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Digital Equity & Inclusion in COVID-19


RESEARCH

Digital Exclusion in Scarborough and the Greater Toronto Area

Informed by the City of Toronto’s interest in identifying exclusions and inequities in digital access in Toronto, the Knowledge Equity Lab is conducting research on the following questions:  

  • Who and where is being underserved digitally and why? How are profit and non-profit spheres offering digital services? Whose interests are served in the current delivery of digital services and associated digital divide? Whose responsibility is it to serve communities?
  • What inequalities and discrimination can be seen in digital inclusion? Across different communities, what are the barriers linked to the digital divide (particularly for low-income, racialized, gendered and/or international students)?
  • How can community organizations in Scarborough be supported to work towards digital inclusion/access? 
Image by Lucas Law
RESEARCH

Centering Equity in Learning Assessment in Higher Education 

Assessment practices are not value-neutral. Why and how we assess student learning in university reflect our view of the role of the university in society. Assessment could serve to reflect the social justice and public mission of the university, or it could reflect a view of the university as a supplier of labour for the private sector or the power elite. Embedded in changing social, political and historical contexts, the university is simultaneously a site of social justice and liberation, but also a site of multiple forms of inequity and injustice, such as the marginalization of Indigenous, Global Southern, women, and queer communities’ ways and means of knowing. The pandemic that necessitated the massive move to “remote emergency online learning” has exacerbated and further exposed these marginalizations and the many pre-existing intersecting inequalities in our social and educational systems. This research projects seeks to reflect on, and disrupt inequitable practices and to design equity-centered assessment to empower learners, informed by a pedagogy of care.