Pedagogies of Care Fall 2024 Lunch & Learn Recap

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For the second semester in a row, Learning Innovation & Lifetime Education (LILE) had the privilege of coordinating a Pedagogies of Care Lunch & Learn series. This series builds on the pedagogies of care summit panel of 2023 and our Spring 2024 Lunch & Learn series. We recognize “pedagogies of care” as a broad umbrella which could encompass many topics, including community-informed research and teaching; culturally affirming pedagogy; and environmental justice. We were excited to continue this series because pedagogies of care are the foundation on which other emerging pedagogies must be built. The principles of pedagogies of care direct how we create equitable learning experiences. 

During Fall 2024, we were fortunate to host three different sessions that covered new topics, demonstrating the innovation and attenuation to care at our own institution:

  • In September, Ryan Emanuel spoke on performing ethical community research, particularly with Indigenous communities.
  • In October, Whitney N. McCoy spoke about using culturally affirming pedagogy to support Black girls.
  • In November, Hannah Conway spoke on environmental justice and its relationship to Southeastern Native sovereignty. 

Stories We Tell: Understanding and Guarding Against Extractive Research in Indigenous Communities.

Associate Professor of Hydrology Ryan Emanuel started this Fall series with a talk on extractive research in Indigenous communities. He began by sharing his positionality and several stories about the Lumbee peoples, modeling the importance of oral traditions in Native American Culture.

“Oral traditions, or our stories, they don’t just transfer knowledge, but they’re also ways of organizing knowledge and organizing the ways we see ourselves in relationship to the world around us,” said Emanuel.

Emanuel then contrasted these traditions with extractive research, which takes and often ignores the knowledge that cultures and communities have about themselves. Extractive research is research conducted on a community that takes information or artifacts without fully engaging with or giving back to that community. Emanuel shared a few examples of extractive research done to the Lumbee community, including two different studies that used blood samples to try and determine racial composition and define “Indian blood.” These studies ignored the Lumbee people’s knowledge of their identity and directly impacted their ability to achieve federal recognition as a tribe, limiting their right to self-determination. This is just one example of the ways that extractive research can have hugely damaging effects on Indigenous communities.

Emanuel then shifted his focus to talking about ways to safeguard against extractive research and work more ethically with Native communities. The biggest takeaway from this information was that relationship building with Native communities is essential to this work. We need to connect with and hear from communities when it comes to proposed research projects, and ideally relationships should be built on the community’s terms before a project is even proposed.

When answering a question about how to support Indigenous peoples in sharing their stories, Emanuel said “we need to continue to embrace and affirm Indigenous knowledge systems as a valid way of engaging with the world. We’re set up around these western academic disciplines, and even our interdisciplinary centers and programs across the university don’t often stray beyond the collective bounds of those disciplines… The more that we can normalize Indigenous knowledge systems within the academy, I think the easier it will become for Indigenous peoples to tell their stories and to conduct research and work on their own terms, using ways that are culturally appropriate.”

Emanuel also shared that one of the best ways to bring these ideas into our teaching practices is by giving community members the opportunity to speak for themselves in classroom spaces. External speakers can be important and impactful for students to hear from, but requests for speakers need to be planned carefully so that we are not overburdening the community and ensuring we compensate peoples’ time. However, hearing from the community can also be accomplished in the form of media and materials created by the community that can be incorporated into our classes.

You can learn more about extractive research and ethical community partnerships with Indigenous communities by viewing the full video below:

Empowering Black Girls’ Identity Through Culturally Affirming Education

Dr. Whitney McCoy, a research scientist at the Center for Child and Family Policy, led the second session on the topic of empowering Black girls’ identity through culturally affirming education.

McCoy began by sharing her background as a former classroom teacher and her journey into culturally responsive education. She emphasized the importance of centering students’ lives and identities in the curriculum, stating, “I really wanted to find ways in which I could center my students’ lives into the work that I was doing.” She highlighted the need for culturally affirming education that is rigorous, relevant, and anti-oppressive.

McCoy explained how Black girls face unique challenges due to their intersecting identities of being both Black and female. She referenced Kimberlé Crenshaw’s term “intersectionality” and illustrated this with examples from pop culture, such as Serena Williams and Meghan Markle. McCoy noted, “Black girls have this double bind identity of being Black and girl,” which necessitates culturally affirming care.

