MYFest is founded on “Intentionally Equitable Hospitality” (better known as IEH).
What is IEH?
Intentionally equitable hospitality begins with the notion that a workshop facilitator is a “host” of a space, responsible for hospitality, and welcoming others into that space. IEH requires intentionality about who is involved in the design of that space, noticing for whom the space is hospitable and for whom it is not. IEH is iterative design, planning, and facilitation in the moment. Learning together holds the potential for unique growth moments, and can be truly transformational if it is tied to a sense of belonging. IEH is a values-based approach that promotes co-learning, by prioritizing the needs and wants of the most marginalized.
Intentionally equitable hospitality is not neutral, as it IEH centers values rather than measurable predetermined outcomes. IEH prioritizes the values of social justice while fostering learner/participant agency within the learning space, while never forgetting the ways in which power and oppression work outside of that learning space, and how they influence it. The work requires a constant renewal of the daily effort to pay attention, to interrogate one’s own positionality, to imagine and extend one’s own critical engagement with “the other”, and to reckon with the limits of one’s own understanding of other people’s lives—to model this and explicitly discuss this so that co-learners can begin to practice IEH with one another.
The text above is directly extracted from a forthcoming article: Bali & Zamora (in press). Intentionally Equitable Hospitality as Critical Instructional Design. In Quinn, J., Jhangiani, S., Burtis, M. (eds). Designing for Care.
Here is a brief video explaining the main concept of IEH. The video was recorded during the Intentionally Equitable Hospitality Series in January 2023
Previous publications on Intentionally Equitable Hospitality include:
Bali, M., & Zamora, M. (2023). Designing and Adapting for Community with Intentionally Equitable Hospitality. Learning Design Voices. University of Cape Town.
Bali, M., Station, G., Zamora, M. (2022, August 24). Online Does Not Mean Isolated. Inside Higher Ed. https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2022/08/24/building-community-online-conferences-events-opinion
Bali, M., & Zamora, M. (2022). The Equity-Care Matrix: Theory and practice. Italian Journal of Educational Technology. doi: 10.17471/2499-4324/1241
Bali, M., Caines, A., Hogue, R. J., DeWaard, H. J., & Friedrich, C. (2019). Intentionally equitable hospitality in hybrid video dialogue: The context of virtually connecting. eLearning Mag. Retrieved from https://elearnmag.acm.org/archive.cfm?aid=3331173
