Category: Week 8 – Inclusive Pedagogy

(Lack of Understanding leads to Fear,) Fear leads to Anger, Anger leads to Hate…

Through our class readings (and listenings) this week I must say I really enjoyed some of the perspectives Mahzarin Banaji shared in ‘The Mind Is a Difference-Seeking Machine’. With most things, I often believe people’s thoughts/feelings/predispositions can be explained by better understanding either their experiences or how they look at and interact with the world around them. I think the same can be used, to some degree, to explain why people exhibit racist ideals or fail to practice inclusivity.

I kept finding myself thinking back to a cartoon I saw a few years ago made by Zen pencils illustrating a quote by Mark Twain, see below. Here an individual trades their idealized symbols of hate for momentos after traveling the world and expanding their narrow world-view through experiences and understanding. I think the last part is especially important, as understanding breaks barriers and builds bridges.

I believe Ms. Banaji agrees, as she commonly discusses how a lack of understanding leads to misconceptions and even hate. Taker her example from an Eastern European country where ‘a survey was done where they were given a nonsense name of a group and asked, “How much do you hate them? How much would you like them not to come to our country?” They got large numbers of people saying, “We don’t want them here, we really dislike them, they’re filthy and mean and nasty.” And they didn’t exist. That was a made-up name.’ A lack of understanding and familiarity allowed this made up group to become something to be feared and avoided, even though they didn’t exist.

I think it is human nature, some leftover survival mechanism, to be wary of the things we do not understand or are unfamiliar with. I also do not think it is inherently bad to be hesitant, as danger does exist. The same idea applies to why you don’t get in a car with a stranger, or why some people carry pepper spray with them – not everyone’s intentions are pure. I do not think anyone would disagree that terrorists (whether domestic or foreign) are bad people and are to be despised. The problem is when a minuscule fraction of a group is used to shape an opinion on the whole.

People like to put other people in groups, I think it’s just a rudimentary way of keeping track of things. People I like, people who root for x team, people who drive y make of car, people who like to hike, people who voted for z political party and so on and so on. I do not think the action is necessarily wrong or right, it just is. However, a problem arises when these groupings are used to shape ones larger world view and attach judgements to people who we ‘think’ fit into various categories.  Ms. Banaji pointed out an example of the power of these groupings in how you dissipate fear, stating “we discovered is that fear reduction is deeply based on who that other is. You will reduce your fear towards previously fear-producing others if they are members of your group. For whites, you lose fear to white faster than to black. To black Americans, you lose fear to black more quickly than you would to white.”

To me this circles back to understanding. We are more ready to accept and forgive (and to some extent re-categorize) what we understand than what we do not. Quite simply, most of us fear the unknown and to quote some wisdom from a well-known green master ….

Inclusive Pedagogy: Noticing the Subtle Differences in the Classroom

For me, the article on inclusive pedagogy resonated the most with me. As recent as last year, when I hear of inclusiveness in the classroom, I think primarily of race and gender. However, sometimes last year (I think April, 2018), I attended a Networked Learning Initiatives (NLI) on differentiation in the classroom that changed my perspective on differences in the classroom. This was an interesting 2-hour session that was worth every second. I learned many things and I will share some of them in the paragraphs that follow.

To start with, I learned what differentiation in the classroom is. Simply put, differentiation in the classroom is being aware of the differences in our students. Differences could range from almost imperceptible challenges such as learning disability to more blatant ones such as race and gender. When I registered for this NLI session, I had the later in mind. However, I soon found out that the term ‘differences’ was more nuanced than I had imagined. In fact, during the session, one of the participants shared an example of a student in her class who was always having bad grades. She thought it was due to lack of efforts, only for her to later realize that the student had a learning disability, which made comprehending course content difficult. Unfortunately, the student was not even aware of their disability. This really made me reflect and I thought to myself: “In what ways could I have been insensitive to such minuscule differences in my classroom?” “could there have been someone in my classes with challenges such as learning disability that I failed to notice?” How many times have we tagged students as lazy while they may have been suffering from a learning disability?

