Category: Week 8 – Inclusive Pedagogy

This week, I want to specifically address Katherine Phillips piece entitled “How Diversity Makes Us Smarter.” My typical approach to blogging is to try to relate the readings to my own experiences, and this one really hit close to home. Having grown up in a conservative, rural small town, I spent most of my adolescent years attending church youth group, playing sports, and silently chastising the lifestyle choices of the more artsy, progressive students in my school. This is not to say that my childhood was inadequate, so to speak, but it was undoubtedly uni-dimensional and not necessarily conducive to personal discovery and growth.

I had the great blessing of being accepted into graduate school in New York City, which eventually led to my being introduced to my Jordanian husband, and moving to the Amman to live for a year. This would come to be one of the most critical and informative years of my life.

Last week was not one of the best weeks I had this semester. I was trying to cope with the feeling of being lost in my teaching and academic experience when one of my professors referred to the concept of diligence as part of his definition of the qualitative side of our work as scholars. This concept led me to think about the way we perform our daily teaching practice and interactions in the classroom and work environment. I have found out that as the workers in the knowledge production process, we have to cope with the contradiction between reductive pragmatism and immense idealism. Thus, the gap between these extreme approaches is the space where our conscious and unconscious processes are negotiated. I realized that becoming a scholar/teacher required a diligent and constant effort to navigate within this gap by paying attention to our biases and prejudices, by opening space for diversity, and creating an inclusive environment.

The excerpt[i]from the ‘Hidden Brain’ by Shankar Vedantam illustrates an extreme example of the extent to which individuals may act indifferent to immediate human suffering. During the incident at the Belle Isle bridge in Detroit, a woman of color tried to avoid verbal harassment by a man, who later chased her to the Belle Isle bridge with his friends two other friends. Beaten and injured severely, she climbed to the edge of the bridge to save her life. The moment she realized that her perpetrator will not stop and that there is no one to help her, she jumped off the bridge holding on to the slightest chance of her survival. All happened before the eyes of many bystanders, who acted as spectators of a horrific scene rather than witnesses to a brutal crime. Vedantam argues that those who came forward as witnesses later “did not have the insight into their behavior.”[ii] Presenting that our mind works in two modes, pilot/conscious and auto-pilot/unconscious, Vedantam argues that “the autopilot mode can be useful when we’re multitasking, but it can also lead us to make unsupported snap judgments about people in the world around us.”[iii] The “hidden associations”[iv] between new situations and preconceived beliefs start shaping our unconscious when we are as young as three years old. Thus, these connections, centered on the dichotomy of the Self and the Other, determine how we value human life. The moment some of the bystanders changed their minds and admitted their guilt was when they found out that the victim was a mother of a thirteen-year-old.

The Belle Isle bridge incident proves that the life of a woman of color becomes worthy when she had the title of mother, which is respected and sanctified and with which the spectators of the horrific scene at the bridge can identify. Thus, the mind tends to fill the logical gaps with our social and moral judgments, partly shaped by the conventional thought patterns of the society in which we were born, raised, and live. The sense of familiarity or foreignness shapes the way we feel and act within a particular environment. Katherine W. Phillips introduces that it is not hard to understand why people prefer a homogeneous environment over a diverse environment. The conformity of the former is easier to handle than the former: however, Philips invites us to look closely into the benefits of diversity before judging and eliminating it. Thus, she presents some studies showing that diversity increases productivity, and enhances decision-making and problem-solving skills since it pushes us to change the way we think about the problems and issues with which we deal. Philips concludes that “when we hear dissent from someone who is different from us, it provokes more thought than when it comes from someone who looks like us.”[v] Although this idea is plausible, we also need to ask the conditions under which we hear about the dissenting opinion of someone.

In her book, Whistling Vivaldi, Steele shares her experiences in her academic career. Steele presents our perception is segregated by the actor/observer dichotomy. Her example concerning a discussion on racial bias in the university setting illustrates the miscommunication between the administration and some students, who recently become aware of their status as a member of a minority. Steele captures a significant point that everyone is not heard the same, as she switches from observer’s perception to actor’s perception, and shares her realization as follows: 

“These students lack motivation or cultural knowledge or skills to success at the more challenging coursework where underperformance tends to occur, or they somehow self-destruct because of low self-expectations or low self-esteem picked up from the broader culture or even from their own families and communities.” (22)

In the face of the rigidity of structures of cultural domination and social organization, I wonder whether the actors would feel safe to make their voices heard in the first place. Also, even if there is enough evidence to invest in diversity in our highly pragmatic professional life, is such belief capable of removing the glass ceiling? I believe as long as we rely on our observer perception, to which Vedantam refers as the hidden brain, we could only come up with suggestions such as “try twice as hard ignore what other people think”[vi] or “just have faith in yourself”[vii] to the struggle of the Other.

As scholars/teachers, I believe we have an important role in shaping the blocks with which we construct the frameworks of culture and social organization. The activity of teaching is part of our everyday practices in which we encounter and reproduce the hidden associations that are the by-products of the history of suffering. Our task is being diligent and self-reflexive, not only with our teaching and scholarly works, but also in our day-to-day interaction with our students and our encounters with the physical, political, social, and cultural structures of the university environment.

