Maywa Montenegro

While critical current events and lived experience have always shaped how instructors teach and students learn in the classroom, instructors have recently faced a less distinct divide between their classrooms and the events outside them, as global crises imbue our local contexts with lasting impacts. Salient examples include the sudden shift to remote learning at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and nationwide student protests across U.S. higher-ed institutions, including our own, in response to the genocide in Gaza. In addition, we continue to face a wide range of implications for higher-ed institutions under the current federal administration, particularly the dismantling of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives.

In this context of a “polycrisis,” Maywa Montenegro created a Social Sciences Division-wide community of practice on “Difficult Conversations” in the 2024-25 academic year, demonstrating a deep commitment to supporting our campus community in responding with care to increasingly challenging times. Associate Professor of Environmental Studies and Associate Dean of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in the Social Sciences Division, Montenegro leveraged TLC’s guide on “Addressing Critical Current Events and Holding Difficult Conversations in the Classroom” and a small grants program through the UC Office of the President to develop this opportunity for meaningful instructor engagement. The community of practice model recognizes that, just as peer learning and mentoring help students learn more effectively, instructors also benefit from peer support – and collective care – to teach in complex times. 

As part of their participation in this learning community, a cohort of Graduate Student Teaching Assistants, Non-Senate Lecturers, and Teaching Professors implemented evidence-based strategies for promoting inclusive dialogue with students, documented their reflections, and synthesized their experiences through reports or creative projects, which are now archived on a “How to Have Difficult Conversations in the Classroom” website created by Professor Montenegro. 

The TLC invited Professor Montenegro to discuss her vision for the learning community and to reflect on her colleagues’ projects. We invite campus educators to visit the website to locate additional compelling examples of instructors engaging students in “difficult conversations.” 

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Can you share with the campus community what motivated you or inspired you to initiate this learning community on “How to Have Difficult Conversations in the Classroom”?

I was motivated by a few intersecting currents. First was my experience of being an instructor during turbulent times, whether it was graduate student COLA strikes, US presidential elections, or the ongoing genocide in Gaza. Was I supposed to plow ahead with the planned lecture? Pause to recognize and engage students with ‘current events’? Second was my finding out that the science of learning suggests that ignoring the world is not a strategy for pedagogical success! I found out that the literature suggests it’s better to acknowledge and discuss traumatic events than to ignore or sidestep them. I also very much understood that faculty and graduate students often don’t know how to do so. Folks have substantial uncertainty about opening up controversial issues, particularly in the current political climate. So, I was very interested in introducing UCSC SocSci instructors to evidence-based strategies that can help guide these so-called “difficult conversations.” 

In the first (and hopefully not last) iteration of this learning community, you primarily invited graduate student instructors, non-Senate lecturers, and teaching professors to participate in this professional development opportunity. Can you share more on why working with this group of instructors felt important to you?

Yes! Initially, I thought about including Senate faculty in the initiative. But I’m also aware of power asymmetries that can occur in small learning communities when graduate students (for example) work alongside faculty to address issues that are already sources of conflict, disagreement, and debate. As importantly, I wanted to uplift our ASEs, lecturers, and Teaching Professors, who are on the frontlines of teaching on this campus, and offer them the chance to skill-build together in a non-judgmental and supportive setting. On the great advice of Teaching Professor Amy Argenal, we implemented “thought partner” pairings, so that participants were able to bounce ideas off another person in the learning community on a rolling basis. 

One outcome of this learning community has been the development of a website featuring the projects of its participants, centering their experiences, reflections, and lessons learned. What has stood out to you about these instructors’ projects?

Our overall goal was to take the TLC guide for addressing critical current events and put them into practice in our classroom spaces. In documenting our learning and sharing experiences with one another in the learning community, we wanted to socialize this process. We were also curious: What makes a conversation “difficult” in the first place? Why is it hard and for whom? 

The projects now gathered online represent a synthesis of our learnings. I was deeply impressed by their diversity, depth, and creativity. Across Education, Environmental Studies, the Writing Program, Psychology, and Economics, lecturers and TAs often added new components to their syllabi in order to make space for challenging conversations to bubble up. For example, Tiffany Wong in the Writing Program teaches an asynchronous course in three “Acts,” each connected to a major assignment. This year, Wong dedicated Act 3 to “difficult conversations,” emphasizing ethical dilemmas and moral injury in the context of a US army veteran’s experience. She created a YouTube video in which she interviewed a US veteran of several US wars, guiding her class through a series of writing exercises and group discussions that centered the strategies in the TLC guide.  

