Content

Why does this matter?

The sources students encounter in many courses often prioritize the scholarly voices that reflect historical inequities in academic disciplines. Increasing the range of perspectives in our courses works toward correcting that injustice and makes up for the limitations inherent in any one perspective. And when our students observe the broad diversity of identities involved in scholarship, good things happen; this includes increases in student sense of belonging and retention rates as well as reductions of negative stereotypes about historically marginalized identities (Leslie et al, 2015, Marx and Roman, 2002, Purdie-Vaughns et al, 2008).

How might I do this?

• Review your course materials
  • Evaluate your syllabus in terms of how representative it is of a diverse range of perspectives, social identities, and experiences and make changes on that basis.
  • Ask a peer in your department (or a department in your discipline at another institution) or a former student to look at your content and suggest additional sources.
  • Consult your professional organizations for relevant resources and conversations around inclusive content.
• Incorporate a broader range of voices
  • Incorporate various media in order to bring other voices into the room: Ted Talks, documentaries, YouTube channels, newspapers, websites, etc.
  • Elicit student voices with icebreakers/warm-up activities that allow students to reflect on their experiences and provide different ways to engage with the course and one another: creative writing exercises, storytelling, interviews, etc.
  • Invite local speakers: Georgetown connections, DC connections, nonprofits, student organizations.
• Consider the cost and accessibility of course materials
  • Weigh the costs of textbooks and materials you ask students to buy for your course.
  • When looking to cut costs for students, search to see if relevant course materials can be found free online, or consider whther required texts can be placed on reserve at the library.
  • Educate yourself on fair use and copyright policies. Usually, if only a small part of a book or resource is needed for the course, the library can actually make a digital copy available to the course.
  • Work with the library to provide low-cost or free access to digital materials such as articles, textbooks, and films.
  • Make use of Open Educational Resources—content that’s freely and publicly available.
  • Make sure that your materials can be read by screen readers.

Why does this matter?

Encountering a range of perspectives in the classroom helps students understand their own views as well as opening them to other points of view (Clancy and Bauer, 2018). Although students can learn to express diverse perspectives, there are social pressures—the desire to get along with their peers, the fear of offending or being wrong—that make it harder for them to take this on at first (Clancy and Bauer, 2018); the professor’s authority in the classroom can make this kind of expression less risky. In addition, the student group at hand may not include people who endorse all the possible views—the group may not even be familiar with some views—which calls on the professor to fill in the gaps (Thomas and Brower, 2017).

How might I do this?

• Highlight a diversity of perspectives, and particularly those that help challenge dominant, overly-familiar narratives.
• If you could use some assistance, talk to colleagues/friends who can connect you to alternative voices in the field.
• Attend webinars/job talks/professional conferences that expose you to different points of view, particularly including presentations by scholars from underrepresented identities and experiences.
• Provide opportunities for students to hear from those different voices first hand, either in terms of guest speakers or recordings.
• Build toward a classroom climate where students feel comfortable doing some of this work themselves.

Why does this matter?

You’ve put a lot of thought into your course, and there are reasons behind the choices you’ve made. But those reasons may not be evident to anyone but you (McNair, 2016). For students new to the material, a course can seem quite opaque—particularly if that student comes to the class without a built-in familiarity with pedagogy in higher education. That opacity is a potential barrier to learning. Meanwhile, students who are given more transparent assignments (in terms of purpose, the nature of the task, and what will be considered a success) show increased levels of confidence and feelings of belonging, as well as better work in the class—and these effects are particularly strong for traditionally underrepresented groups of students (Ambrose et al, 2010; Winkelmes et al., 2016).

How might I do this?

• Explicitly name your learning goals for the students on your syllabus.
• In the instructions for a given assignment, explicitly state the reasons for it or connect it to the learning goals articulated in the syllabus.
• Engage students in a meta-conversation about the structure and shape of the course. Be as transparent as possible about why the course is structured the way it is, including why certain material is selected, and others left out. Make sure the methods for engagement, both during class time and otherwise, are clear to everyone.

Why does this matter?

Educating students about how your discipline/ field generates (and has generated) knowledge serves as a reminder that humans generate this knowledge; humans choose what to include and what to omit as scholarship accumulates over time. Some of these figures in the field themselves have messy, complex stories that have influenced the discipline in both positive and negative ways. Investigating our discipline entails complexity, incompleteness, and lines of enquiry within disciplinary assumptions about what counts as knowledge and what is produced (Donald, 2002; Chamany et al., 2008). Another way to think through your discipline’s epistemology is to consider what are the threshold concepts: What are the concepts in your discipline that define how experts in your field think, write, and work? What are the concepts that are essential to understand and without which one cannot progress? Reflecting on these concepts and on which of our students do and don’t have the privilege to arrive with background knowledge of the discipline and of academia more generally—can help us reconsider embedded biases in the concepts central to our disciplines and fields.

How might I do this?

• Use the syllabus course description and/or an annotated reading list to describe disciplinary agendas and biases.
• Early on in the semester when discussing key concepts, facilitate a class conversation on the unspoken agendas that have driven the discipline since its origin.
• Through the reading list and or class discussions, discuss and analyze with students any lack of diversity, historically and/or presently, in the field.
• Design assignments where students have the opportunity to pursue their own investigations that may challenge dominant narratives in the field.