Episode 17: From "oh sh*t!" to "oh shift", a conversation with Leila Angod, Jessica Bleuer, Rose Gutierrez, and Ruben Rubén Gaztambide-Fernández
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From “oh shit!” to “oh shift”, a conversation with Leila Angod, Jessica Bleuer, Rose Gutierrez, and Rubén Gaztambide-Fernández and the Pedagogies of Community Engagement Collective. Hosted by Sherry Ostapovitch.
Sherry Ostapovitch: [00:00:13] Welcome to the WhyPAR Podcast, a podcast of the Youth Research Lab at OISE - the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education.
My name is Sherry Ostapovitch, and this episode of the WhyPAR Podcast is the second in a special series produced by the Pedagogies of Community Engagement Collective. The PeCEP project was created to explore, generate and share knowledge about facilitation practices that support community-engaged work across different sectors. In this special series of three podcasts, members of the PeCEC reflect on their experiences as community-engaged facilitators, confronting some of the dilemmas and tensions, as well as the opportunities and joys of working with, in, and for communities.
This podcast episode entitled, From "oh shit!" to "oh shift" is a conversation with Leila Angod, Jessica Bleuer, Rose Gutierrez, and Rubén Gaztambide-Fernández. They share moments when their facilitation plans were ruptured by unexpected challenges. Stay tuned to the "shift" to find out how to think differently about these moments, and what facilitators can learn and do, when things fall apart.
Rose Gutierrez: [00:01:22] Hi folks, my name is Rose Gutierrez. I'm a community-engaged facilitator. I've been facilitating from the 1990s, started around doing a lot of work in terms of equity, moved into community arts, and it's a pleasure to be in this conversation.
Jessica Bleuer: [00:01:38] Hi, my name is Jessica Bleuer and I'm also a community-engaged facilitator. I use a lot of theater of the oppressed and dramatherapy in my work, and I'm also now teaching at Concordia University. My work really focuses on equity-addressing spaces and dignity-promoting spaces.
Leila Angod: [00:01:56] Hi, my name is Leila Angod. I do school-based youth participatory action research. I'm an Assistant Professor at Carleton University in Ottawa, and I teach in the Childhood and Youth Studies program, focusing on youth activism and anti-racism.
Rubén Gaztambide-Fernández: [00:02:12] Hi everyone, I'm Rubén Gaztambide-Fernández. I'm a community-engaged researcher whose primary work is in the context of classrooms, also doing school based WhyPAR. And I am a Professor and Chair of the Department of Social Justice Education at the University of Toronto.
Leila Angod: [00:02:44] This is a podcast episode about those oh shit moments.
Leila Angod: [00:02:47] Those moments that come up and break the intention of where you're wanting to go as a facilitator in the group. So this is a tension. Like, I feel like I should move things, like this is part of what I wanted to talk about with the "oh shit" moments, because I feel like, you know, the desire for forward momentum, right, to get where we're going.
Rubén Gaztambide-Fernández: [00:03:11] And we've all had those moments, right. We've all had those moments where, you know, we thought things are going to go a certain way and then something happens and you're like, oh shit, now what?
Rose Gutierrez: [00:03:19] Well, absolutely. I think, oh shit, moments are just part of the landscape. We'll all experience that as a facilitator. We have to kind of also decide and figure out, in terms of our skills and experience, what to do in those moments. Sometimes they're really helpful, you know, and sometimes they're very scary. Right. And we have to kind of assess, you know, depending on what it is that we're doing, what to do in those "oh shit" moments. So this podcast is a really great conversation amongst us as community facilitators to just kind of share our knowledge, right, share our knowledge and our experiences. So hopefully other folks who will be in that same position as a facilitator can maybe learn from some of those things.
Leila Angod: [00:03:59] Yeah. And I think to normalize those "oh shit" moments too, that, yes, it's going to happen.
Jessica Bleuer: [00:04:05] It's happened to all of us.
