Principles of Practice
My five principles of practice have been shaped by the accumulation of academic teachings and by twenty years in workplaces, classrooms, and communities, where I watched what happened when educators, including myself, neglected to ask whose voice is being centred and who is absent but wanting to be heard.
Identity is always more than it appears.
Every person who walks into a learning environment carries a whole universe of intersecting identities: race, gender, class, sexuality, age, ability, language, and history. These don't exist in parallel; they overlap and interact in ways that create unique experiences of belonging and exclusion that can't be captured by looking at any one aspect in isolation.
I learned this early, as a Latin-X kid being called slurs based on someone else's stereotype of a country my family wasn't from. My ethnicity was visible in the worst possible way in that moment, while everything that was actually true about me became invisible. Kimberlé Crenshaw's work on intersectionality named that dynamic precisely: some identities are made hypervisible while others are erased, and the interaction between them shapes lived experience.
In practice, this means I think carefully about whose experiences are represented in the curriculum, who's doing the facilitating, whose language is centred, and who's sitting in silence in those moments. It means I design learning environments where more than one kind of knowing is treated as valid.
Discomfort gives learning deeper authenticity.
I don't believe in frictionless learning. The moments in my own life that shifted fundamentally, either my MSW thesis, my work in communities, or the meeting where I was told to "figure it out," none of them were comfortable. They were disorienting and humbling and, in retrospect, exactly what I needed to sit more comfortably in my authenticity.
Paulo Freire understood this. Genuine transformation requires naming the contradictions we live inside, not smoothing them over. When organizations say they value diversity but don't change who gets to be in the room when decisions are made, that's a contradiction worth naming. When a curriculum says it's learner-centred but refuses to provide more time and resources for people to learn, then it needs to be said as a problem for building long-term success.
My role as an educator is to hold space for that tension. To create an environment where discomfort can be felt and examined while providing psychological safety. Not resolved quickly with easy answers, or use a language that sounds progressive but is not followed up with some meaningful actions.
Decolonizing is an action, not a metaphor
My academic work in this program, particularly in Gender and Adult Education, deepened my understanding of what it actually means to meaningfully commit to acts of decolonization. Tuck and Yang's (2012) argument is one I return to constantly: decolonization is not a metaphor. It cannot be reduced to including more diverse voices in a curriculum, acknowledging a land territory, or inviting Indigenous peoples to events. Those things can matter, but on their own, they are what Tuck and Yang (2012) call "moves to innocence," ways of seeming to address colonial harm without actually unsettling the structures that cause it.
I participated in an Indigenous inclusion committee at General Dynamics Land Systems, and I saw the group's sincerity but quickly realized how much internal work I needed to unpack. What it means to be connected to land, to ancestors, to a web of relationships that includes the non-human world. I had spent years doing outdoor activities I framed as conquest: cycling hundreds of kilometres to prove what my body could do, kayaking rivers to face my fears. I realized I had been relating to nature as a resource, not as a relation.
In my teaching practice, I try to engage with Indigenous pedagogies in a genuine effort to understand knowledge, relationships, and responsibility to all our relations, which means something internally and externally for each person.
Reference:
Tuck, E., & Yang, K. W. (2012). Decolonization is not a metaphor. Decolonization: Indigeneity,
Education & Society, 1(1), 1–40.
Reflexivity is non-negotiable.
The practice of inner reflective work began when I started psychotherapy in my early 20s, facing deep uncertainty about my future and dealing with the serious dysfunctions in my family of origin. My journey started with the help of an amazing therapist who guided me in unpacking my identity, my childhood traumas, and my heartbreak from a man whom I still wanted to be with. It was the first time I saw the narratives and assumptions I carried inside me and faced them with courage and compassion.
My social work training built reflexivity into everything, such as clinical supervision, practicum, and the way we wrote about our own practice. When I moved into human resources, that practice largely disappeared, and I felt the difference. Without reflexivity, professional development becomes about consuming content and being a "good worker". Reflexivity genuinely integrates knowledge with values and being honest with yourself when feeling unsettled.
Caregiving for my father has added a layer to my reflexive practice I didn't anticipate. When you witness someone you love losing their words, their understanding of the world, and their memories, you think a lot about what it means to communicate, to be understood, to hold onto identity in the face of loss. I bring that awareness into my work.
No program is ever neutral.
Every curriculum, every training program, every learning design reflects choices about what knowledge matters and whose experience is worth representing. I've seen this from the many roles and places I occupied over the years. Programs in community development that call themselves asset-based but still prioritize institutional outcomes over community priorities. HR training on diversity that measured representation without addressing the barriers producing underrepresentation. Employer training programs are designed to "fix" job seekers without examining what employers might need to change about how they hire and retain people.
Naming that programs are not neutral is not the same as paralysis. It's the beginning of designing better ones. When we ask honestly whose knowledge shaped this program, whose experience it was designed around, and who wasn't at the table. We get closer to building something that actually works for the people it's supposed to serve.