I last taught my graduate course in conservation biology in Fall 2015. Holly Brown, my teaching assistant in the course, had to fill in for me a couple of times because of commitments that took me out of town. She designed a creative and powerful exercise for one of the times I was out of town. In written evaluations of the course, almost every student reported that it was eye opening and, quite possibly, the most useful exercise in the course. What was this creative and powerful exercise? Holly’s version of a privilege walk. If you don’t know what that is or you want to know how she used a privilege walk in the context of conservation or both, it’s your lucky day. A paper describing the exercise recently appeared in Conservation Biology. Here’s the citation and a link.
Brown, H.M., A. Kamath, and M. Rubega. 2017. Facilitating discussions about privilege among future conservation practitioners. Conservation Biology 31:727-730. doi: 10.1111/cobi.12810