Teaching across borders: inclusive pedagogy and critical media practice in a global online classroom

Teaching assistant perspective 1: applying critical pedagogy to navigate cross-cultural online learning 

I, Kacie, completed my MA degree entirely online while living in a remote region of the United States. My online graduate school experience offered me opportunities to work digitally with classmates and professors from around the world who were also taking the online programme because this was a better fit for external (outside school) lifestyles and responsibilities. Like many of my classmates in the online programme, I would not have been able to complete my master’s degree without the flexibility afforded by digital learning, particularly as we navigated significant external constraints including full-time employment, remote living conditions, caregiving responsibilities, work-related travel, military deployment and other complex circumstances. This experience cultivated a substantive appreciation for global learning and for engaging within a digital-classroom community characterised by diverse cultural backgrounds and worldviews.

My pedagogical approach in this Canadian communication course is influenced by my online global learning experience as I was a TA for the communication course in its digital format. The students in my tutorial attended online each week and came to our weekly discussions from all over the world. Students joined from various time zones, some being in the middle of the night; students joined before or after long work shifts; and students joined while navigating caregiving jobs. As I embarked on this learning and teaching journey, I was frequently reminded of my own online graduate school experiences and of how my classmates and I navigated the dual demands of successfully completing our coursework while managing our broader life responsibilities. This awareness enhanced my ability to relate to the undergraduate students I taught in this large, diverse online course. Like my peers in my online MA programme, many of my undergraduate communication students were navigating the unique demands of online learning while simultaneously managing substantial personal and professional responsibilities. These pressures shaped the diverse worldviews they brought to the global classroom, as students worked to balance their individual life circumstances alongside the broader influences of systemic social issues and ongoing political and economic upheavals that influenced their everyday lives.

Accordingly, the inclusion of diverse worldviews has become a teaching tool. I dedicated tutorial time to fostering dialogue about students’ geographic locations, employment and volunteer engagements, and the ways in which the course could contribute to their academic and professional trajectories. This became a strategy in teaching positionality, which is a critical pedagogical tool that I learned from my graduate school professor Darryl Meekins (Education by Design, 2025), who balanced critical pedagogy (Freire) with cultural intelligence (Livermore, 2009) and digital learning in my online graduate school. Merging critical pedagogy, cultural intelligence and digital learning creates a shared pedagogical space in which students and instructors collectively reflect on their lived experiences and develop critical consciousness about their positionality in relation to global systems of power and knowledge.

Thus, my fellow communication teaching colleagues discuss practical ways in which they tackled this in each of their tutorials. For instance, my colleague Sebastian created Chinese-language videos to help Chinese speakers understand the Canadian communication content, and my colleague Boxi used what he calls a hybrid cultural position of being Canadian with Chinese roots to understand the challenges that international students face when studying Canadian communication.

Teaching assistant perspective 2: inclusive, task-based teaching across borders in an online Canadian communication course 

As an international graduate student transitioning from language education into communication and cultural studies, my, Fatemeh’s, approach to teaching CMDS 1000 in my first year of the PhD in summer 2025 was shaped by both my pedagogical background and my experience adapting to a new academic environment. Working with a team of other international TAs under the supervision of a Canadian professor, I quickly recognised the unique dynamics of teaching an online summer course on Canadian communication and culture to students dispersed across different time zones. Many entered the summer online tutorials with varying levels of familiarity with Canadian media and brought diverse linguistic and cultural repertoires, an observation consistent with research showing that internationalised classrooms often incorporate multiple educational backgrounds and expectations (Lee and Anderson, 2013). These conditions made it essential for me to design the tutorials’ content and format in a way that supported accessible and meaningful participation for all students, regardless of where they were joining from, especially given the additional challenges reported in online learning environments (Martin and Parker, 2014).

