Part Two: A Conversation about Inclusive Teaching with Faculty Member, Tara Hardy

Happy New Year and welcome to the start of Winter Quarter 2026.

 As promised, I am bringing you more insight and practical tips from my inspiring discussion with poet and faculty member, Tara Hardy. We tackled real issues students and faculty often face, and related strategies that you can apply in your classroom. 

 

In Part One of this interview, we discussed the importance of course planning for the inclusion of an intersectional curriculum, as Tara describes it. In Part Two, I would like to begin by sharing Tara’s advice for other faculty who are interested in trying this approach. 

 

 Methods for Researching and Inclusion of Diverse Sources for Course Materials 

Jess: How can other faculty do this? I imagine some of the sources you include in your curriculum are hard to find. I just can’t even imagine how you come to find some of these particular perspectives, that I feel are not very mainstream or couldn’t be easily found through a simple catalog search. 

 

Tara: Because I’ve done so many years of community organizing, I know really good people to call and reach out to and say, ‘Ok, what’s the latest here?’ But you know, I do my own research through the library…. I also just use good old Google, but if I had a piece of advice to give to people it would be to not stop at the first 2 or 3 voices that represent a certain experience… I try to get 4 or 5 voices, of a particular experience…  And then, of course, as a writing teacher I have to consider what’s happening in the craft of the writing, right? …You can definitely see times when I prioritise content over craft in order to have representation. But that’s ok, the curriculum has so much good craft that it evens out, right? But I try not to stop at “Oh, I found a voice. Do you know what I mean?” I try to go deeper, because when you go deeper, the things that you find are just essential, and they can truly shift the entire curriculum. 

 

How to Make this Process Enjoyable 

Tara: That would be my piece of advice is to go a little deeper and then the other thing, Jess, is that I really enjoy this part of teaching because I love learning too. Okay, I’m going to be honest with you, I don’t always enjoy the administrative stuff. You know the ‘file this here, file that there, blahblahblah’ – it’s not the joy (laughing).

 

 But doing this type of research, you learn so much, right? So that would be the other piece of advice around how (to do this type of course planning) is like, let yourself love it! Give yourself to it. See where it takes you, you what I mean? Get in the river! 

 

How to effectively utilize individual strengths and resources for Team Teaching 

Jess: Is this approach to course design something that you think could be applied to courses (other than writing) that don’t utilize as many first person narratives in the reading selections?

 

Tara: I mean yeah, I taught social psychology with Ada Vane… Ada taught the clinical pieces, and I found stories that wrapped around every clinical piece of a person’s stories, and it was a really interesting and fun experience. As a result of doing that, the curriculum for Writing Trauma, Resilience, Healing changed, because all of a sudden I had this new material. For example, The Collected Schizophrenias by Esmé Weijun Wang, that work wasn’t in the original curriculum because I only found it through this other research. 

 

Course Planning Tips

Tara: One of the things I do is spend a significant amount of time searching for online content that’s available, not just at the library but also online in order to cover us institutionally around copyright laws… However, most publishers have excerpts from the books that they publish online that are available for free to anyone…I also do that because students are broke, right? You know, I could have them buy three textbooks or I could teach from online free content. 

 

Student Engagement benefits from Intersectional Curriculum 

Tara: Before I was at Evergreen, I was teaching English 101 & 102, and I always brought intersectional curriculum into the classroom even when I was forced to use textbooks; because it made a huge difference for students whose voices are under-represented. I am absolutely certain that there was a higher retention rate of non-traditional students as a result of that…   I wouldn’t do it without it, because I think it is so valuable. 

  

Jess: I agree. You mentioned the higher retention with including that different curriculum, do you think that student engagement is also…?

 

Tara: I was just going to say the other thing that I noticed, is that if a program does not, for example, start with some of the hardest conversations around race, that it’s not uncommon for BIPOC students to retreat and not share as much.

 

 But what I’ve noticed over time, is that when we start the quarter saying ‘Hey, these conversations are on the table.’ Right away, I’ve noticed that BIPOC students stay engaged more, and that’s also true for trans and non-binary students and very much true, also, for students with disabilities. Though I think that students engage in different ways based on if they start to see themselves represented. Representation is so important, you know. 

 

 On Hot Moments in the Classroom 

Jess:  In your program, (Writing Healing) I felt the importance of the foundations we laid so that trust could develop; creating an environment where students felt they could voice something to you if there was something missing from the curriculum.

 

Tara: Agreed… and sometimes… I’m going to be honest with you, students who come from more privileged backgrounds find the material in my classes to be a little off-putting because they’re asking the question, ‘Where am I?’ And my answer to that is: ‘almost everywhere else. You are almost everywhere else.… it might be a little jarring to experience a space where your voice or the voice of your peoples are not prominent in this. But what is prominent are the voices of people who are most impacted.’

 

Yeah, so I would say the principles of disability justice are involved in all the work; And it’s funny, because when people who are not familiar with the principles hear (the principles of disability justice) they think it’s all about our disability, but the principles of disability justice are all about intersectionality and also anti-racism, gender liberation, etc. All those things are essential.

 

The Benefits of Self-Reflection

Jess: I think there can be underlying frustration if students are feeling that there is something missing. I feel like this may go unnoticed by faculty sometimes. Students might be afraid or unable to identify or voice these concerns. 

 

Tara:  Yes, very much so. Or students get blamed for disengagement. 

Actually, it’s one of the things that happens for me, when a student disengages, I ask myself: what about the program or about me has facilitated that?

….sometimes…faculty ask, why has the student retreated?…

I think the conversation needs to shift to: what would invite you to participate more? 

 Or even without directly talking with the student, I talk to myself about what are some things that I maybe have done or haven’t done that could encourage that student to stay engaged.

 

Closing thoughts from Jess

I hope this interview has left you feeling inspired and motivated to seek out sources of diverse representation when course planning, seeing the ways it can benefit student engagement and retention.

Not only is it a benefit to our students and a means for expanding our own perspective, it is a responsibility we have as educators. As Tara so eloquently expressed it, we ought to consider this responsibility “because…the solutions that we will create together will be imperfect, partial, and potentially harmful, if we’re not looking at as many perspectives as possible.”