Leila Angod: [00:04:05] Yeah.
Jessica Bleuer: [00:04:07] What are some of those moments from your own practice? Like I'm thinking about I'm teaching this classroom, I have this very carefully planned class, and then a student, completely not on topic, starts reflecting on how much he appreciates this very controversial figure. Um, you know, he brings up Jordan Peterson being, like, a mentor to him, and something changes in the classroom. And I look around and I'm noticing the reactions of women in the classroom, of trans folk in the classroom, and there's an oh shit moment for me. Okay. What am I going to do now with this?
Rose Gutierrez: [00:04:51] Yeah.
Rubén Gaztambide-Fernández: [00:04:52] Yeah. So how did you navigate it? What were some of the things that were going through your mind?
Jessica Bleuer: [00:04:57] The first thing that was going through my mind was group cohesion. And what was happening to the group cohesion in this class that needed to stay together for two years to finish their program? Um, the second thing I was thinking about was emotional safety. And how had this introduction to this very controversial figure interrupted any small kind of trust building that had already happened in the class? We were three weeks in. And I was thinking about, you know, violence in the classroom and how we were going to move through this revelation together and what it meant. I didn't have any assumptions, but what did it mean for the people in the classroom, and what was it going to mean for the relationships? And so the reason why I said, "Oh shit, what do I do?" is because I was thinking about so many things and it was like, which strand of that do I pick up? Is this the right moment? I also had something that I had planned on teaching. So do I push that aside? Do I really recognize and help unpack? Do I actually not help unpack because I don't want to highlight or amplify this? But can I get away with not, you know, I'm not sure. It's funny because that was a classroom, but if I was a therapist and someone said to me, I love Jordan Peterson, I would literally say, "tell me more".
Jessica Bleuer: [00:06:14] Right, right, right. Because they're trying to communicate something, and my job is there to listen. But then there's something about when we're in a group, our responsibility is not only to one person, but it is to the group. And so that completely changes how I'm going to respond. Because now I'm, I actually have no idea what he's going to say about Jordan Peterson. Jordan Peterson wrote some, like, self-help books that many people still find very helpful, that are not controversial at all. Like they tell you to clean your room, for example. But I feared that what he was going to say could be misogynistic, transphobic, racist, you know, and it's possible that somebody wanted to be like, wait a minute, now I need to know if I can trust you. What exactly is it that you appreciate about Jordan Peterson? And I definitely didn't go that way. I got very nervous, and I said, we're not talking about Jordan Peterson right now. We're talking about... And I brought it back to the classroom environment. But what I did in that moment is I completely ignored all the emotional things that were happening, that then in future classes, I ended up needing to address because there had been such a rupture in that moment.
Rose Gutierrez: [00:07:26] So do you think that there are other tips or like steps to take when you have an "oh shit" moment?
Jessica Bleuer: [00:07:34] I imagine that the way that we can respond to an "oh shit" moment is as diverse as the people in the room, including the facilitators and the participants. But I would say that, out of some research, some participatory action research that came out of Concordia University, I was working with a group of professors that were trying to find ways to address racial and ethnic microaggressions in higher education. And one of the things that this group of professors came up with was this acronym called PRR, which stands for pause, reflect, respond. And the idea is that when a microaggression happens in a classroom, that, it can be really important for us to pause and take some time to think about what's happening to our nervous systems in this moment. Like, how has the harm entered our bodies? Are our hearts beating fast? How has our breathing changed? Are people noticing tension in their body? Are people even in their bodies? Are people kind of to protect themselves, dissociating a little bit from the moment? Um, and to kind of engage in some co-regulation exercises to really recognize and validate that these moments can be very scary, they can be very harmful, and they can bring us back to other moments in our lives where we've experienced harm. And so that's the pause of that acronym.
