I really enjoyed your post. In addition to reflecting on our own experiences, I think it is so valuable to listen to and engage with others who have different experiences and perspectives. And this can help us better reflect on our own biases, experiences, and perspectives.

Thank you so much for sharing how you are encouraging perspectives, discussions, and grace in your classroom. I would love to come and sit in on your class when you talk about grace! What a valuable topic to cover!

I really enjoyed your post! You made a lot of great and interesting points and connections between diversity in nature, research, and teaching. I am interested to hear your thoughts on how you might get away from the “rigid syllabus, the standardized exams, the lectures that only appeal to certain types of learners” and encourage multiple perspectives in a classroom setting. Thanks for your post!

I agree that teaching about perspective is so important. I remember so much of my education being taught facts and truth. And I did not realize that value and importance of perspective (my own or others’). One simple example is how I viewed history as a student. I remember learning about history as a series of dates and facts and I did not engage in other perspectives or confront my own. Even in my engineering education, I often tried to find the “right” answer. But engineering is not so simple. We have to choose which problems to solve, select a design, identify requirements, etc. And those all are influenced by perspective.

Thank you for your post. I really enjoyed reading it. I agree that it can be very hard and problematic to only talk about diversity in terms of what it can do for us and what value it has. In my experience, however, it can be challenging to explain to some why diversity is important. In my field, I often am trying to convince people that diversity in engineering is important and that we should be working to increase diversity in engineering and better support students as they pursue degrees in engineering. And one way to explain why diversity is important is to show what value it can bring to programs/universities/companies/etc. But diversity is important for so many reasons beyond that. I am really curious to hear your thoughts on how we can bring about this type of change.

I really enjoyed your post! I think you bring up some great points about being able to both acknowledge and understand the limits of our own understandings and perspectives while being willing to engage with other perspectives and engage in difficult conversations.

Thank you for your post! The book by Claude Steele, Whistling Vivaldi, also has a lot of great insight into ways that stereotype threat can impact someone’s performance. While we included two chapters as readings this week for the class, I would highly recommend the entire book!

Thank you for your post! I think you pose a lot of great questions! And I think Bethany provided some good ideas for ways to make some of those activities more inclusive. I would be interested to hear your thoughts on the questions that you asked at the end. Are there ways that you could make your classroom environment more inclusive for the students who are in that class?

Thank you Carlos. I think we have to keep talking about these issues as they affect not only us but our upcoming generations…may one of the “but they are” generations will figure it out, but they won’t unless we as educators encourage the dialogue. I always enjoy reading your posts ?

That’s a very interesting analogy!!!! Haha!!! Three years ago when I first came to US, for the convenience of Westerners to pronounce my name, I decided to use my nickname, Armani, instead of my Chinese name, Ssu-Ying. To be honest, sometimes I’m a bit regretful cause I want people know I’m an AUTHENTIC Taiwanese instead of American Chinese. But the good thing is that this name really makes many people in my department, or whom I met on conference or other social events easily remember me!