What makes these conversations “difficult,” Wong reflected, is that the war veteran discusses his experience with PTSD, confronting his own complicity in torturing perceived enemies, even after he had stopped believing in the mission of the US during its invasion of Iraq in 2005. In so doing, Wong provided a “window within a window” for students to observe a conversation that, while exceedingly difficult, showed a person whose deepest convictions were challenged and overturned in time. Without judgement or blame, they saw how “violence damages not only the victims but also those ordered to carry it out.” 

In another example, ENVS Lecturer Katie Monsen designed her project to be a part of her Summer session class, Agroecology & Sustainable Agriculture (ENVS 130A/L), guided by a “Conversations Journal” in which students responded to articles posted on Canvas. For the first round of questions, she began with a “not too controversial” piece on soybean spraying, encouraging students to be curious, give space to others without interruption, and leave room for silence and thinking. These guideropes for conversation really helped, Monsen explained, even though students didn’t agree with one another. “No consensus, but hearing from each other, building off each other. So much deeper than I expected. Rinse + Repeat, right? Well….”

Soon after, Monsen was charged with extractive data collection. For context, she and her students traveled to the Central Valley and the East Bay, where they talked with small-scale farmers, food activists, and other practitioners. During this time, the students shared meals, thought through assignments together, and pondered deeply about justice and agriculture. One of the key field lab assignments had students take soil samples and doing soil tests at the farms they visited. This is when an email landed in Monsen’s mailbox. A student explained that they had been learning about the need for respect, for collaboration, for care of, and relationship with, farmers, as part of (critical to!) good and just agroecology. Going onto farms and doing extractive data collection without reciprocity felt wrong. Could we rethink this? 

For the next Conversations Journal, students read a journal article arguing that “new crops” identified by scientists are seldom new to Indigenous communities of that place. Elderberry, for example, is well known to nearly 200 tribes in California who have long been in relationship with the plant and the land on which it grows. Students reflected on this critique, which sparked a generative conversation about how academic researchers need to pay attention to not just who is included by how research is done. 

To Monsen’s surprise, the students then drew a direct link to the soil sampling experience. “They were hurt,” she recalls, “that I had put them into the very position from which we’re trying to break free, this extractivist approach to agroecology.”

I bring up these two examples because the first shows students observing their instructor and another person having a “difficult conversation” in ways that elucidate violence and encourage accountability without re-creating trauma for the people involved. The second illustrates that tough conversations can pop up anywhere in a class, often not in the planned pathways! Professor Monsen showed a lot of courage and skill in maintaining a “learner’s mindset” and being open to students’ concerns. I’m sure it was “difficult” to receive this feedback about her own assignment, just as it was uncomfortable for students to feel dissonance between the liberatory principles they were learning and the extractive practices they were deploying. By laying the groundwork for active listening and self-reflection in the Conversations Journals, Monsen had given students tools to interrogate the power relationships inherent in making knowledge – and they applied it to their own actions in lab. She was also able to receive their concerns in ways that honored students as producers, not just recipients, of knowledge in the classroom: “I was able to listen to them, acknowledging their feelings, sharing their concern, and open the door to rethinking this.”

These instructors put significant time and effort into these projects. Do you think instructors who aren’t participating in a targeted learning community can still benefit from these approaches? 

I’ve emphasized the planning and foresight instructors brought to their projects. But another thing that stands out to me from this experience is that many of us are already doing “difficult conversations” every day in our classrooms, guided by relevant theories and practices from our respective fields. 

For example, Betsy Centeno, a TA for Community Psychology, grounded their  project in “cariño,” or care, an existing central tenet of their teaching philosophy, and one which they describe as “being intentional about nurturing meaningful relationships with students.” Their course critically examines topics like colonialism, racism, immigration, housing, gender & sexuality, the university, and more. So they had plenty of potentially divisive material to work through. They combined cariño principles with TLC methods such as checking in at the start of class, reflective journaling to help students pause and collect their thoughts, and strategic empathy, a technique in which instructors resist the urge to correct students, instead engaging them in questions that promote their own self-reflection and critical thinking. 

