See also Disability Justice Accessibility Access Crip

Ableism consists of both discrimination against disabled people, and the centering of non-disabled people’s needs, interests, and participation in all aspects of life, from physical spaces to social norms. Ableism can include stigmatizing views and beliefs about disabilities and disabled people, barriers to access and inclusion for disabled people, overt forms of exclusion of disabled people, violation of disabled people’s agency and self-determination, invalidating and dismissing disabled people’s experiences and lives, and carrying the burden of self-advocating for their rights and taking on access costs when these are not provided institutionally (Kouri-Towe and Martel-Perry 2022). In educational settings, ableism is widespread in both the design and delivery of teaching and learning that centers on a presumed non-disabled student and teacher, and in treating disability as a problem for institutions to accommodate, rather than as evidence of an exclusionary system (Fritsch 2024).

Abolition and abolitionist politics work to reveal and dismantle the oppressive gendered and racialized dimensions of incarceration and associated institutions in pursuit of justice. Abolitionist scholarship and activism centres decriminalization and the abolition of carceral institutions such as prisons, policing, borders, immigration enforcement, and detention centers. Because patriarchy, sexism, ableism, colonialism, and racism are central to the function of carceral institutions, leading to disproportionate criminalization of Black, Indigenous, racialized, and immigrant communities, abolitionist thinkers argue it is not enough to reform these institutions, but abolish them in favour of community building alternatives focused on transformation at the political and personal levels. Whynacht (2021) highlights how abolition can help us reimagine justice and safety in cases of gender-based and domestic violence, where the violence entrenched in systems such as policing functions to reinforce the very harm it seeks to remedy.

See also Ableism Accessibility Crip Disability Justice

Access, or accessibility, is an approach commonly used in educational institutions to accommodate and support the participation of disabled students (Kouri-Towe and Martel-Perry, 2024). As an approach, access attempts to remedy exclusions and alleviate the harm of ableism within education through both individual accommodations and broader policy and practice changes. However, critics argue that exclusive focus on access can fail to transform exclusionary conditions from the outset. For instance, when responsibility is placed on disabled people who must share “intimate details about ...[their] bodily abilities and needs” to have their access needs met (Fritsch 2024).

Accessibility measures aim to foster the inclusion of disabled people by removing barriers to their full participation (Kouri-Towe & Martel-Perry, 2024). In post-secondary education, institutional accessibility policies overwhelmingly focus on the provision of individual accommodations, which are typically limited to people with formal diagnoses who specifically request these accommodations (Fritsch, 2024; Kouri-Towe & Martel-Perry, 2024). This approach assumes able-bodiedness to be the norm, requires constant self-advocacy from disabled students and faculty, and does not attempt to transform the wider conditions of ableism which lead disabled people to be excluded in the first place. Educators can support accessibility in their classrooms by making access an ongoing process that starts from the assumption that students will have access needs without having to self-advocate and that barriers exist that we can pro-actively address by thinking collectively about accessibility, involving students, professors, and other university staff in building inclusive classrooms (Fritsch 2024).

Taking accountability in pedagogical settings requires recognizing when harm takes place, whether intentional or not, and taking the necessary steps to reflect on what occurred, repair damage, and plan for changes that will prevent future harm. Classrooms can replicate power dynamics and violence that occurs outside of education, especially in cases where difficult or traumatic subject matter is discussed and engaged with, such as “topics that relate to lived experiences of violence, injustice, and oppression” (Kouri-Towe & Martel-Perry, 2024). Further, the history of education’s role in colonial and racial violence, such as through the residential school system and school-to-prison pipeline, can impact who has access to education and how vulnerable one might be to harm in the classroom. Accountability involves both navigating emotions and considering students’ and teachers’ lived experiences, which can look like apologizing, accepting responsibility for actions and behaviours, understanding consequences, committing to reflection, following up with the harmed party, and inviting feedback from them on how to improve going forward (Kouri-Towe & Martel-Perry, 2024).

See also Community Engagement Transformative Justice

Activism refers to the mobilization of individuals and communities seeking liberation or redress for social, economic, political, and cultural injustices. While activism can takes place in various milieus, in the educational context, feminist, decolonial, anti-racist, and queer studies programs have often connected pedagogy to activism and consciousness-raising efforts both within and outside of the classroom (Bart et al. 1999; Fahs and Swank 2021), combining theory with action or practice, sometimes called praxis (Peet and Reed 1999). Some scholars see teaching can be a powerful form of activism in itself, as learning about social movements and struggles in the classroom can empower students to enact change in the world around them (Desai 2024).