Jessica Bleuer: [00:08:56] And then the next thing is when there's a little bit more co-regulation. And this is very important, the goal is not to regulate the harm away okay. It's just about building a bit of capacity to really address what has just happened, the "oh shit" moment in the classroom. And so when there's a little bit more capacity because the classroom has either decided to take a break, go for a walk, do some breathing exercises together, something. A little bit more co-regulation. Then the idea is to really reflect about what is happening in the classroom between the people in the classroom and of course, like what other systems, systemic issues are entering the classroom in that moment. And that reflection can happen in discussion, that reflection can happen with a prepared kind of survey that the professor kind of says, okay, go onto your phones or your laptops, and let's just answer some questions about what's happening here. So it's like an internal reflection before it becomes an interactive reflection. And so that after you've paused, you've co-regulated a little bit and then you've reflected on the larger systemic issues that are happening and the interrelational issues that are happening in the classroom. Now, we might have a little more capacity to respond. So that's the second R respond.
Rubén Gaztambide-Fernández: [00:10:08] I was thinking about the specific example that you were giving, Jessica, and just kind of building on this idea that there's probably lots of responses, lots of possible ways of addressing an "oh shit" moment. None of which are probably perfect, because in a group context, everybody has different needs, and there's no way that as a facilitator you can meet everybody's needs. So somebody needs are going to go are going to go unmet in some way or another. Maybe you're wrong, you can even address your own needs. And I was even thinking about the person, the person who's making the comment, right. Like one question that, in the reflection process that would come up for me would be like, what is the need that is being expressed when this person clearly, deliberately is introducing the name of a person or an idea that is going to be disruptive. Like, do they realize how disruptive it is? Is it intentional? What are they looking for? What's the need that's going on that is provoking this person to do that? And then I think, yes, there are lots of responses and there are probably some definite "no" responses like definitely things that you should not do, like probably putting all your attention on that person. Why don't you spend the next ten minutes talking about Jordan Peterson? That would probably be the wrong thing to do. So there are some clearly things that you should not do, but there's no clear answer as to what you should, right, because at the end of the day, the needs in front of you are...
Jessica Bleuer: [00:11:35] Are so diverse.
Rose Gutierrez: [00:11:36] And there's so many factors, right? It's like your relationship to this group, your history to this group, how long it is that you are able or have the capacity to work with this group. So many factors that there's a checklist that happens, you know, when you're like, okay, is it a pause? Is it a direct, you know, response? Is it a break? Like what is it? But I think it's there's that kind of intuitiveness to the response. I think that's really important. And, and I do think it's also important to really like to set up a space where people are, um, are committed to the process because that response might not work. But then you work through another response that can maybe be better for like to address whatever harm is happening in the group.
Leila Angod: [00:12:20] So I love what you said, Rose, about intuitiveness, because when something comes up for me, the "oh shit" moments are, it's that moment when something that's present in the space bubbles to the surface and makes itself visible and apparent, and you have to then decide which of the multitude of pathways are you going to take to address it? And for me, it comes back to feel. And I need to feel the way forward first. The example that I wanted to share and just to say that, you know, we had a we had some really rich conversations about which stories to share and the ethics of sharing them and the risks of sharing them as well. The one that I wanted to share was about when a group of young people that I was working with, some of the challenges in the relationships within that group that had occurred outside of the research project, entered into the space. Um, and so the violence that had occurred outside really fractured the relationships in the group, and the project was derailed. It was really a struggle, um, to move forward on the day when we came together and some folks were missing and we knew why, and the young people wanted to talk about it. And it was a very fractured group. Emotions were running really high. I was afraid in that moment for things to spiral even further out of control.