Needless to say, after this NLI session, I decided to be intentional about looking out for such subtle differences in my classroom going forward. However, it is not enough to be aware of differences but we need to take necessary steps to accommodate students with challenges that we might not even be conscious of. The way we design our instructional materials is crucial. For example, when preparing lecture slides, we should ask ourselves if it is legible enough for students who might have difficulty with reading. Or if we want to play a video, we should make sure it is subtitled, in case there are students who might have hearing difficulties. There are several other examples of how to be intentional about inclusivity in the classroom, however, I will stop this blog post here.

I think my eureka moment about inclusivity in the classroom was this NLI session, and since then I have strived to be a more inclusive teacher, and I am still striving. This diagram below presents a good summary of inclusivity in the classroom.

Image result for inclusiveness in the classroom

Higher Education

The scandals in higher education have brought to the forefront a topic that affects all of us who are looking at a career in higher education. This is the value and purpose of going to college. An NBC poll from 2017 says show that 47 percent of respondents believe that a college degree is not worth the cost “because people often graduate without specific job skills and with a large amount of debt to pay off”. This is an increase from 40 percent in 2013 who said that college is not worth it. Zooming in further, this number jumps to 57 percent when the responses are narrowed to the 18-34 age category.

Beyond the surveys, the College Learning Assessment (CLA) corroborates the NBC poll. In 2017, the CLA reported that “only minimal learning gains are derived from the college experience,” and when detectable, these gains were considered to be “statistically modest” Expressly, the CLA results showed that 45 percent of students failed to demonstrate any statistically significant improvement in assessment performance over the first two years of college. Further, 36 percent of students failed to show statistically significant improvements over all four years of college

These perceptions, displayed by the survey, and the quality, demonstrated by recent CLA data justify the failing trust that the public has in higher education. Nevertheless, it is well-established that, in general, higher education continues to be a good financial investment. The question is, for how long? Let me know your thoughts. Thanks.

NBC Report: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/first-read/americans-split-whether-4-year-college-degree-worth-cost-n799336

CLA Report: https://www.aacu.org/liberaleducation/2017/winter/neuman

Week 6 — Diversity (cost?) (benefits?)

Diversity of thought, discipline, race, gender, sexuality etc. are extremely cardinal to the progress of a school, company, or any institution. The advantages are well researched and documented in this article. However, as I was reading this article I started to think about some questions (that I don’t have answers to):

  1. Are there any downsides or cons of diversity? (intuition says no)
  2. Do company’s/ institutions loose on talent while trying to meet their diversity quota?
  3. Does the entire concept of having a diversity quota beneficial or  detrimental?
  4. When an institution “markets” its diversity numbers, does that have any psychological implications on the “diverse” individual — maybe self doubt (Do I really deserve to be here or am I just here to meet the diversity criteria?)

 

These are very convoluted questions. I’d appreciate peoples input on what they think.

Men are better at Science than women : a case of gender bias in Academia

Imagine a scenario of an aspiring woman Physicist,  attending a workshop on gender issues and underrepresentation of women in Physics and an invited speaker gives a talk on how women are worse at Physics than men and that Physics was invented and built by men. How would that woman and many others sitting in the audience feel? This is what happened last year in October when a prominent Italian scientist, Alessandro Strumia,gave a talk at one of the biggest Physics facility in the world, CERN,  claiming that women are underrepresented in Physics because they are “under-performing” to a group of women starting their careers in Physics. 

One of the major claims he made were that Physics is not sexist against women, but against men. He produced various half-baked studies claiming that women were hired and promoted in positions unfairly and that women scientists receive less citations for their publications as compared to male scientists which prove that males perform “higher quality research”. 

His talk was condemned widely worldwide and CERN issued a statement describing his talk “highly offensive” and that CERN stood for diversity. First thing that came to my mind was how he was allowed to give the talk at the first place. After reading more about it I realized that the organizing committee did not have access to his slides beforehand and his talk was supposed to be on gender bias in citations which was an important issue to be addressed.