Affect refers to the emerging intensities, bodily sensations, and/or environmental perceptions that circulate prior to their articulation and recognition in the language of emotions or feelings (Kouri-Towe 2022). In a pedagogical context, affect describes the aspects of classroom dynamics that may not be intelligible but are experienced or felt, such as an uncomfortable feeling or an electrifying excitement. For teachers and learners, affect can help draw our attention to the importance of “bringing thinking and feeling closer together” (Charania 2024). Pedagogical affects are thus not strategies or positions, but a disposition and capacity to attend to the unsettling experiences that shape learning (Georgis 2024; Kouri-Towe 2024).

Allyship describes a relationship of solidarity shaped by uneven power dynamics, usually through a person or group located in a dominant community or subject position in relation to an individual, group or community subject to oppression, marginalization, or other form of injustice. Allyship relies on the use of privilege to support or intervene in injustice, and can also include relinquishing access to space or power through ceding a platform, redistributing resources, and other actions that aim to benefit others. Allyship has been critiqued as a political subject position that reinforces power imbalances and hierarchies, especially as it risks being used primarily as a form of political identity (Indigenous Action Media 2014). In the pedagogical context, allyship introduces ways of teaching about experiences of oppression and violence that center an understanding of privilege and oppression (Poirier-Saumure 2024), and may be helpful for developing coalitional approaches or solidarity in the classroom (Kouri-Towe 2024). When allyship is applied in an educational setting, it may be used to interrupt and subvert the power dynamics and authority of the teacher (D’Arcangelis et al. 2024).

Care as a pedagogical concept is connected to understanding the ethics of power and consent in education (Batraville 2024). Care is not simply about showing empathy, but addressing the impact of systemic violence and injustice in the hierarchical relationships that are replicated in the classroom. Black, Indigenous, and feminist approaches to care focus on the importance of reciprocity and sharing, such as those found in Anishinaabe principles of “not taking without giving something back” (Cole 2024).

The classroom is a pedagogical space where teaching and learning occur between educators and students. Classrooms are often challenging because they are shaped by tension, friction, and contestation constituted by power dynamics between teachers and students (Kouri-Towe, 2022). Class readings, discussion content, and other material that is taught in classrooms - can often compound experiences of oppression and/or trauma related to race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, class, and other forms of injustice (Yang, Joachim, and Manning, 2024). Likewise, the physical space of the classroom can be a site of exclusion, such as through inaccessible rooms or desks and seating, poor lighting, and exposure to environmental contaminants. The classroom, the pedagogical encounters that happen during class and outside of class time, and the transmission of knowledge and information in education more broadly are informed by social and political contexts that both teachers and students must navigate (Kouri-Towe, 2022; Kouri-Towe & Martel Perry, 2024).

Coalitions are a form of collaboration and cooperation, typically limited in scope and time, between people across differences and positionalities. They are “strategic alliances,” for the purpose of working towards a shared goal without relying on a shared identity or positionality. As such, they may bring together people who might otherwise stand in opposition to one another. Coalitional work can be an effective strategy for achieving specific goals and transforming aspects of systems or institutions. By viewing the classroom as a coalitional space, we can simultaneously account for the ways that teachers and students might be in opposition, while also recognizing the ways they can be allies. A coalitional approach to the classroom fosters collaboration while acknowledging differences and power inequalities to achieve shared goals (Kouri-Towe 2024).

Collaboration in a pedagogical context refers to non-hierarchical approaches to working across roles and social locations, including students, faculty, staff, and community members. Within the classroom, collaboration can center diverse perspectives and experiences in ways that contribute to feelings of agency and empowerment in learning. Because people bring different skills and pre-existing knowledge into their learning environments, collaboration can support peer-based learning, collective meaning-making, problem solving, and creative approaches to learning beyond the banking model of education (Freire 1970). Collaborative pedagogies can also help to dismantle oppressive and hierarchical structures of knowledge by applying feminist, anti-racist, and anti-colonial approaches to teaching, learning, and creating (Chatterjee & Klement, 2024).

See also Activism Community Engagement

Community-engaged and experiential learning opportunities involve working alongside local organizations to facilitate knowledge sharing and social change beyond the classroom (Kouri-Towe, 2024). Learning can be applied and connected to community interests and needs while attending to and remaining critical of existing structural forces that shape community-specific circumstances. Such approaches to learning allow abstract frameworks to take on deeper meanings than classroom and academic contexts typically enable, helping students to translate concepts into real-world applications while fostering transferable skills applicable beyond the classroom (Desai, 2024).