Leila Angod: [00:13:44] And I'm saying the word control while critiquing myself for saying that. But for things to escalate on an emotional level, on a reactivity level, that would then further harm the group. And so it was hard to feel the way forward there, because now I'm dysregulated from a nervous system standpoint. Now I'm frazzled. Now I'm worried. Now I'm anxious. And so thinking about how the desire that was coming up for me was to have forward movement towards the goals of the project and wrapping up what we had agreed to do as a group. I would love to tell myself in that moment, to just extend some generosity to myself and kindness to myself, to take a pause and take a minute and regroup with the facilitator team, who's also really struggling. And I might have then had that intuitive insight at that moment to say, you know, we could do individual self-reflection here. We don't have to debate this and unravel all of this as a group. There are other things we can do to come together. But while still acknowledging that this is present in the room and this is happening. I think what guided me in that decision, where I had to make that decision between the multitude of options, was to reduce harm and to move forward towards the goals we had agreed on.
Rose Gutierrez: [00:15:05] I love that you're sharing that story for the second time, that I'm hearing it deeper. When I hear it, there is so much that is required of us as community-engaged facilitators. That is so unfair, actually. You know, we have to be the host, right, to make sure that we're creating a space that feels welcoming, accessible, you know, where there's like multiple voices at play. We're doing all that. We're planning the agendas. We're also teachers. Like we're not therapists, but there's, what do you call it? Like social personal history that comes into the space. And I don't know about you guys, but besides going to teachers' college, who trained you to do this work? Like, it's your lived experience, it's community development, it's sitting with your family and like navigating conversations with like, your siblings. I know that academically, there's probably more courses than when I was younger to kind of do this work, but it's like life, work. And it's hard, it's hard because you're put in a position with huge responsibilities. We, you know, we come to this work, you know, conscious, you know, and have kind of our own values and ethics in operation. And we want to care for the group. But the other thing that I think what we do when I feel like we professionalize this, this practice that we have is that we all of a sudden assume that we're, um, we're kind of like the leader of the group, like we're responsible. But if we think about it more, as in community liberation terms, how can we shift the balance of those "oh shit" moments? Because they're happening to all of us.
Rubén Gaztambide-Fernández: [00:16:39] I actually think that it's funny that you feel that responsibility, and I'll speak for myself, because I don't want to project my own, my own traumas onto people. But and we've come up with, this word trauma has come up a few times. But I think that a lot of times the things that feel like intuitions, whether it's the intuition that drives how we go about planning, as well as the intuition that drives our reaction to those "oh shit" moments that break the plan that we had. Oftentimes, those intuitions are often to the result of trauma. And so I'll speak for myself like, you know, I grew up in an environment where as the oldest in the family, where there were these kind of moments of crisis as a child, I ended up having to navigate, facilitating conflict in my family. And in a lot of ways, that is where my intuitions come from. They come from the trauma of having had to be the facilitator. Having had to be the person who was reading the room in order to resolve conflict or in order to navigate, you know, a family member's alcoholism or something like that. And of course, that's true for everybody, right? Everybody in that room brings with them not just who they are politically in terms of positionality, but all the traumas that have informed their trajectory to that place. I wonder, like the piece about reflection is really important, but I also wonder about the limits of that sort of analysis in terms of our responsibility to this space we're in. You know, Jessica, you mentioned sort of having had the background from therapy, what you can or cannot do or what you're expected to do within a therapy environment versus a classroom environment or a community environment.
Rubén Gaztambide-Fernández: [00:18:20] So that's one thing that's been sort of circulating in my head as I've been listening. And maybe this will break the flow a little bit. But the other, in response to your question, Rose, I think one thing I've learned, because most of my community-engaged work has been within the context of a classroom, a classroom that is usually not my own classroom. I go into a high school or a secondary school, and I'm inhabiting somebody else's classroom, is that the classroom is so laden with power and authority and roles, prescribed roles, that is really, really difficult to work against them. So I was sharing earlier a lot of my "oh shit" moments were moments when I realized that despite my best intentions, what I thought I was doing, was not what the people I was working with thought I was doing. And there was this complete mismatch. Right? And that story I shared was I was doing this facilitated, I want to use the word I thought I was using, which was I was facilitating a conversation about the knowledge. And then when the conversation was over, what the student said to me is that I was lecturing. I was just completely dumbfounded, you know, like, I have been doing all this work that I thought was wonderful facilitation, and as far as the students were concerned, I was lecturing. And this complete mismatch between what I thought I was doing oftentimes in the classroom because it is so laden with power. Those are the "oh shit" moments, right, you really think that you're doing this whole work to empower the students to take responsibility for this space, and low and behold, they're still acting like students in a classroom. And they don't believe anything that you just said.
