In 2021, the American University of Armenia (AUA) launched a new master’s programme: an MA in Human Rights and Social Justice. In an auto-ethnographic piece of research presented as a facilitator and instructor on this programme, I seek to identify and explore responses to challenges in building an equitable learning community. Specifically, I focus on tensions which occur when we seek to implement an approach informed by transformative, emancipatory education (Freire 2001; Hooks 1994) and participatory action research in a course which is explicitly about social justice. I do so to diifferentiate between deliberate and enforced vulnerabilities, and reflect on their roles.

I define a participatory action (PA) approach to education as one which explicitly identifies the classroom as a space of knowledge production and takes techniques and practical tools from PA, feminist, and other qualitative research methods to the classroom to create a horizontal, multiply accessible space. It understands students as experts by experience who bring complex and multiple identities and experiences to learning  (Henning et al. 2019; Moon 2010). This approach necessarily implies supporting students to identify and critique the operation of power relationships within wider society. As we make theory real by connecting it with our daily lives, we also turn our critical gaze upon our learning community.

I therefore ask: what tensions does this create? What position, commitment, and action does it necessitate from a classroom facilitator? Through the exploration of auto-ethnographic vignettes, I identify moments which crystallise and reflect power inequities and suggest educational responses which work for justice. These moments are organised through discussion of power as fluid and characterised by the presence of resistance (Munro 2003; Foucault 1982). They include: the power to name oneself, the power (not) to ask and answer questions, the power (not) to disclose experience, and the power to assess and evaluate.

I make two contributions through this analysis: one theoretical and one practical. The theoretical contribution proposes a framework to identify and differentiate between productive and destabilising tensions, or deliberate vulnerability and enforced vulnerability. The practical contribution outlines how participatory research approaches can be used within the classroom. Next, I briefly outline both.

My theoretical contribution draws on social movement literature’s discussion of prefiguration (Yates 2015b, 2015a; Ishkanian and Peña Saavedra 2019) to define the classroom as a potentially prefigurative space. By this, I mean that it is a space of ‘collective experimentation, the imagining, production and circulation of political meanings, [and] the creating of new and future-oriented social norms or “conduct”’ (Yates 2015a, 1). It thus makes certain demands on its participants. Just as prefigurative spaces have been critiqued as reinscribing power inequities (Ishkanian and Peña Saavedra 2019), so too has the classroom. However, rather than seeing this as uniquely flaw or failure, I propose to leverage analysis of power to differentiate between two types of discomfort or, here, vulnerability. Vulnerability as deliberate exposure to power is a site of agency (Butler, Gambetti, and Sabsay 2016); we may thus accept or embrace this deliberate vulnerability as a pathway to growth and transformation. Conversely, enforced vulnerability which reinscribes inequities creates obstacles to transformation.

As I discuss my autoethnographic vignettes (namely: the power to name oneself, (not) to ask and answer questions, (not) to disclose experience, to assess and evaluate), I develop my practical contribution by considering how facilitators might practically co-construct deliberate vulnerability and work to manage, and minimise, enforced vulnerability. This includes by scaffolding reflection on discomfort and its creation as a function of power relationships. It also includes developing multi-modality and learner ownership in a more granular way through learning design and classroom facilitation.

The research is auto-ethnographical, taking my own experience as guide and facilitator to examine tensions in facilitating a just classroom. Auto-ethnography refers to the engaged process of ‘describ[ing] and systematically analyz[ing] personal experience in order to understand cultural experience’ (Ellis, Adams, and Bochner 2010, n.p.). In this case, the personal experience in question is an academic year of classroom facilitation in a newly founded master’s programme. The auto-ethnography is formed by both a research diary kept while teaching (Hockley, Dewar, and Watson 2005) and retrospective reflection (Ellis, Adams, and Bochner 2010). Student course feedback also support my auto-ethnographical reflections. Driven by critical power analysis, my approach foregrounds analysis of my own positionality within the knowledge creation processes. I lean particularly on Pillow’s discussion of reflexivity not as catharsis or cure, but rather as an open-ended process of discomfort (2003). This dovetails with my analysis concerning the productivity of deliberate vulnerability, as well as the position that the role of facilitator may experience both deliberate and enforced vulnerability. Anonymity and confidentiality are maintained in the mini-narratives which are shared within the paper, drawing on a framework proposed by Saunders, Kitzinger, and Kitzinger (2015).

Through this paper, I offer a theoretical framework to structure reflection on the potential of deliberate vulnerability to support learning. I seek to stimulate discussion on practical tools and responses – from myself and from students – which produce deliberate vulnerability and disrupt enforced vulnerability. While thematic content often sharpens the appearance of inequities in the social justice classroom, this reflection is relevant to teaching and learning across disciplines. Discussion of my own positionality and student identity through the vignettes also places this paper directly into dialogue with the conference theme of global realities and the changing world; the research explores power relationships and their asymmetries within the context of a classroom formed by transnational shifts, migration, and war. It asks questions about anti-colonialism action in teaching at an American University in a foreign language for most students. These factors are vital in exploring the construction of the learning space and how learners, including me and formally enrolled students, negotiate it.

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