Preface

This has been a project-in-process since 2018, with most of the work taking place during 2019. Between 2020 and 2022, we worked on preparing it for publication, initially planning to submit it as a journal article. However, the more we worked on it, the more we realized that a traditional journal article was not a good fit. It is important for us that 1) the information be freely, and publicly available, 2) the guidelines be presented along with the data we collected, and the classroom tools we’ve developed to go along with it.

By licensing it under a Creative Commons license, we want to give people the opportunity to widely share, re-work, re-use, and further develop the guidelines and the project as a whole. We found the format of an e-book to be the best fit to achieve these goals. In the spirit of the Open Research movement, we decided to share notes from interviews we conducted with students who used and didn’t use the guidelines, notes from interviews with professors about the guidelines, and summarized feedback from course evaluations in which the guidelines were used. In order to provide as many resources as possible, we also included a section with tools for the classroom which include a sample syllabus and sample classroom discussion questions, among other others. We’ve also opened commenting in the e-book with the hopes that people will share feedback and ideas, and join the conversation!

We the authors started out as an graduate student instructor and two undergraduate students, but now we have all graduated. Jake and Emma earned their BAs, and Emily earned her Ph.D. During that time, Emma has gone back to school to earn a MA in education and will be graduating in June 2023. Over the course of the project, we’ve learned a lot, and grown considerably in our thinking and writing about the project. Due to life circumstances and having graduated, Jake and Emily have not been able to keep up with the most recent publications and conversations about critical pedagogy; however, Emma has continued to forge ahead!

This project is limited by what we bring to the table. We hope that others will continue this work, bringing their own life experience, ideas, and creativity to this important movement. The hope is that the larger context of these guidelines will help others understand more deeply what we were trying to do in creating them and create a more solid foundation for building off of and improving them.

Honorable mention to Marielle Turkowski who was involved in early discussions of the project providing essential input to the development of the project, but ultimately needed to step away from the project to pursue her MA.

We would also like to acknowledge and thank Emily Keller, librarian at the University of Washington Libraries for her encouragement, advice, and insight over the many years. She was integral to the early conversations and development of this project. It would not have been possible without her. We would also like to thank Lauren Ray of UW Libraries for their assistance and support as well. We would like to thank all of the students in Emily’s “International Justice on Trial” classes in the Law, Societies, and Justices department, and the summer 2019 Human Rights in Latin America class, and other students and professors who spoke to us for this project.