Jessica Bleuer: [00:19:47] It's so important what you're talking about power and all the power in the "oh shit" moment so that even if I have the "perfect" facilitation response, whatever that means, perfect in quotation marks, facilitation response to something. I cannot circumvent the power that I hold in my body with all my positionality. I cannot circumvent the power I bring into the space, or the power that I engage in relationship with someone else in the space, or even the institution that I'm in.
Sherry Ostapovitch: [00:20:34] Stay tuned for the second half of From "oh shit!" to "oh shift" where Leila Angod, Jessica Bleuer, Rose Gutierrez and Rubén Gaztambide-Fernández discuss the "shift", describing how they moved through those "oh shit" moments and were able to adjust their practices.
Rose Gutierrez: [00:20:50] It's interesting when you like, you have a huge kind of analysis in terms of what happens in an "oh shit" moment. So when you're designing a workshop for a group, I put in so much time, work, effort to kind of design it so that it could optimize or maximize, you know, the kind of conversation that can happen, learning that can happen. And in fact, I try to do everything that I can to not have an "oh shit" moment, right? But it's interesting now that we're talking about "oh shit" moment around, what is the value of those "oh shit" moments? And is it really a successful session or group or conversation if you don't have an "oh shit" moment? Right? And so there's that tension around, are you pushing enough? You know, are people comfortable enough to kind of be able to disclose what it is that will bring them the learning and the group forward? Um, or have you set it up so that the "oh shit" moment is really like, holy shit, like, this is going to go down and it's not going to go down well. I don't even know, as a facilitator, if I have the skills to actually move it in a way that people can come back together, you know, in a whole kind of way. So it's interesting, when I first thought about it, I thought, no, you never want an "oh shit" moment, but maybe you do.
Rose Gutierrez: [00:22:00] And if you can create the condition, or if you can scale up as a facilitator to be able to navigate them a little bit better on some or most occasions, maybe those "oh shit" moments are really important to kind of like get people to think around whatever the topic is that you're facilitating around. The strategy of the conversation was shared with all of us, because we're all experiencing that "oh shit" moment in a different kind of way, even the person who is creating the "oh shit" moment. And that it's like there's more collective responsibility with the group and maybe the strategy or the healing of the harm of that act can be better. But those "oh shit" moments are really tough because in my experience, the root is around power, privilege, oppression. They're systemic. Right? And so, you know, you got to care for people collectively or not. You got to do some teaching at the same time because it's a teaching moment and you got to repair. You're like a juggler at that moment. It's spiritually taxing. Honestly. Some of us, you know, will just do a certain amount of equity workshops. And then I got to take a break.
Jessica Bleuer: [00:23:13] You know Rose Just brought up this idea of the juggler, and then you were juggling so much in these moments. And it makes me think about, like, how do we conceptualize our role in those moments? And I love thinking about it as a juggler, because I am. I'm trying to juggle minimizing harm in a space where harm will inevitably happen just because of the power dynamics. Um, even if it's a small harm, sometimes it's a much larger harm. And I'm trying to juggle whatever the collective objective that we've all consented to do together, I'm trying to juggle trying to meet that collective objective. I guess I'm trying to juggle my own nervous system and like how activated I feel in the particular moment. But I'm also trying to juggle a bit of that therapist role. I want other people to be well in this space, whether I am or I'm not a therapist. And generally I'm not hired to be a therapist in these spaces, you know? And I'm an activist, too. Yeah. We juggle all these roles in these moments.