Drawing from my experience in language teaching, I relied on task-based and activity-centred pedagogy rather than lecturing. Thus, I structured each tutorial around group-work tasks that required students to apply course concepts collaboratively. I prepared multiple small-group activities each week: concept-mapping; short debates; comparative analysis tasks and reflection prompts, which students completed in two Zoom breakout rooms (30–45 minutes) before returning to a discussion with the whole group. This design supported learning-by-doing, which is particularly effective in online environments where passive listening can quickly diminish engagement (Martin and Parker, 2014; Prince, 2004). It also accommodated students who felt more comfortable participating in smaller groups, especially those for whom English was an additional language or who were new to Canadian academic norms.

Given the emphasis on communication and culture in the course, I intentionally integrated comparative examples from different national contexts to support comprehension and inclusion. I noticed that students engaged more confidently when they were invited to juxtapose Canadian media institutions, technological systems or cultural narratives with examples from their own countries. Discussions of topics such as algorithmic bias became especially productive when Canadian cases were compared with Persian, Indian or East Asian examples contributed by students or drawn from my own experience. This approach aligns with culturally responsive pedagogy, which highlights the importance of connecting new concepts to learners’ existing cultural frameworks (Gay, 2018; Ladson-Billings, 1995). It also proved effective in discussions of course readings, including Light’s (1999) ‘When computers were women’, which I used not as a case to analyse in isolation but as an entry point into broader questions of labour, visibility and power that students could examine across multiple cultural and technological contexts.

Another philosophy underlying pedagogy in this course was also informed by my research interest in, and scholarly work on, inequality in digital systems. Benjamin’s (2019) argument that discrimination can be embedded into technological design by default and Noble’s (2018) analysis of how search engines reproduce racial hierarchies helped me design discussions in ways that encouraged students to connect theoretical themes to familiar digital environments. These works supported my broader aim of helping students see communication and media studies not as abstract theory but as tools for understanding everyday digital life.

Overall, teaching CMDS 1000 as part of an international TA team highlighted the possibilities of inclusive, activity-based pedagogy in online, multicultural classrooms. By combining group-work structures, comparative cultural examples and critical theoretical framing, I aimed to create a learning environment that supported equitable participation for students distributed across global settings. This experience underscored how international TAs can bring distinct pedagogical strengths to courses that introduce ‘Canadian’ communication, helping students arrive at understanding through collaboration, practice and culturally grounded engagement.

Teaching assistant perspective 3: Canadian communication across modes and cultures 

I, Boxi, had the opportunity to serve as a TA for CMDS 1000 across multiple semesters, including the autumn and winter terms, as well as in the online format offered during the summer session. I found that the delivery format had a huge impact on student engagement and learning outcomes. Both my online and in-person tutorials were organised in the same way: review key concepts of the weekly readings, move to student presentations of assigned readings and end the sessions with discussion questions to encourage student participation. In the online format, I observed that students often relied heavily on PowerPoint slides instead of discussion for learnings. Additionally, all the students had their cameras off, which made it difficult to observe whether they were fully engaged. In contrast, in-person sessions allowed for more instantaneous interaction and feedback, and viewing the participating students was easier. To address the issue of participation with the online formats, I encouraged students to participate in the online chat and provided immediate feedback to their responses, as timely and substantive feedback is essential for improving student satisfaction and academic success (Lu, 2020).

I also used breakout rooms for small-group discussions, which allowed me to monitor student participation by verifying if their microphones were active or muted. Student engagement improves when online learning environments effectively facilitate collaboration and shared goals (Kahn et al., 2016). In breakout rooms, students worked in small groups to discuss the assigned questions and contribute their ideas to the class discussion. This encouraged more active participation and collaborative learning.

Having grown up in Canada with Chinese cultural roots, I have a hybrid cultural position that shapes how I understand and teach communication. This positionality allows me to anticipate the challenges that international students may face when learning Canadian communication. In a classroom with students from multiple national backgrounds, I am aware of how cultural norms influence the ways people express themselves and participate in discussions. I incorporated examples from different countries to help students understand the concepts. For instance, when discussing media regulations, I contrasted Canadian media systems with examples from the UK and China to illustrate how media systems operate in state-controlled versus independent contexts. Using examples is more effective than relying solely on writing materials (Lee and Anderson, 2013) and I believe examples helped my students to better understand the communication concepts and made the sessions more engaging.