See also Activism Community-Engaged Learning

Community engagement in an educational context involves ongoing collaboration and consultation with community-based organizations and grassroots groups, with an emphasis on building strong foundational relationships and partnerships that benefit both the learner and the communities in which they are embedded (Desai 2024). Community engagement goes beyond just doing work about and for communities, to doing work with communities, which can facilitate social justice and meaningful change while fostering transformative educational encounters (Kouri-Towe 2024).

Complicity and implication describe secondary involvement in harm, such as when an individual or a group contributes to a form of oppression or benefits from legacies of violence, regardless of whether or not they are active participants in wrongdoing (Zembylas, 2020). In pedagogical contexts, complicity and implication point to how educators and students can replicate and uphold power structures and violence within educational environments (Luhmann, 2024), such as by reinforcing racial hierarchies or normalizing inclusion and exclusion in education. Drawing attention to how complicity and implication function in the classroom builds on social justice approaches to education and draws on difficult knowledge about genocide, colonialism, racism, sexism, transphobia, and other forms of oppression (Luhmann, 2024). Although such encounters may result in feelings of guilt and shame, pedagogies of implication require educators and students to acknowledge genealogies of complicity in injustice and “find paths towards responsibility” while overcoming desires for innocence (Luhmann, 2024).

See also Gender-Based Violence (GBV)

Most discussion on consent focus on sexuality and gender-based violence and sex education, where consent is usually understood through the adage “no means no” or, more recently, the affirmative consent model of “yes means yes” (Wright 2022). However, critics of this model of consent argue that it overlooks nuances that are impacted by “the emotionally charged circumstances of sexual interactions and the way body/mind arousal influences decision-making” (Wright 2022). Indeed, consent is presumed to be a binary matter: a sexual encounter is either consensual or non-consensual. However, gendered social norms and ambiguities that can accompany sexual encounters shape the grey areas of consent that are often influenced by trauma responses, such as dissociation, hypersexuality, and acquiescence (Burkett & Hamilton 2012; Wright 2022), as well as agency and coercion (Burkett & Hamilton 2012; Elsayed et al. 2025). Trauma-informed approaches to education around consent thus require serious consideration of these grey areas, rather than a binary approach, in order to address sexual and gender-based violence.

Crip, often used as crip culture, is a radical approach that rejects ableist norms and practices, such as the assimilation of disabled, mad, neuro-divergent, and chronically ill people into non-disabled infrastructures and culture. Crip culture calls for the inverse of assimilation by asking the non-disabled world to transform in ways that desire disability (Fritsch 2024). In the educational context, crip pedagogical practices include “collective access,” such as options for hybrid participation, shared notes, or flexible deadlines (Fritsch 2024). A crip culture of access in the classroom involves both professors and students working together to center disability and accessibility in the structure of the class, rather than asking disabled people to self-advocate and seek out accommodations that are exceptional to classroom norms.

Developed through work with Indigenous communities, the framework of cultural safety aims to ensure appropriate and respectful care is given to individuals following their cultural norms, values, and experiences. It involves “cultural awareness and sensitivity to the social, political, and historic contexts that shape a person’s life and a community’s experience” (Elsayed et al. 2025), and requires self-reflection and cultural humility on the part of service providers, community workers, and others offering support.

Curriculum refers to the “content and sequencing of courses” within different fields of study, as well as how students are evaluated on their engagement with course material (Hobbs & Rice, 2012). In contemporary women’s, gender and sexuality studies programs, curriculum development and design often centers queer, decolonial, anti-racist, intersectional, transnational, reflexive, accessible, and collaborative approaches to knowledge production and learning objectives (Hobbs & Rice, 2012; Kouri-Towe & Martel-Perry, 2024). Curriculum can also provide frameworks for understanding societal norms, values and beliefs regarding gender, race, ethnicity, religion, politics, and culture by examining the histories, communities, and ideologies included or excluded within them (Berheide & Segal, 1985; Wooten, 2017).

