Outside of the box: Inspiring Women Among Us (IWAU) as public pedagogy on gender and inclusion via learning in community

Abstract

December 6th marks the Montreal Massacre, and Canada’s National Day of Remembrance and Action on Violence Against Women. Universities often host actions around this date. In 2015, we sought to expand discussions on gender and equity by launching Inspiring Women Among Us or IWAU (www.iwau.ca). Our annual series of events includes talks, workshops, films, arts activities, movement, mentoring opportunities, and activism/actions. We build community through engaging with issues across the gender spectrum. Educational exchanges are key to IWAU but we do not label them as such. We work to showcase and support feminist, queer, and Indigenous individuals and organisations. Our events are low barrier, and we purposefully emphasise an informal atmosphere. We have responsively moved queerness, trans awareness, intersectionality, and learning from Indigenous leaders to our core. In this paper, we present research about participant experiences (2017) as collected via a self-administered survey (n=140). In discussing response patterns, key themes, and our interpretations, we consider IWAU as site of formal and informal educational exchanges. In design and practice, we stress inclusive opportunities outside of the classroom. According to participants, education and mentoring is occurring, formally and informally, as hoped. We share quotes about participant experiences of IWAU to illustrate how they experience exchanges and learning. Cognisant of work by Porter (2019) and others, we acknowledge the need for mutually-beneficial university-community relations. We discuss IWAU’s unique position/role as a bridge between university, community, scholarship and action. In contextualising results and interpretations, we foreground the persistent need for gender-related spaces, opportunities, and exchanges beyond formal learning scenarios, in a ‘knowledge democracy’. Adding to over 50 years of work (for recent examples, see Ahmed, Berdahl et al., Cheeks, Corbett, Moeke-Pickering et al.), we offer our case study as including elements that support adult education ‘outside of the box,’ for feminist futures.