Guests in Conversation: 

• Aditi Mehta, PhD, Assistant Professor, Teaching Stream, Urban Studies Program, Department of Geography and Planning, University of Toronto 

• Phil Goodman, PhD, Professor, Department of Sociology, University of Toronto Mississauga 

• Rachel Fayter, PhD, Post-Doctoral Research Fellow, Department of Geography and Environmental Studies, Carleton University

Co-learning is a model of community-engaged learning in which students and non-students learn together in a shared, typically off-campus setting. 

Our three guests are co-learning scholar-practitioners whose work bridges community and university spaces with deep commitments to social justice. Each has used co-learning as an aspirational transformative practice that centres incarcerated, criminalized and otherwise marginalized collaborators in ways that upend hierarchies in university teaching, learning and research. Together they will dialogue with each other and the audience about care, accountability and process in CEL as they address the following questions:  

• What are the possibilities and limits of co-learning as a model in CEL? What does transformation mean in co-learning pedagogy? How do values and commitments shape process and outcome in co-learning? 

• Why do co-learning approaches in CEL often centre transformative justice?  What can co-learning and/as transformative justice offer CEL more broadly? What are the implications of this framing?

• What practices can we implement as CEL educators across CEL models more broadly, to advance justice and transformation?  

To ground and extend this dialogue, our speakers have selected some recommended readings which we encourage participants to engage with in preparation for our collective conversation.