through that, it comes with also finding the space to be able to heal and imagine a possible future where that pain no longer exists. I think that’s what collectively what we’re working toward: what we’ve learned through our mentors, our doctoral studies, through the commitments, and through our everyday practice. The message here is that we can’t see this work as simply a work that can be captured by attending a one-hour talk. It’s: What are those commitments? It’s not being dismissive of those people who are really attempting to shift the terrain there, but it’s also commitment for the long haul.

I learn every single day from the classroom and from our students how to do this work.

Kristen: Dr. Vélez and I have been talking with colleagues about what it looks like to do the work. Could it be off-site, being around a kitchen making jam? This is a metaphor of working the soil, of cultivating and harvesting, and then sharing those gifts with one another. We’re doing that work together, we’re actually making jam, and we’re jamming for justice, you know!

We’ve been talking about mothering from a justice perspective, as well as what are some of those other sites for movement-making such as artistic spaces--cultural spaces. We have a group of students who are beading, weaving, eating, and reading. This is not necessarily a classroom space, but it is a culmination of a way of being, and a way of taking traditional Native art and community, and working towards healing the communities, not just ourselves the beaders. So those are also ways that might not be seen as general knowledge about what justice looks like, but that is justice work too--just as much as it is for us to stand alongside of those who are organizing movements to end pipelines, or to end deportations, and to support our students who come from historically marginalized communities. So those are spaces, too, that we’re occupying. Veró, would you say a little bit more about the mothering?

Veró: It’s one of the things we’ve been trying to think about, especially for women of color in the academy, and women of color who are committed to this work. We’ve talked a lot about how there is this additional kind of work that we do through our mentoring work. In part, we embrace it as other work: the mother, or the “other” part. It’s this other type of work that we do--the commitment to love our students, the commitment to transform our classroom. We see it in this kind of way that challenges the way we think about mothering in the academy as really gendered, which can be a really troubling term to use in terms of how we frame educators. But we’re trying to take the concept, and we’ve been borrowing a lot from the work of Alexis Gumb who talks about revolutionary mothering. It’s love at the front lines and talking about how we use mother work as a technology in the work that we do. It can be healing and transformative, the way we work, and often it’s in non-sanctioned spaces in the universities to make this kind of work possible. It’s the porous nature of our classrooms that extend and spill over into other kinds of spaces that we nurture and grow. We are also very reciprocal to our own lives.

We talk about this also in the context of what does this mean in our own lives as women of color? What does it mean to birth movements? It’s through our work, through our relationships, through the intergenerational, through kinships, through sisterhood, through these kinds of ways that we think about it. We are claiming the term, mothering, as a profound commitment because mothering work for us is the epitome of love. And, if we enact love, how can this be done through what we do on a daily basis, how can this be core to how we transform our classroom, core to how we transform our practice, core to how we transform our scholarship.

This is the idea of how can we produce and reproduce these different kinds of movements, as a result of the kind of work we do.

We’ve been so excited to think about this term of mother work, and other work, and other mothers, and not as a gendered term. We want to disrupt the gender binary here, too. For me, not having my own biological children, what does it mean to do this work? Or, for some of our beautiful queer family that’s a part of this work? One of the organizers that I worked with when I was organizing with mothers was a father, and the mothers would say, if you’ve made these commitments and your principles align with us, then you, too, are a mother. So we are really shifting the terrain of how we can queer the term, of how we can disrupt the term, and also how we can claim the term for the ways in which we want to envision the work we want to do each day. It really hits at the heart of the process components that we talked about. I’m really indebted to some of our foremothers. We talked about Alexis Gumb and Bell Hooks, but there’s also Gloria Anzaldúa, Patricia Hill Collins, and we can go on and on.

Q: As co-teachers in the classroom, what did you learn from each other about what it means to be a critical educator, and what lessons have your students taught you?

Veró: One of the things, among many... I’m going to try not to get emotional here, but every time I think about Kristen… but one of the things that to me is so powerful, I think Kristin is to me the embodiment of love in the classroom. She is the embodiment of what’s possible, of us being able to think about what the classroom can truly be as a place of joy and healing. She walks it every day, even though our own lives are really complex and we carry a lot of pain because we are not separate from this study that we’re talking about, this is our lives. Kristen made me believe that I too could be an educator in this way.

I have seen Kristen, through her pedagogy, literally save so many lives on this campus. I think for me, I’ve learned that I’m hella never alone, that we get to do this together, but that we can do teaching for social justice on our own terms. We can do it in a way that honors who we are, that honors our communities, and that really can be a fun and joyful process.

I’ve learned how important it is to break bread in the classroom; we tend to bring food. Beyond the fact that I think it’s just how we’ve learned, in our homes, from our own mothers, around the kitchen table which was a site of incredible learning and transformation. I don’t think sometimes Western understands that some of our students come into our classrooms hungry. We work with homeless students, we work with students whose economic realities oftentimes don’t fit what we think a college student is going through. So bringing food into the classroom is almost necessary for us to get through the class, through that day. Breaking the bread is such a loving way to interact with our classes.

The classroom isn’t just what we remember in our heads, but it’s a full embodied experience. I know this is something we draw from Bell Hooks, recognizing the body-mind spirit of education. I think that it’s not just that we’re sitting passively and absorbing content, but creating a dynamic classroom that involves our whole bodies as a part of that process, getting creative, engaging with each other, and realizing that the body too remembered the lesson. The body, too, is a site in which the pedagogy is enacted. Kristen, you taught me in a very concrete way.