McCoy presented statistics to emphasize the challenges faced by Black girls, including higher suspension rates, increased suicide rates, and underrepresentation in executive leadership and STEM fields. She highlighted the importance of Afrofuturism in empowering Black girls and women, citing examples from media and literature that showcase their power and identity.

In discussing her research approach, McCoy emphasized the use of critical race mixed methods and the importance of centering the voices of Black women and girls. She described the InventHERs program, which provides mentorship and STEM exploration for young girls, and shared how the program aims to uplift and affirm their identities.

McCoy stressed the need for long-term support and investment in community engagement and equitable access to education, stating, “We write community members into grants because we want to make sure that they know that it’s not just about us being [detached] as researchers. We really care about the community being able to do this work.”

McCoy also highlighted the importance of training and mentorship for undergraduates involved in community-engaged work. She shared strategies for preparing undergraduates to be effective partners, including reflective exercises and discussions about community cultural wealth. Finally, McCoy provided advice for starting community engagement projects, encouraging persistence, and building strong partnerships. 

You can learn more about culturally relevant teaching by viewing the full video below

Centering Southeastern Native Sovereignty in Environmental Justice

History Professor Hannah Conway’s final talk of the Fall 2025 series nicely bookended Emanuel and McCoy’s talks. Focusing on the U.S. American South as a location whose history and future are on the forefront of environmental justice, Conway began by answering the questions “Why the South? Why Southeastern Native?”

Sharing her own positionality, history, and commitments, Conway shared her belief that “the region currently known as the U.S. South can and will be transformed into a more just world through the collective action of Southerners committed to building strong, healthy, and equitable communities.”

Noting that the South is understudied in environmental history and the Southeastern environment has and remains underprotected, Conway said, “Our communities have been disproportionately impacted by environmental harms … environmental justice … even though it’s now global, is very well-known, it was born and is a movement of by-and-for working class Black Southern communities.”

Importantly, Conway emphasized that Southern communities are categorized as “frontline” in the climate crisis.

“In sustainability circles, we understand frontline communities as those who are first and worst in the impacts of climate change,” she said. “For a long time, this focused on our coastal cities … but I think the most recent flooding in western Carolina has shown that this is not sequestered to the Coast, right? That our communities, broadly, are disproportionately impacted by the impacts of climate change.”

Using her own dissertation and book project work, Conway then demonstrated how the South is also a place that has led in activism and community organizing specifically tied to environmental justice struggles. Examples include movements from Memphis, TN (Byhalia Pipeline Protest Victory); Atlanta, GA (Stop Cop City); Monroe County, WV (Mountain Valley Pipeline Protests); and Bayou Chene, LA (Indigenous opposition to the Bayou Bridge Pipeline). 

“So, how do I, as a Southeastern Native person, center Southeastern Natives in my work…?” Conway asked, “The central argument of all of my work is we cannot understand the history of environmental degradation in the South, nor can we achieve true environmental justice without reckoning with these long-term impacts of the forced removal of Southeastern Native people from our ancestral lands.”

Conway ended her talk by discussing how she works with her students to move from feeling burned out about the history of the environment to moving toward action.

“One of the reasons that I center Southeastern Native sovereignty and teachings in my work is .. the broader idea from Indigenous people that … We’ve lived through world-ending events many times over, both African-American and Indigenous people in North America,” she said. “So if you want to look to anyone [for] how to move through and be resilient through really unthinkable world-ending crises, it is Indigenous people. We see that articulated in these kinds of ongoing community movements.“ 

You can learn more about environmental justice and Southeastern Native sovereignty by viewing the full video below:

Learn More

If you’re interested in learning more about extractive research and ethical partnerships with Indigenous communities, here are some resources to get started:

If you’re interested in learning more about culturally affirming practices, here are some resources co-authored by Dr. McCoy to get started:

If you’re interested in learning more about Indigenous sovereignty, community organizing, and environmental history and justice here are some resources to get started:

LILE also has a guide on how to Create an Inclusive and Equitable Course, which includes further resources. This guide should not be used as a checklist but as a starting point of how you can rethink your course design. 

If you’d like to talk to a LILE expert about pedagogies of care, you can contact us at lile@duke.edu or visit us during office hours.