We might not instinctively associate drag queens with teacher education, but for Dr. Harper Keenan, the queer imagination has tremendous potential to help us “unscript curriculum” and think about our classrooms in radically different ways. The Robert Quartermain Professor of Gender and Sexuality Research in Education at the University of British Columbia (UBC), Dr. Keenan has initiated an impressive array of community collaborations, including Drag Story Hour and the Trans Freedom School. Join us as Dr. Keenan describes the challenges (and unexpected rewards) of teaching pre-service teachers during pandemic lockdowns; the transformative power of queer, trans, and drag pedagogy; and why it feels more important than ever to celebrate queer creativity and worldmaking. Full episode transcript and references are available on our website.

For Dr. Bryan Dewsbury, equity-minded, inclusive, or humanist teaching means distinguishing teaching students from teaching subject matter. The humanity of students, in other words, is prioritized over course content, and their lived experiences become vital to how the classroom operates. In our conversation, Dr. Dewsbury describes how he confronted the challenges of teaching online during COVID lockdowns, while also highlighting the many dimensions of his approach to humanist teaching. He explains, for example, how restructuring “office hours” as “student hours” can deepen student learning; how the principles of PhD qualifying exams might help us design open-book undergraduate exams; and he offers other possibilities for inviting students to become thoughtful, engaged citizens. Full episode transcript and references are available on our website.

In a 3QTL first, we are delighted to feature two guests on today’s episode: Dr. Patrina Duhaney and Dr. Regine King, the award-winning co-developers and instructors of a University of Calgary course entitled “Afrocentric Perspectives in Social Work.” As members of their Faculty’s Anti-Black Racism Task Force, which was established in 2020 following the murder of George Floyd, Dr. King and Dr. Duhaney were motivated to create a course that would familiarize students with the challenges and barriers experienced by Black people in a Canadian context. Our guests also found themselves in the difficult situation of having to launch and team-teach this course during pandemic lockdowns. Join us as Dr. Duhaney and Dr. King describe the social justice principles at the foundation of their approach to team teaching, their creative and collaborative assignment design, and their strategies for communicating—with each other and with their students—in a new and challenging teaching and learning scenario. Full episode transcript and references are available on our website.