Desire and pleasure refer to embodied approaches to teaching and learning, such as excitement, passion, curiosity, and playfulness. Drawing attention to desires and pleasures in the classroom can deepen understanding of learning through embodied subjectivity; however, it can also entail risks, such as sexualization and objectification, and the uncritical projection of the teacher’s or student’s own desires onto the classroom. Indeed, for many students, university classrooms can be sites of collaboration, discovery, and knowledge production as well as violence, obedience, and assimilation (Batraville, 2024; Irving, 2024). Dan Irving’s concept of “ecstatic pedagogies” provides a framework for reintroducing desire and pleasure in university classrooms based on reciprocity between teachers and students and “grounded in passionate love for learning from, and with, each other” (Irving, 2024). Practicing ecstatic pedagogies in the classroom can include being accountable to students’ learning, self-reflection and mutual introspection, and exchanging ideas with understandings of life experiences.

A cross-disciplinary framework of inquiry, digital intimacies draws from critical intimacy studies and queer theory to consider the applied roles of affects, connections, and communities in digital culture and webs of connection formed in digital spaces, such as social media platforms, artificial intelligence interfaces, and robotics (Rambukkana, 2024). Scholarship and teaching on digital intimacies examine how people interact with different media and communities in the digital realm while also examining the intimate facets of technology that generate affects, feelings, emotions, desires, and ways of relating (Rambukkana, 2024).

Disability justice frameworks in education seek to transform how we teach and learn in ways that expand access beyond inclusion of disabled people in the classroom. Rather than providing accommodations only for disabled people when they self-advocate for inclusion, disability justice calls on a collective approach that positions disability at the center of education (Kouri-Towe & Martel-Perry 2024). Professors can introduce disability justice frameworks in the classroom by structuring courses in a way that anticipate the needs of disabled students and by considering how barriers can emerge differently for differently situated people in the classroom. For example Kelly Fritsch argues for a model of the classroom that desires disability, rather than accommodates it. She uses strategies such as offering students participation points for helping turn on and off lights or moving around desks and chairs, and gives flexible deadlines on assignments to align the classroom with a desire for disabled people as a collective orientation for learning (Fritsch 2024).

Pedagogies of discomfort address relations of power within educational settings and relationships by asking what makes teachers and learners uncomfortable? Discomfort often emerges when learning relates to difficult knowledge (Britzman 1998), including learning about topics relating to violence, social justice, or complicity and implication in injustice (Luhmann 2024), such as when hegemonic power relations are challenged (Chatterjee and Klement 2024), including “questioning cherished beliefs and assumptions” (Boler 1999, 176). Pedagogies of discomfort can be generative for learning that transforms our understanding of power and violence by learning through discomfort, rather than turning away from uncomfortable moments in the classroom (Poirier-Saumure 2024).

EDI (Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion) and related terms refer to initiatives aimed at addressing systemic inequities within institutions. Critics of the EDI argue the focus on representation and inclusion rather than deeper transformation of inequitable systems reinforce rather than challenge institutional power and exclusion. Within the educational context, EDI offices and policies may be used to shape hiring practices, faculty and staff retention and promotion, distribute resources and opportunities, fund special reparative initiatives (e.g. funding for historically excluded students), and inform curriculum design, and assessment models (Kouri-Towe and Martel-Perry 2024).

Also known as EDID / EDIDAA / JEDI: Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, Decolonization, Accessibility, Anti-Racism, Social Justice

Questions of embodiment in education invite us to consider “the body [as] an important site for knowledge reception and generation” (Cole 2024). In this sense, embodiment involves paying attention to how our bodies precede or inform our cognitive understandings of the world, while recognizing the embodied diversity of learners and how this impacts potential learning. Such conceptualizations further invite us to recognize embodied knowledge as a critical site for social inquiry and knowledge production, enabling a recognition of difference through lived-experience, such as the embodied realities of queer or trans identities, beyond existing frameworks of power/knowledge (Sinclair-Palm 2024; Trimble 2024). Drawing attention to embodiment can empower both teachers and learners to better understand how educational encounters can be shaped by differences across bodies and lived experiences (Kouri-Towe 2024).

See also Consent Transformative Justice

Gender-Based Violence (GBV) refers to harm inflicted on individuals because of their actual or perceived gender identity, gender expression or sexual orientation (Elsayed et al 2025). This can include (but is not limited to) physical, psychological, sexual, and economic forms of violence. GBV intersects with other forms of oppression such that individuals who are multiply marginalized (e.g. racialized women, trans women) experience higher rates and specific forms of GBV (Elsayed et al. 2025; Davis et al. 2022). Individual experiences of GBV in interpersonal relationships fundamentally stem from systemic inequalities. As such, efforts to combat GBV cannot rely on individual solutions alone. Transformative justice frameworks argue instead that we must collectively work towards the abolition and transformation of oppressive systems in order to end GBV (Davis et al. 2022).

