Marsha Hinds Myrie is an Educational Developer, Anti-Oppressive and Inclusive Pedagogies, Office of Teaching and Learning, University of Guelph. Marsha is a career teacher with over two decades of experience at all levels of the educational system including delivering educational services to neurodivergent and disabled communities. Marsha believes that the core of anti-oppressive and anti-racist pedagogies is rejecting colonial hierarchies in all forms and renegotiating partnerships of equality and mutual respect that benefit us all.
Marsha’s life and work are an embodiment of dualities and intersections. She is a Barbadian/Canadian citizen with an ancestral, cultural and intellectual home in Africa. Her career unfolds, sometimes spectacularly and sometimes confusingly at the intersections of activism and education. Her lived experience makes identity and transdisciplinary practice two major components to her pedagogical approach. The philosophical mooring for Marsha’s interaction with anti-oppressive and inclusive pedagogy comes partly out of her PhD research which focused on the ways in which political and cultural experiences shaped the development and creation of intellectual spaces and intellectual thought in Commonwealth Caribbean tertiary institutions. Through examining the design and approach to teaching in non-western universities, western universities can find concrete and tried strategies that deliver decolonial, inclusive, anti-oppressive learning spaces.
Hinds Myrie came to the University of Guelph in September 2021 and continues to find ways both in and out of the classroom to highlight the University of Guelph’s connections to Caribbean and Black intellectual movements while also creating space for deepening and widening the engagement. The epistemological values that create disciplines in the Western academy are still immensely uncomfortable for Hinds Myrie but if required, she would classify her substantive disciplinary areas and research as womanism, Black Studies, philosophy as praxis and intellectual history. Marsha is an Adjunct professor in the Department of Political Science. She is a public intellectual steeped in the Caribbean intellectual tradition, critical studies and Black Canadian/Diasporic Studies.