I think that while intellectually we may know “I can do anything,” seeing or hearing about real examples makes those statements feel like real possibilities.

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I have also read that study… I think this is where we have to be aware of what the science says and how to counter it without overcorrecting.
In my ideal world, we would also educate students on the research so that they could try to correct their own actions. (Maybe males would interrupt less, or females would try to overcome and speak in class.)

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Yes… without people researching and letting us know how we act out our unconscious biases, we cannot correct them.

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Inclusion is the perfect word. Yes- I think I’d argue that we (as people and instructors) should always work towards inclusion. And the institutions that promote diversity should help teach instructors (and students) how to be inclusive.

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Yes, I think that some courses will have to include “obvious” offensive content. However, I was thinking in terms of more subtle subjects where some ‘standard’ course content may be biased: teaching history of American colonization (pro-American biases, overlooking non-white male experiences); teaching evolution, climate change, or other sciences (needing to provide false equivalence for anti-science views); or literature (focused on works considered ‘classics).
But you make a good point about how some identities may not be obvious to us. And unfortunately, those are identities that most of are unlikely to aware of – and that instructors may be entirely unprepared for.

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I really appreciate that you mention vulnerability. I think its such an important part of multicultural understanding but such a hard one to implement. Showing vulnerability makes these conversations more compelling, but there’s so much risk to that. Thanks for that insight!

You make a good point about how academic fields impact public policy, and if the perspectives of the field are limited, the resulting policies can negatively impact people. Large universities have two purposes- educate students and engage in research. Most of the conversations so far have been about how diversity impacts students. I’m ashamed to say that I haven’t thought much about the lack of diversity impacting research, conclusions, and policy. In my field, like probably many others, we know that diversity is an issue and even have discussions about how to increase diversity. However, it’s never framed as a scientific issue. It’s typically discussed as a ‘culture’ issue: “How can we recruit? Why aren’t non-white students interested? Is our culture inclusive enough, or are we somehow offending/excluding people?” We never discuss the larger implications- that policy resulting from research or from homogeneous workers and managers is more important. And, I think that because we cannot solve the diversity problem up front, that we must be thinking about how to incorporate these voices as stakeholders, and that doing so may involve more effort, as they may not have participated previously or have other barriers that we should be thinking about.

Ha- yes, Jasmine. I don’t want to presume to know Heath, but I assumed in drafting my initial reply that he was a fellow introvert and that extrovert axes would be a bit different. Perhaps they don’t need to make the same conscious efforts to raise their y/z scales?

Yes… I think as a woman/younger person/POC/etc., you often think (probably correctly) that you can’t be as informal as you’d like (or as some ‘traditional’ coworkers act) because people won’t take you seriously as an instructor.

I agree that one can have fun in the classroom and even act less formally. I think a helpful tool for balancing being more informal with the fear of students crossing a line or being percieved as unprofessional is 1) not crossing the line yourself and 2) knowing (before it happens) how you would react to people crossing the line or suggesting that a woman’s actions are not professional when there would be no question if a man did so.

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Absolutely- being a woman in a male-dominated field brings with it a lot of introspection about how you present yourself and your actions can be perceived. Unfortunately, we must do this constant level of self-assessment in order to be successful.
However, I think the struggle you describe is how to be professional vs your normal self; trying to determine how to balance the two is part of being a professional in any field. We cannot/should not be the same person we are in personal relationships with friends that we are with subordinates (e.g. students). In a normal working environment, we learn how to act through observing coworkers and occasionally being corrected about violating work norms for appropriate behavior (through blunt conversation, uncomfortable silences, significant looks, etc.). When teaching alone, the only corrections we may receive would be in the form of student feedback or a complaint about inappropriate content/behavior. That lack of peer/office feedback about acceptable behavior seems to be a set up for failure for young/new instructors…

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