Also known as Gender and Sexuality-Based Violence

Indigenizing refers to pedagogical strategies that center Indigenous knowledges and perspectives. This approach also involves decentering Western and colonial knowledge systems that shape most educational institutions and curriculum across disciplines (Tuck & Yang, 2012). Indigenizing education happens most readily by hiring Indigenous faculty, staff, and recruiting Indigenous students to transform pedagogy and curriculum; such a process also goes beyond challenging colonial curricula, focusing primarily on affirming Indigenous knowledge ways (Pete, Schneider & O’Reilly, 2013). One challenge to Indigenizing the curriculum is when there is an absence or exclusion of Indigenous people in education. In these cases, attempts to Indigenize curriculum by simply adding more Indigenous readings or topics to a course taught by non-Indigenous faculty can potentially reinforce colonial pedagogies that center non-Indigenous students in the classroom Some strategies faculty use of Indigenizing their course materials “do so by incorporating field-specific content that is Indigenous in origin and/or reworking non-Indigenous course content through Indigenous methods and approaches” (Kouri-Towe & Martel-Perry, 2024).

See also Intersectionality

The concept of intersectional harm applies Kimberlé Crenshaw’s framework of intersectionality to analyses of institutional harm and violence by illustrating the structural roots and connections between different forms of inequality. In the context of education, this framework makes visible the role of institutional policies and administrative structures increating barriers and subjecting people to administrative violence. The intersectional approach helps us move away from individualizing understandings of injustice by recognizing how multiple interlocked systems generate harm in different but connected ways (Kouri-Towe and Martel-Perry 2024).

See also Intersectional Harm

Coined by Black feminist legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw, intersectionality (Crenshaw 1991) refers to “an analytic framework that understands systems of oppression as co-constituted rather than discrete” (Kouri-Towe and Martel-Perry 2024). In other words, intersectionality describes how systems of oppression, such as racism, sexism, classism, and ableism, compound each other. As a theoretical framework, intersectionality helps illustrate how responses to injustice across social, political, economic, and pedagogical contexts shape differences across the same systems (e.g. the experiences of gendered racialization) (Simpson 2009; May 2014).

Kink as a pedagogical praxis considers how play and consent are navigated through power hierarchies both within and beyond the classroom (Batraville 2024). Batraville contends that, for many, classrooms are spaces of obedience, discipline, and assimilation. Drawing on insights from kink’s approach to negotiated consent that “foreground collaboration and cultivate agency” (Batraville 2024), kink as something other than sexual practice can center care and agency amidst the legacy of violence that shapes the history of education.

Neoliberalism describes the economic and socio-political ideological system that has emerged since the 1970s, comprising shifts towards free market, globalization, privatization, deregulation, speculative investing, individualism, and flexible/non-permanent labour. At the socio-political level, neoliberalism is shaped by the concept of individualism, which includes cultural and institutional shifts that value meritocracy and competition over cooperation, individual responsibility replacing social or civic responsibility, and the extension of ‘free-market’ logics in all dimensions of human life (e.g. social media influencers or self-branding). In the educational context, neoliberalization includes defunding public education, increasing reliance on non-permanent teaching and administrative labour (e.g. part-time faculty, short-term contract staff), increasing tuition and ancillary fees, centralization of institutional administration and increasing top-down governance (Chisholm 2024; Kouri-Towe 2024). Further, the neoliberal co-optation of justice-based concepts such as anti-racism, equity, diversity, and inclusion, and decolonization in education have compounded the problems of racism, discrimination, and exclusion by making those who are historically excluded responsible for identifying, leading, and changing these continuing forms of injustice (Gagliardi 2024).

Pronouns have come under debate as the expansion of new gender identities and expressions have expanded the language used to describe people beyond the male/female binary in English (i.e. she/her, he/him). Non-gendered pronoun use has a long history in English as well as other languages, including the use of “they/them” or other non-gender specific pronouns to refer to a single person of unknown or unidentified gender. Increasingly, non-binary pronoun use of “they/them” has been normalized in a diversity of contexts, including education. While people often use pronouns to denote their gender identity or expression, it is important to note that these are connected but not causal, meaning one cannot assume someone’s pronouns based on gender identity or expression alone; likewise, some might not associate their gender identity or expression with their pronouns at all (Kouri-Towe & Martel-Perry, 2024). Pronoun use can also be fluid depending on context; some people might not feel comfortable or safe sharing their pronouns in certain contexts and spaces due to the prevalence of gender-based violence or lack of acceptance for gender diversity (Kouri-Towe & Martel-Perry, 2024).

