91福利

Speaking Up for Change: TED Talk Pedagogy for Teaching Health Advocacy in Nursing

This session presents an innovative teaching approach that uses TED Talk鈥搒tyle pedagogy to strengthen nursing students鈥� advocacy, communication, and critical reflection skills. Based on our published work in a maternal-child nursing course, the session highlights how narrative-driven, advocacy-oriented presentations can deepen learning and support students鈥� development as socially accountable nurses.

In this approach, students prepare and deliver short TED Talk鈥搃nspired presentations that combine evidence-based maternal-child health content with personal, community, or clinical narratives. Through storytelling, students are encouraged to 鈥渟peak up for change鈥� by drawing attention to inequities, amplifying marginalized voices, and identifying advocacy-oriented actions. The session will outline key teaching strategies, including assignment scaffolding, use of exemplars, peer feedback, reflective activities, and creating a psychologically safe environment for presentation and discussion.

The approach is informed by narrative pedagogy, as well as critical and feminist pedagogies. Narrative pedagogy promotes reflection, meaning-making, and self-awareness, while critical and feminist perspectives support students in examining inequity, power, and exclusion in healthcare. Together, these approaches create space for students to connect course concepts with lived realities and social justice concerns.

Student feedback suggested that the assignment was both transformative and empowering. Students reported increased confidence in public speaking, stronger connections between theoretical content and real-world inequities, and deeper understanding of the social determinants shaping maternal-child health. Many drew on personal or family experiences to address issues such as racism, stigma, cultural safety, and barriers to care, which enriched classroom dialogue and fostered meaningful engagement.

Aligned with the conference theme, this session offers a creative, student-centered strategy for teaching health advocacy in nursing. Participants will gain practical ideas for incorporating storytelling, reflection, and advocacy into their own teaching across diverse educational contexts.

Presenters

Embedding Indigenous Content into Psychology Courses: Designing and Distributing Micro-Modules

It is widely acknowledged that Psychology has caused great harm to Indigenous peoples in Canada (Canadian Psychological Association [CPA], 2018). In response to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada鈥檚 Report (TRC, 2015), the CPA published a report in 2018. The CPA report provides concrete recommendations, such as improving 鈥淚ndigenous cultural literacy鈥� in undergraduate psychology training (CPA, 2018, p. 26). Despite a desire to include Indigenous content in psychology courses, many instructors face resource challenges, including limited time to curate and meaningfully embed such content. To support the inclusion of Indigenous content in psychology and help move the field from acknowledgement to action, the Decolonizing and Indigenizing Psychology Committee (DIPC) at 91福利 created micro-modules to be embedded within undergraduate psychology courses. As a first step, we surveyed psychology faculty members (n=20). Faculty identified courses which might benefit most from the inclusion of Indigenous content, expressed a desire to embed such content, identified challenges (e.g. managing student discussions and locating quality material), and identified types of resources needed to support them in embedding Indigenous content. Second, the DIPC, in consultation with individual faculty members, created approximately 20 micro-modules on topics such as Indigenous epistemologies and methodologies, Indigenous-centered research and methods, and stereotypes. The DIPC prioritised required courses across all four years of the program to maximise exposure for students. The micro-modules will be housed in an open-access repository and include a resources database and a primer. The primer was created by the DIPC, informed by discussions with an Indigenous pedagogy expert. It introduces users to the basics of best practices for embedding Indigenous content in their courses. These micro-modules and corresponding resources help to address resource gaps and support faculty in embedding Indigenous content, and support their learning related to Indigenous ways of knowing and content more generally. In our presentation, we share details and learnings from our process, and examples of final products. Our project was funded by grants from the CELT and Indigenous Education Council.

Presenters

Global Exclusion, Local Solidarity: CRM 360 (鈥淐riminalizing Global Migration鈥�) Initiatives of Resistance with FCJ Refugee Centre, Toronto

This presentation discusses the design, delivery, and outcomes of a multi-step class solidarity assignment entitled 鈥淕lobal Exclusion, Local Solidarity: Initiatives of Resistance with FCJ Refugee Centre, Toronto鈥� from a new 91福利 course, CRM 360: Criminalizing Global Migration, delivered in the Fall 2025 semester. The assignment was developed between the instructor, Faculty of Arts Community-Engaged Learning & Teaching (CELT) unit and the Centre as a core experiential learning component of the course. It brought together students, faculty, community partners, student organizations, and municipal actors to support learning, engagement, and reflection on contemporary migration and refugee issues at a time of increasingly exclusionary migration policies globally and nationally.

The project was centred on a partnership with the FCJ Refugee Centre (FCJRC), a Toronto-based grassroots organization working with refugees and migrants experiencing precarious migration status, an important theme of the course. Through required and optional activities students were introduced to the centre鈥檚 work, current immigration policy debates, and the role of community organizations in responding to the criminalization of migration. Activities included an in-class guest lecture by FCJRC staff, participation in a Walk and Ride for Refuge fundraising campaign, a class solidarity walk from campus to City Hall, engagement with the City of Toronto鈥檚 Newcomer Office, and a winter coat drive.

Student feedback through several means emphasized the value of connecting course material to real-world contexts while also acknowledging structural limits to such in-class learning. Students highlighted the importance of hearing directly from community practitioners, engaging with municipal institutions, and understanding how policy, advocacy, and service provision intersect at the local level. Feedback sought to improve the activity in the future identified areas for improvement, including the timing and coordination of optional activities and the challenges of group-based work in large classes. These insights provide important guidance for refining future iterations of experiential learning in similar course settings.

Presenter

Activating Access: Decolonial praxis within and beyond the halls of academy

This session will examine the epistemic-cum-community lessons learned across Access Activations, a Disability Studies work-integrated-learning course aimed at mobilizing justice-based transformation in the cultural sector by designing disability-led access plans rooted in crip wisdom, disability justice, and critical and decolonial accessibility practices. Working with disabled, Deaf, mad, and neurodivergent people over 12 weeks, students collaborated with course instructors, cultural accessibility leaders, and one other to animate their practice-based knowledge and reimagine not just what access can look like within a space, but how it can mobilize us relationally, epistemically, and ontologically to dream up arts geographies of otherwise. 

This session and its nodal points will concern itself with what it means to bridge the classroom and the community. Grounded in Black radical scholar-advocate Walter Rodney鈥檚 assertions that there can be no separation between spaces of knowledge-making (the 鈥渋n here鈥�) and those of community and world-building (the 鈥渙ut there鈥�), our work contends with what it means to reterritorialize the academy into an ecology of decolonial theory and practice (i.e. praxis). In infiltrating Toronto cultural institutions with learned and lived decolonial disability knowledges, in leaving the halls of academe for the communes of creatives, our cohort became invested in a scholarship that does not merely discursively acknowledge its limitations, but redresses and eclipses them actionally. Students, then, engaged in theory insofar as they engaged in the political work of change-making, centring Black and brown, disabled and mad onto-epistemologies, and making manifest an academia of below. 

We hope to achieve these learning outcomes:

• Examine to what extent (if at all) we can practice our values and live by our political orientations within and/or alongside institutions founded on principles that run counter
• Explore how to apprehend access from the grips of colonial institutions and push forth a decolonial access of relation and radicalization through application-and-implication pedagogy
• Delve into how to enact epistemological justice in a classroom setting through dialogical, global southern/global majority and transnational teachings

Presenters