Students may also differ in their familiarity with Canadian communication and media studies, so it is important to design the tutorial in a manner that is accessible to all students. Strategies such as group discussions and breakout rooms can improve engagement, but I have noticed that it is crucial to ensure each student has a chance to participate and share their own unique thoughts. Furthermore, I believe having TAs with different backgrounds adds another layer of richness. Our perspectives can help students see Canadian communication from multiple angles, and within a broader global context. I believe teaching is about equity, inclusion and connection; it is about creating opportunities for all students and instructors to participate, reflect and engage despite their differing backgrounds.

Teaching assistant perspective 4: challenging Eurocentric pedagogy through culturally responsive teaching beyond the classroom 

Since I, Sebastian, joined my PhD programme in autumn 2020, I have worked as a TA for CMDS 1000 every year under the instruction of different professors. Supporting my students continually reminds me of the obstacles I encountered when I first came to Canada as an undergraduate. As a TA, I have observed that many overseas students and students who speak English as an additional language (EAL) still experience limited academic performance due to challenges related to proficiency in English and cultural adaptation. Although linguistic and socio-cultural factors are often viewed as the primary barriers for these students (Pratt, 2016; Zhao and Ebanda de B’beri, 2022), recent studies argue that focusing solely on their ‘inadequacy’ individualises broader systemic problems embedded in Eurocentric pedagogy in Western universities (Ji and Chen, 2023; Yu, 2023). Specifically, Yu (2023, citing Kubota, 2001) suggests,

accentuating negative images of Asian students is a strategic way for researchers to ‘[leave] the impression that positive images of U.S. classrooms are neutral, factual, and real’ (p. 23). As a result, by exaggerating Chinese students’ difficulties and struggles, this deficit-informed research ironically perpetuates the ethnic stereotypes they seek to debunk. (p. 112)

Meanwhile, although Canada is widely known for its multiculturalism policy, Bannerji (2000) argues that this policy often functions as a political tool to manage and contain diverse populations rather than to genuinely promote inclusion. Ethnic media, crucial to the cultural development of minority communities, also faces limitations due to obscure infrastructures, with constraints on space, autonomy and scale of operation (Hayward, 2019). In contrast, Alencar (2018) and Wessendorf and Phillimore (2019) contend that integration into a host society should not be a one-way process in which students must simply assimilate. Instead, they advocate for a two-way process that ensures equitable access to social resources and encourages institutional change. These studies emphasise that Canada, as a receiver of international students and immigrants, and post-secondary institutions, as key financial and symbolic beneficiaries, must implement more inclusive practices, listen to students’ needs and provide appropriate support to enhance their chances of academic survival. Meanwhile, Wagener and Eich (2025) argue that cooperation between educational institutions and development-orientated non-governmental organisations (NGOs) can help students develop a more nuanced understanding of complex global challenges, particularly in the Global South. Similarly, collaborative online international learning has been suggested to enhance students’ ability to think beyond disciplinary and national boundaries, a quality that proved essential during the Covid-19 pandemic (Wimpenny et al., 2024). Together, these studies demonstrate the potential for internationally orientated online curricula and NGO collaborations to cultivate students’ capacity for global citizenship and a cosmopolitan vision.