[i] See http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=122864641

[ii] Ibid

[iii] Ibid

[iv] Ibid

[v] See https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-diversity-makes-us-smarter/?wt.mc=SA_Facebook-Share

[vi] Ibid

[vii] Ibid

Bibliography

How ‘The Hidden Brain’ Does The Thinking For Us: NPR, http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=122864641 (accessed March 06, 2017).

How Diversity Makes Us Smarter: Scientific American, https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-diversity-makes-us-smarter/?wt.mc=SA_Facebook-Share (accessed March 06, 2017)

Stelle, Clause M. Whistling Vivaldi: How Stereotypes Affect Us and What We Can Do. New York. W. W. Norton & Company, 2010.

I bet you’re thinking “Why did she use the words affect and effect side by side in the title? It makes no sense!” If this was your first thought, hang in there — I promise it’ll make sense by the time you’re done reading this article. Let me start by defining the word affect as it was used in the title. Affect (pronounced “af-ekt”; noun) is a term  referring to feeling or emotion, and it plays a key role in how an organism (i.e. humans) reacts to a stimuli.  Much of my doctoral research is focused on understanding the relationship between affect and food and how that relationship influences food choice. Additionally, I also study affect’s role in biases as it pertains to interdisciplinary group settings. So when I read Shankar Vendantam’s How “The Hidden Brain” Does The Thinking For Us, I couldn’t help but think about how my research relates to inclusive pedagogy.

https://performancemarks.com/tag/swb/

In his article, Vendantam mentions that our brain operates in two modes: “pilot” (consciously) and “autopilot” (subconsciously). What’s fascinating is that the brain absorbs and processes information in both modes simultaneously. We don’t realize it, but our brain takes a multitude of explicit (i.e. consciously perceived) and implicit (i.e. subconsciously perceived) factors into account when cataloging information for future use. Even the positive or negative emotions we experience during an interaction with a stimuli can affect how we will respond to it (or with other stimuli we perceive as being related) in the future.

https://www.pinterest.com/pin/520939881876110453/

As Vendantam stated “…the mind is hard-wired to ‘form associations between people and concepts’.” From the first moments of fetal existence, everything we encounter or experience shapes how we think for the rest of our lives. In the whole nature vs. nurture debate, it’s safe to say that nurture significantly impacts one’s cognitive processing. What does this mean in the context of pedagogy? Everything.  It means that each and every student is unique in how they behave and interpret the world around them. This impacts their ability to learn and interact with information as well as their fellow classmates. As an educator, it means that your teaching style as well as the manner in which you conduct yourself and your class are greatly influenced by your past experiences. It means that the individual experiences of students in your class will impact their future actions. This is why, as educators, it is vital that we are mindful of ourselves, our students, and the learning environment we establish. Care needs to be taken to ensure our courses are as inclusive as we can make them. With 10 or even 300 unique individuals in a class,  maximizing inclusivity may seem like a daunting challenge. However, by focusing on learner-centered materials and teaching methods, I believe any educator can be successfully implement inclusive pedagogy.

https://spark.adobe.com/page/qRKQz/

http://accordcoalition.org.uk/2016/05/27/winners-of-2016-accord-inclusivity-award-announced/

As a social scientist I appreciated this week’s readings. Shankar Vendantam, The Hidden Brain -which discussed the brain on “autopilot” and  children’s absorption through cultural upbringing associations of faces really struct me. the author states that, “hidden associations” of that essentially determine what happens in the unconscious minds of these children. “Our hidden brains will always recognize people’s races, and they will do so from a very, very young age,” Vedantam says. “The far better approach is to put race on the table, to ask [children] to unpack the associations that they are learning, to help us shape those associations in more effective ways.” The author also speaks to the fact of the “colorblindness” issue of the U.S. (it would be nice if everyone were colorblind but in all reality we are not)

I appreciated reading this document as I have yet to teach and being an instructor in Sociology I have been anxious in thinking how I would discuss and instruct topics of race and race related issues to students that already have a positionality. I have been anxious about how I would  introduce “uncomfortable” conversations to students but still constructing an environment of respect of peer option. The author lightly mentions about how to “take back the controls” of our unconscious thoughts but does not go into detail about how to do so -the only critique that I have about this piece but otherwise it is useful to read insight to how our conscious and unconscious mind works. The author states that we us our unconsciousness/ “hidden brain” more often than we may realize.

Diversity enhances creativity. To me that is a clear statement. The fact that there are structure issues in society that is not inclusive and pushes a homogeneous group up in society while leaving others behind in problematic. The fact there is a “Inclusive VT” program in 2017 worries me a little (even though it is a great program and I appreciate the call for inclusion) these efforts should have been put into the making along time ago. “If we are to change, grow and innovate as quoted from Katherine W. Phillips, “How Diversity Makes us Smarter”. The discussion of safe spaces was also a topic in this week’s readings, speaking from my perspective and my identity in society there are a lack of safe space to have conversations in relation to race and social justice, in academia that is another story. As an instructor my hopes are to create a space space for my students especially with having to instruct course that directly deal with these issues. Would that space provide students with enough comfortableness for them to share the thoughts in their hidden brain? Would that be necessary for students in order the feel included and heard (as we all have had different experiences)? These questions maybe answered in different way or not at all, however as I am a still in the learning process I do hope that I learn how to construct a conducive classroom environment for all my students to be able to think like a sociologist.