Co-facilitating pedagogy circles for diversity, equity, and inclusion: Two student-partner experiences

The idea of a "pedagogy circle" was developed by several faculty members and undergraduate students at Bryn Mawr College in the summer of 2020 through the Summer Pedagogical Partnership Program.An extension of the Students as Learners and Teachers (SaLT) program at Bryn Mawr and Haverford Colleges, this work focused on preparing for the sudden shift to online teaching and learning prompted by COVID-19 (Cook-Sather & Bala, 2022).Starting in the Fall of 2020, the SaLT program began to offer Pedagogy Circles for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, co-facilitated by pairs of SaLT student partners and hosted via Zoom.This forum proved important both to continue to support college community members in managing pandemic conditions and to reckon with the demands that emerged from the strikes for racial justice that our campuses experienced that Fall, led primarily by BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color) students.These pedagogy circles foster cross-constituency dialogue about working toward antiracism, diversity, inclusivity, and equity within and beyond classrooms.Any interested faculty member, administrator, staff member, and student in this bi-college consortium is welcome to participate.Each semester we send around an announcement of the forum and a sign-up form, which automatically sends a Zoom link to those who sign up.The sessions last for 1 hour, and we typically offer two or three sessions per week.This forum has expanded to include other options, such as the Pedagogy Circle for BIPOC Faculty-a space for BIPOC faculty co-facilitated by BIPOC students (Cook-Sather et al., 2023).We are two SaLT student partners who began co-facilitating Pedagogy Circles for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in the Fall of 2022.Below we introduce ourselves and describe how we restructured and facilitated pedagogy circles that semester.By design, circles are open to everyone on campus, though the participants that semester were all faculty members.Since then, we have had students join us.We acknowledge that student and faculty responsibilities, both academic and otherwise, may prevent their participation.In this essay, we reflect on what we have learned as students, facilitators, and people and how we see this forum as a unique space in which to practice this form of partnership work.The relationships we built as co-facilitators and with circle participants are collaborative,

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