{"id":204,"date":"2025-07-28T12:35:51","date_gmt":"2025-07-28T16:35:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pressbooks.library.torontomu.ca\/advancingculturalaccessibilitypractices\/?post_type=chapter&p=204"},"modified":"2025-09-04T14:07:27","modified_gmt":"2025-09-04T18:07:27","slug":"engagement-description","status":"publish","type":"chapter","link":"https:\/\/pressbooks.library.torontomu.ca\/advancingculturalaccessibilitypractices\/chapter\/engagement-description\/","title":{"raw":"Engagement Description","rendered":"Engagement Description"},"content":{"raw":"

Engagement and Participation in this Course<\/h2>\r\nIn his critique of the \u201cbanking\u201d model of education, Paulo Freire (1970) articulates how, in this framing, students are empty vessels who obtain knowledge only through their educator. There\u2019s an unshakeable hierarchy where the educator is the expert and the students are passive recipients of knowledge, with little value assigned to the students as inherent knowledge keepers, or to the potential for teaching and learning to happen student-to-student or student-to-teacher. The framework of the banking model that Freire discusses is really recognizable in colonial university systems, and his discussion of non-hierarchical teaching-learning dynamics is relevant to how we are framing engagement in this course. Thinking again with the banking model, student engagement is constructed as this fairly narrow range of behaviours that become \u201cstudent participation,\u201d which is evaluated by educators as proof of students\u2019 efforts and ability to receive knowledge. For example, students are usually called on to participate in class discussions verbally or through written forum responses. Good participation usually means speaking or writing in a way that is substantial but concise, on topic, legible, formal and polite. It should be \u2018grammatically correct,\u2019 frequent but not too frequent within each class, it should not be highly emotional, and should reference class material explicitly to show that we are keeping up with reading each week.\r\n\r\nWithin these spoken and unspoken parameters we could track naturalizations of white supremacist ideologies of respectability and intelligence, the privileging of often non-disabled and normative ways of communicating, and neoliberal expectations of productivity and time. This traditional idea of participation encourages us to engage in a way that is palatable and productive within academia, nestled within the wider structure and aims of the colonial project (Harney & Moten tie in?). And because it privileges - or in many ways, demands - one way of \u201cparticipating\u201d at the cost of all other ways, it stifles the potential for crip ways of knowing and being to happen in the classroom. Though in some ways we are continuing to rely on or reproduce this system, we want to emphasize crip wisdom and knowledges and explore engagement in this learning as something that is expansive, varied, and evolving.\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\nFoundationally, the purpose of participation should be to serve our individual and shared learning process, to deepen our learning and develop meaningful praxis and relationality. Participation is not graded or measured. Participation in class can be a lot of different things. Here are some of the frameworks we think might be useful to start from:\r\n
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Alternative Ways of Engaging in this Course<\/p>\r\n\r\n<\/header>\r\n

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