My work is in Critical Race Theory, so that’s my expertise and my content area is Race and Ethnic Studies and Education. But really to think about the ways in which indigenous futurities, or the concept of decolonizing education, has to be a part of any conversation where we think about the land. We have to be articulating the land--that it’s not just about this abstract concept, but that it’s literally the land under our feet. How do we understand and articulate these terms in the project of justice? I could go on and on, but these are some of the things. I get emotional, in some part, because it’s such a joy and a beauty to walk alongside you, Kristen, and to learn these things, and so I’ve just been in awe of your teaching and who you are and how you walk this work.

Kristen: I know what this university was like before Dr. Vélez. And, I know what it looks like now since she’s been here. We talk in our classes about having a social imagination, and dreaming, and that dreaming is a pedagogy as well and a theory. I feel like we must have been doing something right when we dreamed up or created the conditions for her to come here. And when she came here, it transformed our institution, it transformed lives. Veró, you’ve transformed mine and our students’ lives.

I am so grateful when we talk, and I often get an opportunity to sit in on Dr. Vélez’s classes, and what happens simultaneously is that Dr. Vélez has brought graduate-level work, to undergraduate students. And they eat it up. And again, you can’t eat up that high-level, you can’t develop that critical consciousness of critical race theory without having some really good foundations set for that. I’ll be in class with her, and she’s talking Derek Bell and possessive investments of whiteness, and in between the students are going ooh, ugh, this is deep, and they start laughing! She has an incredible way of engaging students where they are and helping them to bring the knowledge they have to the classroom and honoring it. She is able to take on this high-level, hard-core, critical race theory content, and do it with humor, and that has been extraordinary to see her as an educator.

One of the things I value most about our time together is humility. I think that we share a belief system that getting awards at the university level--we appreciate the acknowledgement that our work is seen and appreciated--but it can also be highly political. To me, everyday appreciation of students in those spaces is what’s most important. I see every single day Dr. Vélez being rewarded or awarded by students by the ways in which they engage. They continue to transform their own lives, and she creates the conditions of transformation and empowerment in the lives of the students so that they go on to work with or in their communities organizing.

That happens because of the conditions created by Dr. Vélez, and the ESJ team. What I’ve seen happen since Dr. Velez came to this campus has been truly transformative and revolutionary, but in a way that hasn’t incited violence. Students go to Veró’s office and there’s always food, and there’s always a warm welcome, and that face is always filled with love. To be honored as your sister has been one of the greatest gifts.

Veró: I was laughing, too, because as part of this work we need to think about ways in which co-teaching can happen and be nurtured in a beautiful way. These moments happen organically, where Kristin’s sitting in the back, and we’re doing these classrooms, and I’ll be like “and sister, do you remember when this happened?” and I pull her into it, and we both start laughing. Students get to see that when we talk about love, they see it between us, and they get to see that this is possible and that we can build a better world--as cliché as that sounds--vis-à-vis the relationships that we nurture and care for. For many of our students who have never had a Chicana and a Native woman in a classroom, and for us to both be together, and for us to have these moments to interact organically, is special to us. I know it shifts the way they imagine what could be possible in the work of justice. So, I laugh because we just play off each other; we have these moments.

I think to create more opportunities for that to happen at the university would be great. We should dismiss the notion that justice work is an individualized project. Justice work is always, and should be always, a collective project. That has been such a joy. I think the humility part is so key to this. Humility isn’t about cowardice. It’s about recognizing that we don’t know everything and that we have something to learn from each other. I think that strikes at the heart of who we are as justice educators, and the heart of how we build, and the heart of how we love, and the heart of how we care for each other. Because we don’t know everything and that’s also important to acknowledge. It’s been fun to share the classroom with this beautiful person, to learn so much every single day.

Kristen: So, if the university is interested in what it means to not just recruit amazing folks to come to Western, but what does it take to retain them? Veró, you have retained me.

Veró: Same. Absolutely same. And, our students are beautiful. Our students keep us on our toes. One of the things that we’ve always said a lot is that we feel like we work with some of the most beautiful students ever. I think Western has an incredible student community here, a rich community that is driving questions. We should be learning from them, we should be taking the cue around what our curriculum should be, based on the questions young people are asking.

We have this combination of both a fierceness around our student group and also this humility, too. Our students blow me away with some of the questions and remind me that I always have to be a lifelong learner. And they’re funny and creative! As someone who comes from a very LA context, a Chicano LA context, to come to Western to be on this side of the border, the students right away made me feel at home. I think there’s a lot of potential there in our classrooms. We’ve said, too, that Western continues to underestimate our students and their potential, not just as the target audience of our teaching, but as co-educators in the process. If we can shift that terrain when it comes to that, I think that Western would be unstoppable when it comes to living its mission of social justice.

Kristen: Also, what does the work look like for faculty and staff in our university? It means we don’t get to assume we know what it means to be undocumented, or to be at those intersections of multiple identities. We don’t get to just read about it and think we know. We need to listen. If I could ask something of folks who are invested in social justice, it would be to cultivate their ability to listen deeply and to hear. For instance, our students on this campus have told us many stories and have shared over and over again what their needs are. We really don’t need to do more than just listen to what they want, and if we just acted upon the beautiful ways they’ve organized and either shared their demands or their urgent needs, then I think we’d be in such a better place in terms of justice-oriented work.

The Innovative Teaching Showcase theme could only be so well-represented because of the work, dedication, and love for humanity that Drs. French and Vélez so generously shared during this interview. The Center for Instructional Innovation is incredibly thankful for their time and energy, as well as for the work they do for our amazing students at Western Washington University.