Facing Human Wrongs:

This open access course licensed under creative commons (attribution 4.0 international) was originally designed as an interdisciplinary initiative between the departments of Educational Studies and the Faculty of Land and Food Systems at the University of British Columbia in 2020.

FHW offers six “unlearning bundles” that can support participants to expand intellectual, affective and relational capacities and move towards a head/heart/gut space where we may be better equipped to…

• hold space for uncomfortable and difficult things without feeling overwhelmed , immobilised, wanting quick fixes or demanding to be rescued from discomfort
• develop shared vocabularies and practices to responsibly navigate VUCA (volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity), as well as tensions and paradoxes;
• surrender arrogance, idealizations and projections to be able to deal with all aspects of reality: the good, the bad, the ugly and messed up within and around us;
• learn to weave relations grounded on trust, respect, reciprocity, consent and accountability;
• be generative translators between different disciplines, generations, cultural contexts and multiple moving layers of reality;
• deepen our self-understanding and self-compassion to face our shadows, compost historical, systemic, collective and individual “shit,  and weather storms together;
• walk the tightrope between desperate hope and hopelessness with honesty, humility, humour and hyper-self-reflexivity;
• calibrate our vital compass towards decolonial forms of sobriety, maturity, discernment and accountability.

FHW is an experiment in a wider inquiry of how education can activate visceral responsibility (responsibility not based on intellectual choice, self-interest, or convenience) and de-activate harmful desires and perceived entitlements conditioned by modernity/coloniality, such as conditioned desires for moral and epistemic authority, unaccountable and unrestricted autonomy and the universal arbitration of justice and common sense.

This course offers a pedagogy that is often experienced as counter-intuitive because it invites participants to step back from and develop a healthy scepticism towards their narratives and identities. Unlike other courses, FHW does not emphasise the affirmation of participants’ self-expression, voice, empowerment, virtues or preferences. 

Needless to say that this course is not for everyone, that is why we invite you to try the first unit and complete the questionnaire “Is this course for me?”, before you decide to commit to it. You can take this course as self-study (individually) or as part of a scheduled group (with support from trained facilitators). 

Since this course is open access, we invite you to consider a reciprocity commitment to the Indigenous communities that have inspired and supported the creation of this course.

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.