Inspired by these theoretical insights, in 2022 I began producing educational videos on YouTube and its Chinese equivalent Bilibili that offer concise explanations of key communication theories in Mandarin. As both a PhD candidate and a TA, this is a personal initiative to support Chinese international students in our courses, and by sharing these videos publicly, many other students benefit as well. The videos extend learning beyond the classroom and allow me to engage with learners more closely by providing asynchronous review options and culturally responsive resources tailored to students who may feel hesitant to ask questions in class. In comparison with my tutorials, I incorporate popular culture references more familiar to Chinese students, allowing for culturally specific engagement. This personalised narrative style breaks the traditional dynamics of university tutorials and lectures by creating a more intimate and humorous form of knowledge exchange, thereby offering a more inclusive virtual learning environment (Roose, 2022). I choose to produce concise, 10-minute videos not only because of my limited time as a student but also because of my own experience as an EAL scholar. When preparing for my doctoral comprehensive exams, I often struggled with the dense and confusing language of certain theorists and I found educational podcasts and book reviews extremely helpful for quickly summarising key ideas and outlining major debates. Short videos may not capture a theory in its full complexity, but they provide a valuable starting point for students to grasp the main arguments in a familiar language, preparing them to engage more confidently with the original readings and lectures. This approach supports students’ gradual adjustment to an English-speaking academic environment by offering an accessible entry point, a reflection of the need for socially and institutionally responsive pedagogical practices. This project also allows me to participate in decolonial knowledge creation that fosters a ‘cosmopolitan vision’ among students who are not directly exposed to Western academic settings by using platforms like YouTube or Bilibili, thereby embodying the ideals of inclusive global citizenship. Canadian academic institutions could adopt this decentralised method as a model to develop online programmes that facilitate productive collaboration between domestic and foreign learners. With this strategy, international students can use their distinct cultural capital to co-engage in knowledge production, transcending the role of passive learners to active contributors in a true globalisation of intellectual discourse, while local students can develop a cosmopolitan vision through successful cross-cultural collaboration (Wagener and Eich, 2025; Wimpenny et al., 2024).

Teaching assistant perspective 5: from journalism to world-making – postcolonial limits to teaching-learning communication 

In the postcolonial context, communication studies emerged as a narrowly bounded discipline rather than an expansive field of inquiry, shaping both its institutional history and its pedagogical limits. In contrast to North America, where communication emerged through a phasal and plural process, the Indian subcontinent, for instance, where I, Ankit, have studied, remained largely unilinear and vocational. In the United States, it developed through a long internal tension between rhetorical-interpretative traditions and empiricist social-scientific approaches, with theories and research work often emerging indirectly from debates about persuasion, public life, social interaction and media effects. The field was shaped by recurring struggles over method, legitimacy and disciplinary identity – producing a heterogeneous but internally contested intellectual formation (Eadie, 2012). Canadian communication studies crystallised around a different problematic. Rather than centring persuasion or behavioural effects, Canadian scholarship approached communication from the outset as an expansive field of inquiry rather than a bounded discipline. Shaped by interdisciplinary engagements with media and technology, as well as culture, history, geography and political economy, communication was treated as a structural condition organising social life, both spatially and temporally. This orientation widened communication studies beyond individual expression or message transmission (Eadie, 2012).

Unlike these plural and internally differentiated trajectories, communication studies in India consolidated along a far narrower path, anchored predominantly in journalism and information dissemination, with little comparable expansion into theoretical, philosophical or critical engagement with communication as a constitutive social process (Dwivedi, 2021; Rajan, 1990). This trajectory limited the progression of communication studies from a discipline to a field, confining it to rigid disciplinary contours. Even in the decades after independence, communication education effectively remained synonymous with journalism training, with curricula overwhelmingly orientated towards reporting practices, editing, printing technologies and media management, rather than towards theory, rhetoric or interdisciplinary inquiry (Rajan, 1990). In the post-independence period, media education in India expanded institutionally, though largely within the same vocational framework. Universities such as the University of Calcutta, Maharaja College in Mysore, Osmania University and Nagpur University introduced a range of courses related to journalism and media practice, further consolidating media studies as a professional domain rather than an expansive field of inquiry (Dwivedi, 2021).

