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“Love your material, love your students, love yourself”: Karen Ridd on teaching
Karen Ridd, Teaching Associate Professor of Peace and Conflict Transformation Studies and Conflict Resolution Studies, is a co-recipient of the 2022 Kay and Lorne Dick Teaching Excellence Award.
Karen Ridd, Teaching Associate Professor of Peace and Conflict Transformation Studies and of Conflict Resolution Studies, joined the CMU faculty in 2010 after more than a decade of sessional instructing. She and David Balzer, Associate Professor of Communications and Media, are co-recipients of the 2022 Kay and Lorne Dick Teaching Excellence Award.
The award, established in 2022, is granted annually to two faculty members who best exemplify the commitment of CMU to excellent teaching.
How would you describe your teaching philosophy? How has it evolved over the years?
George Lakey, who's a big name in the nonviolent social change field and has been a mentor for me, has this mantra: "Love your material, love your students, love yourself." For me, that has been the cornerstone of teaching. I think you can't really go wrong if you love all those things concurrently. For me that means allowing students to see my passion and excitement for the material and continuing to try to grow and learn. It means caring about their lives and trying to create a classroom in which I teach in different modalities. People here passionately care about what we do—we want to do the students justice, we want to do the material justice, and sometimes then we don't do ourselves justice in that process. I think I'm doing better over time at the loving myself and looking after myself part—because the better shape I'm in, the better I'm going to be at teaching.
What strategies do you use to engage and inspire your students?
My teaching was really formed through the world of participatory education. At one point in my life, I was a professional clown—I actually started the therapeutic clowning movement of having clowns in hospitals worldwide. The first course of any sort that I ever taught was a workshop on clowning, and you can't lead those workshops in an "I will tell you what to do" way; they have to be participatory. I then worked in human rights in Central America, and I did some peace education with Spanish educators who had been trained in Nicaragua in popular education, which is all about valuing the learner and making sure whatever you are doing in the classroom is connected to the learner's experience, and it's very physical. So, I'm thoughtful about the different learning styles people might have—some of us learn better when we are listening to a lecture, or talking to the person next to us, or writing things down, or when our bodies are engaged, or in groups. I try to incorporate as many of those things as possible in each class I teach.
How do you measure success in your classroom?
I want the environment in the classroom to be comfortable enough that people are willing to be uncomfortable in new ideas and new conversations, or trust that they can say something. I measure success by how willing people are to imagine and think different things than they did before—and that includes me! I better be willing to think new things and be willing to be changed by them if I'm expecting the students to potentially be changed by their experience in the classroom with me and with that material. If people are willing to try out new stuff, then I feel like that's successful.
Is there a specific moment in your teaching career that stands out as especially rewarding?
I had the chance to teach a Walls to Bridges course in Restorative Justice at the Headingley Women's Correctional Centre in 2019. Walls to Bridges is a program that teaches university courses inside prisons and jails to a mix of people who are inside students (people who are currently incarcerated) and outside students (people who are not currently incarcerated). It was a very powerful experience. Powerful learning for me in terms of what that environment is like to be in, powerful learning from the women who were students from the inside, powerful watching the transformation of outside students coming with their assumptions—both sides were terrified to meet the other—and then creating a learning community in the classroom. I've had the wonderful opportunity to continue to collaborate with someone who I met when she was incarcerated. She recently taught a beading workshop in our Conflict Resolution, Creative Arts, and Social Change course.
What impact do you hope to leave on your students?
I certainly hope they learn things! But they don't have to learn it from me. I hope they learn things from themselves, from amazing speakers I'm bringing into my classroom, from the things they read. I really hope they learn from their colleagues. They don't come as empty vessels, they come with all their experiences and their ideas, so I hope in their conversations with each other they make connections. I hope that having someone who believes in them and is confident that they can do hard things has an impact on them beyond just in the classroom; I hope that's something they carry forward. I hope the way I teach and the way I treat people is congruent with what I teach, and that congruency also gives them a model for how to interact and be with people.
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