CTLT Indigenous Initiatives 2024 Classroom Climate Update

The CTLT Indigenous Initiatives Classroom Climate team is dedicated to creating an inclusive and enriching environment for the UBC Teaching and Learning Community, and we want you to be a part of it! Discover how you can join our vibrant learning community and engage with exciting new programming for the 2024-2025 academic year.

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What is Classroom Climate? 

When instructors and students walk through the classroom door, they bring with them their whole selves: their histories, communities, and relationships to systemic power structures. As members of the UBC teaching and learning community, we come from different positions, life experiences, and ways of navigating the world. We are not separate from the influence of what is happening globally, but also at home in our own communities. Understanding how outside-the-classroom impact students and instructors inside the classroom is a key aspect of what creates classroom climate.  

At CTLT Indigenous Initiatives, we recognize that “UBC Classrooms are not static or neutral spaces; rather, they continue to be multidimensional and dynamic spaces where complex interactions occur through the diversity of identities, modes of delivery and places of learning.” (CTLT Indigenous Initiatives: Classroom Climate).  Additionally, it’s not only the power and complexity of diversity in the classroom that contributes to classroom climate, but also understanding that classroom climate is inherently place-based (Perreault and Tsukada 2016). It is important to understand the nuanced relationships to the lands in which we learn and teach from and on.  

CTLT Indigenous Initiatives Classroom Climate Series  

Classroom Climate is one of the foundations from which we build our work within Indigenous Initiatives. Our yearlong Classroom Climate Series supports the development of skills, resources, and capacity around navigating Indigenous topics and contexts in the classroom. The Series brings together staff, faculty, and students, in facilitated monthly sessions to create shared learnings and meaningful discussions. 

“Creating a productive and inclusive classroom climate should not be a concern only when a certain group of students is present in the classroom or when socially contentious issues are discussed.”

Complicating How Classroom Climate Works: Advancing the Frameworks” by Hanae Tsukada and Amy Perreault (2016). 

The CTLT Indigenous Initiatives Classroom Climate Series was developed by Amy Perreault, Associate Director, CTLT Indigenous Initiatives, in the early days of Indigenous Initiatives, then called Aboriginal Initiatives. The Series’ themes are dynamic and influenced by feedback from our Classroom Climate Faculty Advisory and “Complicating How Classroom Climate Works: Advancing the Frameworks” by Hanae Tsukada and Amy Perreault (2016). As Tsukada and Perreault remind us, “regardless of whether the classroom is online or face-to-face and whether or to what extent our identities are visible to each other, our classroom interactions as well as our bodies, are deeply embedded in the social contexts that shape who we are in relation to each other” (Tsukada and Perreault 2016).  

What’s New for the Classroom Climate Series in 2024-2025? 

During the 2023/2024 academic year, we had over 390 registrants from over 83 different units sign up for one of our Classroom Climate sessions! We have delighted in connecting with different faculty, staff, and students across campus and feel inspired by the shared learning opportunities presented by so many cross-campus guest presenters and facilitators. In early October 2024, we held our second annual Classroom Climate Open House to celebrate and share so many fantastic departments and resources we have had the pleasure of working with.  

Reciprocity and Witnessing  

The core of the work we do at CTLT Indigenous Initiatives is based within witnessing and reciprocity. Both witnessing and reciprocity ask us to be active agents in our learning and extend both our shared lessons and understandings beyond the boundaries of the classroom and campus: it is an ask to not only be accountable to the knowledge we are receiving, but also those we are receiving the knowledge from, the communities and lands that nourish them, the lands we are learning on, and to own communities and lands we are from (Perreault and Tsukada 12). The Classroom Climate Series continues to be a place of shared and reciprocal learning, bringing together members of the UBC teaching and learning community to share, gather, and champion decolonization within their work.  

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