Rose Gutierrez: [00:24:09] We just talked a little while earlier around multiple responses to these things. And I think, yeah, there's a huge diverse number of responses. Like these are not solutions, right? But it's probably good to think that we're in a moment, like we're in a process moment right now, in which it's going to take a bit of time. Right. Like, well we know colonization took, 500 years into colonization, it's taken some time to figure it out. It's going to take some time in this moment of harm. Right. To move to all the different layers of repair. Right. Or growth in that. But I just want to fix it at that moment. And it's probably, it's not possible. Like you have to pause. You know, you have to decrease the harm at the moment or provide some care like bandaid care at the moment. And then it's like, what is the healing that needs to happen with the group when something so violent has just happened in the group? You know, those "oh shit" moments ugh they're painful. Nobody wants to go through them, but they're really part of this world. They're kind of part of this world and the world that we're in anyway, irregardless of if we're facilitating a group.
Rubén Gaztambide-Fernández: [00:25:17] And I was thinking in terms of people who are listening, who might want really concrete things to hang on to. Some of them have come up in the conversation so far. We've talked about this idea of pausing to reflect, to allow the moment to sit. You know, I think that's something that is worth thinking about, and that requires some facilitation too sometimes. To just basically actually say that explicitly of saying, okay, acknowledging something just happened, let's just take 30 seconds to sit with it for a moment and think about how we're feeling. I think that pause and reflect in the moment. You also mentioned, in terms of a concrete step, acknowledging and offering care, naming, naming, the thing that happened and what's occurring in the moment. But I'm also thinking, Rose, in terms of what you're thinking of the learning process, sort of some of the strategies we've used in terms of the long term addressing that. I can think, for example, of instances where the best approach was actually to bring an outside source, to bring somebody from the outside who is new and who might have expertise on the particularities. You know, I remember one time we had this breakdown in our group having to do with, there was a trans student who was Indigenous and an Indigenous person in the group who said some things that felt quite transphobic. And at the moment, I felt like it wasn't really my place to facilitate that as a non-Indigenous person. And so we brought an external facilitator to help us work through that. Other times, maybe caucusing is a good way to help different people in the group. Naming, here are the positionalities that are sort of implicated in this conversation. Let's caucus around the issue and think about what it means to live in this space from that particular perspective. What's going through your head? Leila?
Leila Angod: [00:27:08] Yeah. A few things. One, the timepiece is so hard and it's so hard in schools. There are so many layers of the power relationships when working in schools, and time is at the heart of the pressures of the coloniality of schooling. I'm thinking about also then how you're embedded in policies and procedures, things that have to happen when harm occurs in a school setting, and how things are required to be addressed. And, Ruben, the idea that intuition is, um, almost a reaction based on history and experience. And I just wonder if there's room for just other wisdoms to come through that are just from elsewhere, that are just not that. That are just not from our experience, that are not from our traumas, that are not from our histories. But it's that like, insight. It's that moment that really comes from somewhere else. Where you feel, you feel it in a way that is totally different from analysis and totally different from the sum of your experiences. And how can we make space for that wisdom that I'm calling intuition and feel in facilitation? Because I do feel like so many of us are, are coming from, are bringing or weaving those things in in ways that we don't name and we don't talk about. And so part of the pause, and I love too, Jessica, about the PRR and the idea of like bringing in the animal kingdoms to resources to draw from wisdom, other kinds of wisdom, to draw from that knowledge.
Jessica Bleuer: [00:28:51] And when you say the animal kingdom, you're referring to purr being like the sound that the cat makes to co-regulate?
Leila Angod: [00:28:55] Yeah. Thanks. Because we didn't say that part. Exactly, exactly.
