Abstract

In the field of higher education at the present moment, belonging is often put in the spotlight to signal an institution’s commitment to diversity and inclusion efforts. However, challenges that educators face and experiences of students not belonging (or choosing not to belong) are stories that are rarely given attention in discourses of inclusion and belonging in higher education. Through in-person ¹ workshops ², Belonging and Beyond: Using Future Histories to Reimagine Teaching and Learning offers educators and students an opportunity to use “future imagining” methodologies to generate radically inclusive and exciting teaching and learning spaces in higher education. These workshops will bring together people from across the higher education landscape, including current and former students, educators from diverse institutions, and people from other fields who can guide our collective future imaginings.

During the first workshop, educators will share the strategies and challenges they face in meeting their pedagogical aspirations and students will reflect on their experiences of thriving and un/belonging. Participants will engage in a collective visioning process that results in “future-history storytelling” (i.e., stories that take place in imagined futures of higher education). The future-histories produced during the workshop will take the forms of written narratives and short films. Our aim is to develop teaching and learning scenarios that are closely aligned with our collective ideals (e.g., they may include hybrid cultures, multilingualism, anti-racism, belonging, mattering, and other opportunities to center marginalized epistemologies and forms). In the later workshop, we propose to use these future-histories to assist us in “backward design,” where we use our stories from fictionalized futures to inform our current teaching, learning, thinking, and research practice to be more closely aligned with the kind of meaningful, accessible, and nourishing learning-teaching experiences that we collectively imagined.

Throughout the program—before, during, in-between, and after the two gatherings—we’ll use a participatory online learning platform as a space where we connect with each other, document our worlds, share stories, discuss emerging pedagogical practices, exchange feedback, and build digital portfolios that articulate our imagined future-histories through mixed media including audio, photo, and video. Both gatherings will be filmed by an independent filmmaker (who is also a Vassar alum). By the end of the program, we will have created a rich, dynamic multimedia archive that makes public our collective re-imaginings and invites diverse audiences to join us in this ongoing journey.