The establishment of the Indian Institute of Mass Communication (IIMC) in 1965 marked a significant institutional milestone, but it also reinforced this orientation. Conceived within the developmental priorities of the postcolonial state, IIMC functioned as a national centre for training personnel for information services, government publicity and mass media institutions. Its pedagogical emphasis lay in professional skill formation, media technologies and institutional infrastructure, consolidating a transmission-orientated understanding of communication aligned with state-led models of information dissemination (Singh, 1980). Even though research-orientated components were gradually introduced over time, the field continued to struggle against disciplinary rigidities. Many university departments remained print-centric, understaffed and only weakly integrated with wider debates in social theory, history, geography or political economy (Rajan, 1990). This disciplinary orientation becomes especially evident when we examine the nature of courses and degrees offered by key institutions such as the IIMC. A review of the institute’s website reveals that its academic offerings remain overwhelmingly structured around professional journalism and media training. These include postgraduate diplomas in journalism across multiple languages – English, Hindi, Odia, Marathi, Malayalam and Urdu – as well as specialised diplomas in radio and television journalism, advertising and public relations and digital media. While these programmes differ in medium and linguistic focus, they share a common pedagogical emphasis on news production, media technologies and professional skills. Notably absent are programmes orientated towards communication theory, rhetoric, political economy or interdisciplinary inquiry, underscoring how communication continues to be institutionalised primarily as vocational training rather than as an expansive field of study. (For more on this, see IIMC, n.d.)

As a result, communication studies in India rarely expanded beyond the domains of production, infrastructure and information transfer. This narrowing of communication into a transmission-orientated discipline reflects a broader postcolonial condition. Postcolonial scholarship has long argued that colonial modernity privileged instrumental communication and administrative rationality, displacing relational and collective ways of knowing. This epistemic inheritance continued to shape communication studies, which came to be understood less as a constitutive social relation and more as a functional tool of governance and development. In the postcolonial context, communication was often understood, at the level of socio-cultural subtexts, as collective and world-sustaining rather than merely instrumental or informational. This sensibility was not confined to cultural imaginaries alone but also found empirical articulation in scientific inquiry. Jagadish Chandra Bose’s work on plant electrophysiology, for instance, unsettled anthropocentric models of communication by demonstrating that plants respond to stimuli through electrical signals, thereby extending communicative capacity beyond the human realm. Despite political independence, however, postcolonial states largely retained the colonial framework of governmentality, driven by the continued imperative of subject formation and administrative control. This persistence produced a structural disjunction between text and subtext: while postcolonial societies carried forward relational, collective and ecological conceptions of communication, state practices remained anchored in colonial logics of governance. It is this unresolved tension that helps explain the enduring mismatch between cultural imaginaries and institutional rationalities in the subcontinent, and in postcolonial nations more broadly.

This course had both a TA, me and students from this disciplinary landscape too, truly shaping a global classroom. Early discussions with students about what they understood communication to be revealed a somewhat unilinear conception, one centred on the transfer of messages, shaped less by formal training alone than by the dominant media environments they inhabit. Teaching this course therefore proved pedagogically transformative. It not only challenged students – Indigenous, settler, diasporic such as South Asian alike – to rethink communication beyond transmission but also reshaped our own orientation as TAs.

The virtual classroom emerged as a shared critical space in which communication was reimagined not as the successful transfer of information, but as circulation, partaking and the sustaining of a shared world. Drawing on John Dewey (cited in Peters, 2000, pp. 16–19), communication was approached as the condition of social life itself, an ongoing process through which meaning arises from shared experience rather than from the delivery of messages. This understanding was deepened through a Heideggerian sensibility, where communication appeared as a mode of being-with (Mitsein), grounded in situated engagement and co-presence rather than in abstraction or control (Heidegger cited in Peters, 2000, pp. 16–19). In this frame, communication was no longer a technique or skill but was instead a relational condition of existence. John Durham Peters’s critique of transmission models further clarified this shift by reframing communication as a practice of partaking in and maintaining a common world, rather than as the guarantee of mutual understanding. For Peters (2000), communication does not depend on consensus or reciprocity; it enables cohabitation across distance, asymmetry and difference, and allows social life to persist even when understanding fails. Encountering communication in this way proved especially illuminating for students whose media environments encourage atomised selfhood, private consumption and expressive individualism. The course readings and discussions opened an alternative axis of thinking, foregrounding communication as shared existence rather than possession, an insight made tangible through ecological analogies, such as how plants communicate through interconnected root systems in forests, sharing resources and conditions of survival (Grant, 2018). For many students, this relational reframing disrupted the assumption of the atomised self and reorientated communication as a collective, world-sustaining practice through which communities, histories and futures are continually made.