Leila Angod: [00:28:59] Those moments where we pause, one of the most challenging things about facilitating and it's amplified in these moments is the doubleness of I'm listening to myself, I'm listening to my thoughts, I have an awareness of my feelings, but I'm also bringing that awareness to each individual in the group and bringing that awareness to the group dynamic as a whole. And it's like this, this consciousness that is really it has an intensity in how expansive it is. And to me, there is something very, very concretely spiritual about that work of observing. I'm interested in the tools that can bring us to those places of like responsiveness and observation and feeling and deep listening. Um. That still connect back to the structural and still connect back to the power dynamics and how we, Rose, you were talking about moving forward collectively, how we do that. But I'm trying to like wiggle some, a little bit more room and sort of just the idea of where we're drawing from when we're resourcing ourselves.
Rubén Gaztambide-Fernández: [00:30:07] Thank you. I'm so glad you brought that up. And you're absolutely correct. I should have said that intuition sometimes draws on trauma, but also draws on many other things. But you reminded me, is that another strategy that I think is really good to draw upon when these "oh shit" moments happen. And I'm going to use this word conscious of the fact that it means something specific in the context of Indigenous work, as it's the word ceremony. Um, and maybe it's helpful to distinguish between ceremony sort of capital C in the sense of ceremonies that have a cultural trajectory and a cultural foundation that deserves respect and acknowledgment and oftentimes should only be done by those who have that history. But I'm also thinking ceremonies small c in the terms of protocol and ritual. So, for example, sometimes one way to address these "oh shit" moments is to establish a protocol for acknowledging how we're being impacted by them. So, you know, I think of the ritual that we often had in our group, the rose and the thorn, where every time we would open with a space for each member of the group to share something positive that was happening in their life and something that was being challenging, that was a constant ritual. It was a permanent sort of ritual that always often helped us come together. Sometimes one way to address these "oh shit" moments is to invoke ritual as a way to make yourself present, and to allow for those spiritual dimensions of intuition and ancestral notions of intuition to express themselves through the ritual.
Rose Gutierrez: [00:31:36] So I'm wondering, in terms of reframing, "oh shit" now. After we've done 40 minutes, um, you know, because like, at first when I heard of "oh shit", I was like, my reaction was, "oh shit", actually and your body starts to sweat. Because that's the experience of "oh shit". But maybe that's a very like colonized reaction. And that is based on hundreds of years of systems of oppression where if there are "oh shit" moments like it really is "oh, shit" and it's actually detrimental to yourself and community and family. Whereas now, if we can unpack that a little bit in terms of looking at Indigenous practice, that "oh shit" moments are probably just ways of life and navigating them is not so punitive as what was taught to us by colonizers. That's very interesting for me to be learning here on this podcast.
Leila Angod: [00:32:28] I love that! And I wonder if there's shift moments instead of shit moments, because Jessica was sharing something really beautiful... About shift breaks as a really lovely tool. I wonder if you would say something?
Jessica Bleuer: [00:32:43] Yeah, well, we're just talking about how do we normalize collectively talking about times when our access hasn't been that accessible or times when harm has happened? And so we were talking earlier about this idea of having built into any facilitation structure these moments that we call shift moments, where we invite the people that we're working with to think about, what we actually ask this direct question, "is there anything that we could be doing, any shifts that we could be doing that would make this work more accessible to you?" And that everyone would know that there would be multiple times throughout the process that we would be asking this question and then really listening to the response from this question. So I love this instead of, "oh shit", it's "oh shift". And knowing that we need to continue shifting and responding to what's happening in the space, including harm that happens really in any space. Conflict and harm. Rubén, you were talking about ritual. And are there these structures like "oh shift" in place that can help us through these more messy moments that are very common in facilitation, and I just wanted to name that the pause, reflect, respond is a structure, like a ritual that people can be, you know, it doesn't have to be this one, but that we agree on. When these hard conversations happen, we do have these resources. We can pause and we can decide what that pause means. Does it mean we literally take a break for a bit and come back? Does it mean that we breathe together? Is it a co-regulation practice? And then we can reflect in many different ways with questions that we've come up with before the "oh shift" moment or the "oh shit moment". And in that structure of pause, reflect and respond, the response section was really just drawing from all the literature on microaggression strategies, because there is so much published about what to do when a microaggression occurs in a space, and some of it's really good.