In another great example, Amanda Lashaw in Education brought her expertise in Freirian pedagogy to grapple with the issue that sometimes the problem of “difficult conversations” isn’t that people are actually disagreeing. It’s that they are uncomfortable with, even terrified of, disagreement. For her class, Lashaw wanted to nudge students past their discomfort in disagreeing with one another. Connecting popular pedagogy to disability justice studies, she asked her students: How do people who are committed to the liberation of oppressed groups need to challenge each other’s ideas in order to interpret and act on social problems? For an assignment, students watched, discussed, and analyzed Crip Camp – a documentary about the disabilities rights movement – to practice getting more comfortable with disagreement. They read from Freire, as well as from social movement icons such as Ella Baker and Grace Lee Boggs who argued that communities must seek out and discuss contradictions and tensions in order to puzzle out lasting solutions to social problems. These scholars taught that by surfacing a diversity of perspectives can people learn to see their own ideas more clearly. Students then came up with their own creative means of doing so: an anonymous discussion thread where they could share their own experiences with, knowledge about, or ignorance of ableism. 

Finally, and importantly, it’s not just instructors whose courses are based on theories of liberation pedagogy or care philosophies who can mobilize these strategies to excellent effect. It’s also not limited to courses whose topics we might imagine lend themselves to emotionally sensitive topics and/or political debate. For instance, Hyunjin Yun, a TA for Econometrics, was able to address students’ concerns about grading by showing empathy for wider conditions that may trigger grading anxiety to begin with. Also in Economics, Lecturer Julie Gonzalez created a structured framework for debate that acknowledges its positive versus normative aspects and is rooted in strategic empathy. Tariffs and trade rules can be sites for surfacing productive frictions! Across the board, I’d say, the projects reflect a great deal of empathy – both for students and for instructors who often carry the emotional labor of trying to hold space for the complex beliefs, convictions, and values that surface in a classroom, while taking care of our own wellbeing.

How do you envision this type of work continuing on our campus, especially as we continue to face political challenges in higher education and beyond? 

We know learning is not just a clinical, cerebral exercise. As noted on our theory page, “educational scholars who research effective practices in social justice education remind us how important emotions are to both the teaching and learning process.” In seeing how Social Sciences participants crafted their syntheses, I was struck by how many chose expressive media: creating ‘zines, drawing, handwriting, and sketching their feelings about how the difficult conversations went in their classes. Maybe it’s because art is a throughline to emotions!

To me, this suggests that taking up the work of difficult conversations – across the range of how people interpret “difficult” – may also be an opportunity to bridge across the way we make knowledge in Arts, Engineering, Sciences, Social sciences, and Humanities. We span biophysical and social fields, quantitative and qualitative approaches, studies of pasts, presents, and future, nano-scale to the universe, using positivist, critical, and interpretive methods and more. This epistemic range seems useful in connecting as mutual learners during times of polycrisis. 

By this, I mean that a premise of the TLC guidelines is that these strategies will help instructors respond to “critical current events.” In reality, we’re now educating amidst polycrisis: students and faculty aren’t just dealing with multiple traumatic events unfortunately happening at the same time, they are facing structurally interconnected expressions of social, environmental, and economic exhaustion. Whether people take on board this conjunctural analysis or not, for practical purposes, we can expect disruption to be a new normal, and crisis an ongoing “current event.” 

While that can be downright terrifying, it clarifies the stakes of honing skills for moving past debate and discussion into dialogue. Not because any conversation will make violence, injustice, and precarity go away, but because when we share lived experiences, when we can examine existing patterns of thought in our groups, and when we move through our frictions instead of shying away from them, we will be better situated to face the world we live in right now.

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The community of practice led by Professor Montenegro reminds us that teaching and learning never exists in a vacuum. Instead, they are profoundly shaped by experiences outside the classroom, including the deeply felt emotions that color our day-to-day life. These emotions include grief, trauma, anxiety, and fear that both instructors and students alike experience as we continue to face politically challenging times that produce threats to human rights, economic uncertainty, social disconnection, food and housing insecurity, and other forms of structural violence. Our communities continually navigate local contexts inextricably linked to contemporary global events, such as systemic racism, war, imperialism, and genocide, resulting in social precarity that is deeply felt in the body and mind. More than ever, we require collective care and sustained efforts to practice pedagogical wellness across our campus to promote equitable learning environments and ensure our mutual well-being.