A concrete illustration of this relational framework emerged during a class discussion on digital platforms and their impact on everyday communication. To move beyond abstract critiques of platform capitalism, I asked students to recall their experiences with local/neighbourhood grocery shopkeepers and to reflect on the forms of engagement that took place there. What followed was a convergence of deeply personal yet structurally similar accounts. Students across regions described relationships built not on explicit transactions, but on familiarity, trust and shared rhythms of everyday life. One student from Ghana recalled never having to specify the brand of detergent or soap at the local shop: the shopkeeper knew the household’s preferences well enough to hand over the correct item without asking. Another student described the grocery shop as a space of anticipation, where a small chocolate after billing was not a commodity but a relational gesture. A student from India remembered stopping by the neighbourhood shop after school to collect house keys, as both parents worked, an everyday act that folded care, responsibility and trust into the space of commerce.

These narratives revealed the shop not merely as a site of exchange, but as a shared communicative world, one sustained through repeated acts of partaking rather than explicit transfers of goods and commodities. This became evident when we posed a simple question: can such a commonality of experience exist when groceries are ordered through digital platforms? Do we know the algorithmic interface in the way we once knew the local shopkeeper, through shared spaces, minor acts of care or unspoken understanding?

The room fell silent. To make this moment legible, I raised a follow-up question: ‘Notice how difficult it is to name what is missing?’ After a pause, students across the room expressed agreement, not because they lacked opinions, but because the loss was experiential rather than conceptual. In that moment, the limits of platform-mediated communication became palpable. What platforms replace is not only the local shopkeeper, but also the communicative world built through partaking, one that cannot be replicated through algorithmic interfaces designed for efficiency, anonymity and individualised consumption.

This pedagogical experience clarified for us that teaching communication is not simply a matter of imparting knowledge of techniques/infrastructures or analysing media systems, but of engaging students with the conditions of social being that communication itself brings into existence. It is relational. Approaching communication as relational and world-sustaining allowed us to foreground how dominant, instrumental models, now amplified by platform logics, reconfigure subjects as isolated, consumptive and endlessly expressive selves while rendering the labour and relations that sustain digital life increasingly invisible (Fuchs, 2015; Terranova, 2012) and racially oppressed (Benjamin, 2019; McFadden, 2014). In this sense, pedagogy became a practice of attending to the co-constitutive relationality through which communicative worlds are formed. Instead of prioritising mastery or efficiency, our teaching practice sought to invite students to reckon with communication as an ontological force through which collective life is continually made, maintained or diminished.

Teaching assistant perspective 6: interrogating coloniality in Canadian media policy and centring Indigenous-created media 

We were committed to critical inquiry, interrogating positionality and power dynamics, and analysis of technical, cultural and political dimensions of media and communication technologies. I, Brandon, along with my teaching colleagues on this course, intentionally addressed the history and current manifestations of coloniality and modernity in the politics of education in Canadian higher education. This section addresses some of the ways we approach Indigenising the curriculum with First Nations, Inuit, Métis and Indigenous-centred perspectives. The emphasis is on ways students learned about, reflected on and considered these perspectives in their own communication and media practices.

