Pallavi, thank you so much for your comment. That’s why I guess we should not take the meaning of “diversity” or “inclusivity” for granted. But the point you made here seems very crucial, which is the involvement of communities in any decision-making process.

Hi Kyunghee, I totally hear you and I really appreciate that you pointed out the difficulty of actualization of diversity in any social setting. It is really difficult to disrupt the hegemonic perspective that unconsciously inscribed in people’s minds. It is even hard to think another way around within a homogenous group. I am also wrestling with the question of how can we foster diverse and inclusive thinking that we can enjoy in our lives apart from universities and institutions? I think this is the hardest part of the issue.

Hi Khaled! As many people stated here, I enjoy reading your post and more importantly, I appreciated your thoughts and being very mindful about the existing gender inequality in Saudi Arabia. It is very important to hear from a man speaking for its own country while acknowledging the existing pattern. It is hard to disrupt the hegemonic perspective on it. But hearing from you gives me hope for the possibility of change as it starts from very tiny critical thinking as you did here. Appreciated!

Dear Dr. Nelson,
Many thanks for your prompt reply and clarification about diversity in relation to inclusive pedagogy. Yes, it would be best to think diversity firstly as interpersonal relations and sensibilities within the context of the classroom.

Hi Sara, many thanks for your comment and for your time and interest to read my post! I believe my point was not to say social diversity can cause discomfort at all. As I just tried to explain in my response to Dr. Nelson, sometimes I feel institutions adopt and appropriate inclusionary discourses without even thinking what it is. When I read Katherine Phillips, I thought maybe it would be good timing to use her piece as a point of departure to share my ongoing thoughts and think out loud about this.

Also, I understand Katherine Phillips’s point that heterogeneous groups are more innovative as they tend to compromise more to include everybody; but at the same time, I can’t stop thinking that how can we define “homogenous” and “heterogeneous” groups, from what perspective. I believe each group is heterogeneous in a way. Therefore, working in any group is already able to provide a stronger atmosphere of critical thinking and problem solving for me. I don’t know, I guess I am still thinking about this 🙂 And, thanks once again.

Dear Dr. Nelson,
I appreciate your comment and thank you very much for your thoughts! I hear you and I am with you! Also, I agree with your emphasis on your second definition of inclusion as, I believe too, it offers a more promising way to articulate the concept through authenticity and power-sharing. And, I suppose my reading of Katherine Phillips is not really different from yours. The point I tried to make is to question (maybe thinking out loud) that “are we really able to acknowledge the racial, gender, and class inequalities in the practices of inclusion in a place like universities or other institutions? or would it be possible to question the ways in which institutions use those buzzwords only for their ‘image’? Sometimes, in the age of neoliberalism, I suspect the actual recognition of those words; that is to say, sometimes it seems to me that some institutions appropriate those words only for the sake of being seen as diverse. Therefore, I took Katherine Phillips’s piece as a point of departure to think inclusion in order to interrogate a different side of the story.
Besides, yes, heterogeneous groups can be more innovative since they seek ways to compromise and need to think what others expect from them and vice versa. Thanks for letting me think about that again.

That’s really awesome!!! You must definitely be grateful for your background. That is really a blessing! Yet that sometimes might be challenging to face with students who have been trained in this competitive system and a system which puts everyone in benchmarks, a bit different from yours. If you don’t mind, I kindly ask you that, – I am really curious – don’t you think that being compared with grades will badly affect students’ learning process, even sometimes discourage them?

Hi Japsimran, this is a great post and really good food for thought. While learning should be the main objective and focus, grades are seen as the indicators of the students for themselves, unfortunately. Living in a neoliberal competitive world, unfortunately, I think it is really hard to make students think more about the importance of learning. Even if we improve the current grading system to make it more learning-centric, I doubt that students appreciate that. In the class this semester, I told my students that they are really more than their scores and the result when they lost 0.75 from their quiz, most of them came to my office hours and implicitly or many times explicitly saying that they need to do an internship or their grades will have an impact their positions in military at VT. I am really struggling to find an answer to that… but appreciated your post!

Dear Dr. Nelson,
I appreciate your comment and thank you for your suggestion.
I really miss, what you said, “really reading.” As of now, I am trying to follow your suggestion and seeking to connect what I read to my previous knowledge so that I try to raise my own reading in the class. In that way, I can “sometimes” catch work-life balance in my Ph.D. life.

Hi Sara,

Thanks for reading and commenting!
I am “trying” on that too in the class that I am teaching this semester. After we watched Dr. Micheal Wesch’s TED-talks for our class, I started showing this video in my class in order to have a discussion about “real learning” and their learning process. I asked my students to write a prompt for me about these “big questions” (Who am I, Why am I here, Am I going to make it?), while being aware of how difficult is to answer them. Yet, most of them made really valuable self-reflection on them, some of them appreciated that I provided this opportunity to them, some of them came to my office to talk about their anxieties for their futures. I am glad that I could apply what I learned from this class to my own class and I have been able to build some connection with them. In the same vein, in my yesterday “international relations theory” class, instead of asking “what are your takeaways from the previous class” and forcing them to memorize main tenets of theories, in order to make them aware of “different perspectives,” I assigned them to different groups, each of them represents different theory, and asked them to apply their specific theory to a topic that I provided. Then, we had an incredibly lively discussion as they could respond to other groups’ argumentations while they unconsciously internalized theories in this kind of simulation. Yet, this is not enough for sure, I am thinking to provide something to improve their “own mindful” learning process in terms of “being present” and “alertness to distinctions.” Honestly, this is also my own struggle. I hope I can take something from our today’s class.