Outside of the box: Inspiring Women Among Us (IWAU) as public pedagogy on gender and inclusion via learning in community

AbstractDecember 6th marks the Montreal Massacre, and Canada’s National Day of Remembrance and Action on Violence Against Women. Universities often host actions around this date. In 2015, we sought to expand discussions on gender and equity by launching Inspiring Women Among Us or IWAU (www.iwau.ca). Our annual series of events includes talks, workshops, films, arts activities, movement, mentoring opportunities, and activism/actions. We build community through engaging with issues across the gender spectrum. Educational exchanges are key to IWAU but we do not label them as such. We work to showcase and support feminist, queer, and Indigenous individuals and organisations. Our events are low barrier, and we purposefully emphasise an informal atmosphere. We have responsively moved queerness, trans awareness, intersectionality, and learning from Indigenous leaders to our core. In this paper, we present research about participant experiences (2017) as collected via a self-administered survey (n=140). In discussing response patterns, key themes, and our interpretations, we consider IWAU as site of formal and informal educational exchanges. In design and practice, we stress inclusive opportunities outside of the classroom. According to participants, education and mentoring is occurring, formally and informally, as hoped. We share quotes about participant experiences of IWAU to illustrate how they experience exchanges and learning. Cognisant of work by Porter (2019) and others, we acknowledge the need for mutually-beneficial university-community relations. We discuss IWAU’s unique position/role as a bridge between university, community, scholarship and action. In contextualising results and interpretations, we foreground the persistent need for gender-related spaces, opportunities, and exchanges beyond formal learning scenarios, in a ‘knowledge democracy’. Adding to over 50 years of work (for recent examples, see Ahmed, Berdahl et al., Cheeks, Corbett, Moeke-Pickering et al.), we offer our case study as including elements that support adult education ‘outside of the box,’ for feminist futures.Keywords: Feminismeducationpublic pedagogymentoringcommunity-university collaborationsintersectionality AcknowledgementThe authors thank all IWAU participants since 2015, and particularly those who contributed to this 2017 research. We couldn’t keep enjoying and refining IWAU without our Student Planning Assistants and volunteers, our organizing committee and all of our champions, donors, and participants. This includes UNBC Chancellor and Lheidli T’enneh Elder Darlene McIntosh, a key supporter from the start. We thank funders and partners over the years, including the University of Northern British Columbia, and the City of Prince George. We also thank Two Rivers Gallery, the Prince George Public Library and the Geoffrey R. Weller Library at UNBC, the College of New Caledonia, the Northern Women’s Centre, Gender Outlines, the Jim Pattison Broadcasting Group, the Makerie, the House of Ancestors, the Omineca Centre for the Arts, DEGREES Coffee, Copy Services at UNBC, and many more. We thank the UNBC Office of Research and Innovation, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for funding this work and contributing funding to IWAU events. We thank our family members, friends, and colleagues for supporting our service, reporting, and research efforts linked to IWAU.Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1 In addition to citing written academic sources, we are including these short videos as they fit with our attempts to incorporate various media into our practice, and to connect folks with accessible information.2 Participant quotes are presented using unique identifiers that include the event their survey was collected at, and a number.3 The Mentoring Lunch was created by two UNBC professors, Drs. Blanca Schorcht (then Dean, College of Arts, Humanities, and Health Sciences and Heather Smith (then Director, Centre for Teaching and Learning) who explicitly wanted to offer an event where mentoring, carried out by both peer and self, would occur in a safe atmosphere. Offered since 2015, this event continues to be one of IWAU’s most popular activities. For more on IWAU events, please see www.iwau.ca.4 This reference was suggested to us as we discussed this paper in progress and the challenges within it to an IWAU organizer. She knew exactly what we were talking about, and suggested this excellent and appropriate article. Thank you, Dr. Smith!Additional informationFundingThis work was supported by 2 UNBC Undergraduate Research Experience Awards (URE; 10.13039/1000008785); the City of Prince George; and funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) (10.13039/501100000155).