One goal was to engage our international and domestic students alike in learning about the settler colonial history of Canada that repressed Indigenous ontologies, epistemologies and pedagogies. From 2008 to 2015, the mandate of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRC) was to gather testimony from survivors of the residential schools’ system and to assess the history and living legacy of this system. This process culminated in 94 calls to action for reconciliation. Coulthard (2014, pp. 6–7) contends that the governments and courts of Canada continue to function with settler-colonial ideologies and practices, despite shifting from overtly assimilationist and exclusionary positions to positions of recognition and reconciliation. In response to the hegemonic uses of reconciliation and recognition in government apologies for the shameful history of Canada’s residential schools’ system, Coulthard (2014) advocates for ‘a resurgent politics of recognition’ (p. 179) that is rooted in decolonisation and land-based and sovereign Indigenous authority. Education is addressed extensively in the TRC action item recommendations, with specific calls for post-secondary institutions to integrate Aboriginal knowledge systems in teaching, learning and research. Our university pursues these action items in the institution’s Decolonizing, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Strategy 2023–2028. In this course, students were taught to identify and question the relationship between media, culture and power. Students also considered approaches to communication and media studies beyond Western and hegemonic conceptions. The colonisation of knowledge is a continual reproduction of coloniality (Mignolo, 2007, p. 450); it is directly linked to the political and economic coloniality of power. De-linking and unlearning can be seen as the processes of rejecting the colonial matrix of power and the centrality of Euro-western knowledge formations.

In a unit on writing, for example, we attended to Harold Innis’s (2011) foundational contributions to the Toronto school of communication studies by explaining the ways time-based and space-based writing systems relate to social organisation, power and control, particularly in the ways empires are formed and continually reproduced. In keeping with land-based and place-based practices of Indigenous pedagogies, we countered hegemonic systems of writing with the consideration of non-alphabetic writing technologies, such as Indigenous practices of bending and shaping trees to indicate the locations and significance of different sites – a geo-graphy that literally inscribes writing on the land. In the major assignment for the final unit on networks and infrastructure, students were required to spend time on the land. They created a photo essay of the infrastructures and networks in their neighbourhoods and communities. Students then reflected on (1) the physicality and materiality of the network and its nodes; (2) what is circulated within the infrastructure, how and why; (3) how the infrastructure mediates experiences of space and time; (4) who owns the infrastructure and the policies that oversee its use; and (5) the layers of privilege in accessing, using and democratically managing the infrastructure’s services (this description of the assignment guidelines is modified from the instructional material developed by Taylor).

Other class discussions and activities investigated how Canadian media shares stories, perspectives and experiences to collaborate in the ‘shared worldbuilding’ of Canada. We also considered Canada’s multiple distinct cultures and how to reconcile Canada’s violent legacies as a colonialist state. In one tutorial activity, students examined federal and government-funded media outlets. We interrogated how Canadian media entities embody a ‘“Canadian spirit”, a bond that defines as Canadian in their soul the constituents of the nation-state’ (Gasher et al., 2020, p. 180). Students were placed into small groups and directed to review the Heritage Minutes videos website repository (see Historica Canada, n.d.). Students were then given time to watch videos and collaboratively address two questions:

1. What does the Heritage Minute tell us about Canadian culture?

2. Critically examine the Heritage Minute. How does it bring together concepts of visual media, cultural belonging and communication policy?

This activity was designed to help students understand key terms related to Canadian communication policy, Canadian identity formation through media and the role of media in perpetuating shared Canadian values and beliefs. Students formulated responses in small groups then shared their videos and insights with the full class. To open the conversation to diverse, global and international perspectives, we addressed two further questions in a full class discussion:

1. 3.

   Do you see yourself and/or your community in these representations of Canada, Canadian-ness and the Canadian ‘spirit’?

2. 4.

   If not, what kinds of policies could support a sense of belonging?

The next case students considered is the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network (APTN), established in Canada in 1999 as the first national Indigenous broadcaster in the world. APTN delivers a variety of news, sports and entertainment content that centres Indigenous stories, perspectives, issues and, crucially, languages. Students read an editorial by APTN from the network’s 20th anniversary (Martens, 2019). At the end of this tutorial session, they were asked to pay attention to the week’s news coverage on CBC media outlets and on APTN outlets. At the start of the next session, we compared and contrasted CBC and APTN news coverage and the implications of these similarities and differences in expressing Canadian and Indigenous identity/identities.