STORY BY JULIE CARL
Monique Herbert, Associate Dean for Faculty Affairs and Inclusiveness in the Faculty of Health, has a big title and a big job to go with it.
But then, so does the entire Faculty of Health which is working together to implement an action plan that stemmed from the Working Group on Individual and Systemic Racism (WGISR) report, struck to look at issues specifically related to anti-Black and anti-Indigenous racism, along with continuing its Decolonization, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (DEDI) projects that predate that report.
One of that report’s recommendations was to create her new post to have someone in a leadership position to guide these initiatives, Herbert said. Another called for a standing committee at the Faculty level, which for the first time focuses on DEDI and includes staff, not just faculty and students.
“This is the first time staff have been represented on a standing committee. That is a big deal for us,” Herbert said. “Just to have this thread that occurred, starting with input from the WGISR report, through to the subcommittee on DEDI that created this action plan, and then to have a committee that continues to honour what I call the Faculty of Health community looking at how we can support DEDI initiatives within the Faculty is really amazing. We are going to continue that thread.”
The action plan — in reality a framework that adopts an advocacy approach to the task — made each of the WGISR recommendations actionable. These actions focus on different levels of the faculty (e.g., staff, students, faculty) and the wider university, Herbert said.
“And some of it really belongs to the five units within the Faculty of health,” Herbert explained. “One of the things we're doing is listening to and supporting the units that have already started their own DEDI committees or are doing that kind of work already.”
The School of Kinesiology and Health Science has two DEDI projects as well as its own DEDI committee. Ashley Day, an assistant professor, co-chairs the committee with Amanda De Lisio, assistant professor of physical culture, policy and sustainable development. Day is a registered member of the Sahtu Dene and Metis of Normal Wells, although she was raised in the GTA, and is the only Indigenous professor in the School of Kinesiology and Health Science, one of two in the Faculty of Health.
Kinesiology’s committee is populated by faculty, undergrads and grad students. Members focus on community building, flattening the hierarchies between faculty and students and while members cannot always ensure all voices are always heard, members are working to create spaces for more voices.
Earlier this school year, the committee organized a sex and gender research workshop to assist graduate students and faculty in preparing grant proposals through a DEDI lens. In December, members are planning a Universal Design for Learning event, and in the winter semester, they want to hold a book cafe around decolonization.
The Kinesiology community is committed to decolonization. Day’s research is on creating an anti-colonial alternative to physical education and health. She received a grant from York’s Indigenous Research Seed Fund to decolonize the physical education curriculum. Her work is entitled Wiisokotaatiwin — which means Gathering to Discuss and Re-Imagine Health and Physical Education.
In her days as a physical education teacher, Day noticed her large Grade 9 classes would dwindle to a handful of athletes by Grade 12. “And I was always questioning, why? Why wouldn't anyone want to go play sports?” she said. “I was starting to learn more about my culture and different ideas of health and well-being … the question became, ‘What does health mean from an Indigenous perspective?’”
Day has started to work with the York Region District School Board to consider anti-colonial approaches to health and physical education.
“The point of health and physical education is health over a life cycle, not health for four years.”
Another Kinesiology school effort that embraces decolonization is Assistant Professor Larkin Lamarche’s work decolonizing the teaching of counselling skills. Their project is entitled Land as Counsellor, says Lamarche whose pronouns are they/them. Lamarche will centre the teaching and learning of their winter semester counselling skills class of about 40 students on the Maloca Community Garden. The enormous garden, about 2,000 square feet, is on York’s Keele campus and is a project of the Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change. It has plots for growing vegetables, fruits, herbs and flowers according to the principles of organic agriculture.
Lamarche says it is the ideal site for students to grasp the therapeutic and healing qualities of the land.
“It kind of hit me. Operating from a decolonized framework, this is where I can connect the dots a little bit better for students and have a more meaningful experience for them,” they said. “We'll be out on the land, and we'll be doing earthwork or tending to something and thinking about counselling skills as we're doing particular earthwork.”
The students will bring soil and maybe seeds from the garden for their in-class lessons to keep that connection, Lamarche said. The students will also write an end-of-term reflection assignment on how the garden affected them.
The course is supported by a Fund for Innovations in Teaching (FIT) grant and is part of a broader initiative to connect mental health and the land.
Another DEDI project in the Faculty of Health is the publication this year of the Handbook of Disability: Critical Thought and Social Change in a Globalizing World. Marina Morrow, a professor in the School of Health Policy and Management and director of the graduate program of Critical Disability Studies, said she already uses the weighty tome for one of her classes. The handbook is a comprehensive resource for students and teachers that covers history, law, policy, research, paradigm shifts and intersectionality. Morrow was a co-editor of the section on intersectionality and disability.
“The handbook has a very interesting genesis,” Morrow explained. “One of the original brainchildren of this handbook was our dear colleague Marcia Rioux who passed away a number of years ago. The idea behind it was, how can we create a comprehensive handbook on disability studies, a kind of encyclopedia of scholars and activists and research into disability globally, particularly with a focus on showcasing both Global South and Global North authors.”
Rioux was one of the founders of York’s School of Health Policy and Management and a founder of its Critical Disability Studies Program. The program is Canada’s only one that grants PhDs, Morrow said.
“We have to think about how to foster a more collegial community. And when I say collegial, not collegial only within, because we tend to use that word for faculty only, but collegial across all members of the Faculty of Health community.”
— Monique Herbert, Associate Dean for Faculty Affairs and Inclusiveness
Joining Rioux as editors of the handbook were Jose Viera, the interim advocacy director for the International Disability Alliance, Ezra Zubrow, Rioux’s spouse and an emeritus academic at the University of Buffalo, and York alum Alexis Buettgen, now an assistant professor at Wilfrid Laurier University.
Morrow also co-chaired the Faculty’s DEDI subcommittee, struck to develop an implementation plan for the 26 recommendations of the WGISR report, with Collette Murray, the graduate program assistant for the Critical Disability Studies program and for the graduate health program.
The committee’s work was unique as it started out with a very bureaucratic process, prioritizing the most feasible recommendations, then wiped its slate clean and started over by adopting an advocacy framework and concentrating on those recommendations that could be transformative, Morrow said.
In that way, the committee decolonized itself before it could begin effective work with the decolonial research in higher education that Murray brought to the team.
Usually, “executive or Dean positions would have decision-making dialogue. Staff is present to be a notetaker. It’s a top-down approach with invisibility of the staff voice, whose roles intersect with all university levels,” said Murray. “I was highly advocating for the staff voice to be heard.”
The process was about getting committee members to understand that decolonizing calls for a shift in ideology and values and moving past acknowledgement to equity in practice, said Murray who is of Afro-Guyanese heritage. For the first time, a staff member was selected to co-chair a Faculty committee. She was chosen because of her educational background in anti-racist research and practice, and EDI advocacy in other sectors.
Monique Herbert, the person whose job it is to keep the Faculty on track to DEDI, stresses the need for creative solutions to address these issues and ensure a sense of belonging within the Faculty.
“We have to consider the power dynamic. We have to think about how to foster a more collegial community. And when I say collegial, not collegial only within, because we tend to use that word for faculty only, but collegial across all members of the Faculty of Health community.”