Rose Gutierrez: [00:34:45] So can I ask you a question about that? Like in all that literature, is there an approach that examines it in the way we've just been talking about? Does it look at these community facilitated processes as kind of more of like a spiritual process space?
Jessica Bleuer: [00:35:02] In a sense, like Derald Sue who's, you know, a big microaggression scholar talks about like leaning into the process, like, try to move away from the content and try to listen to the process of what's happening between people. There's a lot of leaning in, which I think is a very spiritual concept, like avoiding, let's just move right in. There's a lot of looking at the metacommunication. So you said this, but what it feels like you were communicating was this racist idea, or this stereotypical idea or this misogynist idea. The literature has such diverse and vast microaggression strategies, but some of them do come from that, that aspect of like, yeah, this is normal, it happens all the time, let's lean in and understand what just happened here.
Leila Angod: [00:35:47] And I love bringing ritual, the idea of ritual, something important is happening here and that we're not addressing it as something broken, something that has gone wrong. But we have a toolkit of things to draw from that nourish our community, that we enjoy putting into practice in this space. And leaning into me is just the fact of like, you know what, I'm not engaging with this from the past or the future, but like what is really, really present in the room right now. Because in these moments, it's so often a feeling of perceivably, a negative emotional response. You want to get away from that feeling and you want to get away from what's happening. But it's like, well, something really important is happening here. How can we go more deeply into it? How can we feel all the feelings and feel everything that is here? And I think the ritual piece is such a beautiful way of like, well, we have tools, we have tools, let's now put them into play in this space.
Rose Gutierrez: [00:36:41] Isn't that really the meaning of when we say we want to decolonize our practice? We want to see it in a very different kind of way than we're actually than have been trained to see things. Even the original title of "oh shit" is really very much, of like, embedded in kind of a very colonized. Oh, there's so much work to do always. Right? Like its a colonized mind. Let's shift the framework.
Rubén Gaztambide-Fernández: [00:37:03] Because you're right. If the definition is, "oh shit", are those moments where what we have planned breaks down. Then by saying, "oh shift", the definition shifts from, things change from what we had planned to what actually needs to happen.
Jessica Bleuer: [00:37:17] Thinking about that, there has to be some decolonial literacy and some emotional literacy in order to embrace this new frame. Because just thinking about these moments, you know, and students and participants and teachers and facilitators, we feel a lot of very difficult feelings in those moments. And sometimes having those difficult feelings makes us think that something's wrong. As opposed to what is your body trying to tell you and teach you? And what is the wisdom of your body in this moment? That anger you feel. That anger is protective, that anger is resistant. Resistance in a resilient, resistant kind of way.
Sherry Ostapovitch: [00:38:00] You've just listened to From "oh shit!" to "oh shift", part of the Pedagogies of Community Engagement Collective special podcast series on the WhyPAR Podcast. Make sure you catch the other two episodes, such as Saving or Engaging? Rethinking Community Facilitation, where you can find out how facilitators reflect on their own experiences of saviorism. Or learn about facilitation, doulas, smugglers, and translators in the episode, Facilitator Archetypes: Navigating institutions as community-engaged facilitators.
Details
In this podcast we share moments when our facilitation plans were ruptured by unexpected challenges or situations. We discuss how we moved from through those moments and the shifts we made to adjust our practice.
Music and production by Sherry Ostapovitch
References and Further Reading
Ostapovitch, S. (2025) From “oh shit!” to “oh shift”, a conversation with Leila Angod, Jessica Bleuer, Rose Gutierrez, and Rubén Gaztambide-Fernández and the Pedagogies of Community Engagement Collective (No 2.) [Audio podcast episode]. In The whyPAR Podcast. https://www.communityfacilitation.ca/resources/oh-shift