Psychoanalytic approaches to pedagogy consider the conscious and unconscious dynamics shaping educational experiences, including the role of childhood trauma and resistance in learning. Deborah Britzman argues the problem with inclusive approaches to education is not that students resist knowledge or learning, but that existing knowledge makes learning otherwise a difficult task (1998, 220). This approach to pedagogy challenges the way we learn about and against normative ideas that reinforce hegemonic ways of knowing The psychoanalytic approach considers what might be hidden from us in the educational context, including how our own desires, biases, resistances, and attachments impact our relationship to learning and our relationship to the classroom.

Queer theory is a critical framework that analyzes and deconstructs the normalization of conceptions relating to gender and sexuality. Influenced by poststructural analysis, queer theory seeks to analyze how sexual and gender categories are reified through both expression and performance and institutions and regulations. While many scholars have located the origins of queer theory in the work of Michel Foucault, others have argued that queer theory is rooted in longstanding antiracist and anticolonial Black feminist and Indigenous thinking, including pre-colonial and anti-colonial understandings of sex and gender (Charania, 2024). Queer theory in its most inclusive pedagogical form thus contributes to understanding and critiquing how identities are formulated and lived under imperialism, colonialism, capitalism, and cisheteronormativity (Charania, 2024), with a particular emphasis on the lived experiences of marginalized people.

Restorative justice is an approach for responding to harm or violence that prioritizes, whenever feasible, repairing harm and restoring community relationships. It aims to “[break] the cycle of violence” (Desai 2024) by providing pathways to accountability and healing, rather than simply punishing perpetrators with more violence. Restorative justice is often a collective practice which recognizes the impacts of violence on communities at large, not just on individual victims. As such, it invites many different people who have been affected by an act of violence (i.e., victims, perpetrators, close ones, community members) to collaboratively find ways to resolve harm and move forward. (Elsayed et al 2025).

Within education, the designation of learning environments as ‘safe spaces’ is ostensibly intended to promote equity and well-being by shielding students from harm and violence in the classroom. However, the assumption that classrooms can ever be truly safe has been challenged by work on pedagogy and power in education d (Kouri-Towe, 2024). Regardless of the intentions of teachers and students alike, the classroom is influenced by the power dynamics that structure both educational institutions and wider society, meaning that some harm will inevitably occur in the classroom). Yang, Joachim, and Manning (2024) argue that discussions about ‘safe space’ in the classroom are often mobilized to protect the comfort of white students and faculty, rather than the safety and wellbeing of racialized and other marginalized and historically excluded groups. Rather than assuming safety can be guaranteed, classrooms can more effectively be made safer by recognizing the presence of harm and students’ differing levels of exposure to it, and by collectively developing strategies to respond to harm when it does occur (Kouri-Towe & Martel-Perry, 2024).

Transformative justice is a framework that seeks to respond to and prevent violence without causing more violence and harm, by addressing the structural roots of harm. It recognizes that punitive responses to violence such as those used in the criminal justice system create more harm, do not foster the healing of people who have been harmed, and do little to nothing to prevent violence from occurring again in the future (Kaba 2021). A transformative justice approach instead understands interpersonal violence as rooted in wider oppressive systems, and works to change those systems and conditions that have made violence possible in the first place. Educators developing transformative pedagogical practices draw from transformative justice principles by using strategies for addressing conflict, harm, and inequalities in the classroom that move away from punitive models and towards the dismantlement of structures that perpetuate violence (Desai 2024; Kouri-Towe 2024).

In a pedagogical context, trigger warnings are a mode of preparing students to encounter potentially upsetting or troubling material, typically surrounding topics of violence (Dyer, Kouri-Towe and Miller, 2024; Kouri-Towe and Martel-Perry, 2024). The subject of trigger warnings in the classroom has resulted in debates arguing either for or against their use. Those in the former camp acknowledge vulnerabilities and traumas that students bring to their learning environments, while those in the latter deem trigger warnings as infantilizing students, avoiding uncomfortable learning experiences, and potentially attacking free speech by limiting what educators can say in their classrooms . Educators have grappled with nuanced strategies for using trigger warnings or other strategies in their classrooms with the goal of helping their students navigate the challenges and feelings that come about through difficult pedagogical encounters (Kouri-Towe and Martel-Perry, 2024).