He himself told in his talk that a woman with considerably lesser citations than him was given a position which he believed he deserved which makes me think that this talk was more a result of anger. Then the main basis of his talk was the number of citations. Citations are not a good measure of scientific performance as number of citations depend a lot on peer-review and there have been numerous studies suggesting that peer review process is biased against women . This blog in particular examines how his claims regarding citations were wrong.

There have been similar incidents in the past and there might be more in future but I think inclusive pedagogy is something that can play a big role in reducing these biases and addressing the underrepresentation of women in STEM. There needs to be an inclusive culture in classroom which can help women believe and trust that they are as good as everyone else and that Science is above all these biases. Everyone can do science and nobody should feel excluded by gender. To end this post on positive note, one of the most ironic things that happened in the same week as this CERN incident was that a woman scientist, Donna Strickland won the Nobel Prize in Physics for 2018. This shows that good work will continue to be recognized even if these biases exist.

Inclusive Pedagogy

Shankar Vendantam argues that colorblindness is not rooted in psychological reality since our hidden brains will always recognize people’s races. The better approach is t put race on the table and to unpack the negative associations and superficial judgment. I agree with him and I think the issue is not with race but how we deal with race. Race does exist and it is natural to recognize it. However, racism is socially constructed and as educators, we need to educate ourselves and students to be aware of our implicit biases. Taking the implicit bias test might help in this regard. Another way that might help is to engage with people from varios backgrounds and reflect on our personal judgment and expression. During my master studies at Arizona State University, I had the honor of co-founding an organization called “Better Togather” to create positive, meaningful relationships across cultural differences. Through this organization, we fostered knowledge and appreciation of diverse traditions and inspired collective action for the common good. My engagement in Better Together taught me to embrace differences in culture, ethnicity, identity, religion, and ideology. Also, I learned about my implicit biases in many aspects and it challenged many stereotypes that I had.

Teaching inclusiveness, respecting diversity in our divided and full of conflict wold is very critical not just to foster creativity or increase financial gains of companies as mentioned in Phillips’ Article (even though these are good important gains). The shooting event in New Zeland mosque reminds us that hatred and discrimination could end innocent people lives. As educators, we should advocate and struggles for inclusive pedagogy inside and outside classrooms as fundamental educational value and basic human right issue.

Let us stay away from prejudgments!

I am a 29-year-old woman from Iran.  As far as I remember, I have witnessed several evidences of “difference seeking” which I want to share with you, as well as my current believes about how to deal with this universal phenomenon, specifically its reflection in educational environments.

Back to Iran, there are barely international communities who live there for long time. While significant number of tourists visit Iranian heritage sites yearly, not many choose to stay as immigrants,  particularly in the past 40 years.  Well, this may bring about a picture of a quite uniform country with quite similar people of the same nation, skin color, culture and history. This is not really the case, though; in facts, driving from north to south and east to west, one meet totally different individuals. Due to modern urbanism,  many people have been moving to  big cities, such as Tehran the capital city of Iran, where suddenly they find new accents, lifestyles and looks.  And then the “difference seeking” engine starts generating prejudgments:  Turks are this, Kurds are that, Balochs are this, Arabs are that, blah blah blah.

During the past four years of my life in the US, I have experienced another level of living in a multicultural country. The appearance differences are substantially significant,  so that not only all Iranians are grouped in one cluster, but also many times people of our neighboring countries are added to our group, and we make a larger cluster called Middle Easterners! And, again, the same story repeats: Whites are this, Blacks are that, Asians are this, Browns are that, blah blah blah. This time, just the prejudgments are applied to larger groups of people with remarkable visual differences, but the essence of such statements are the same:

  • We have a backpack of features specific to each cluster. Simply, whenever we meet a person who looks like a member of that cluster, without having a enough knowledge about his/her background, we assign those feature to that person.
  • We feel excited to share our backpacks with fellow citizens, and make it updated!
  • After a while, we become even more expert and make small bags in our backpacks, e.g. eastern and western Europeans bags inside the Europeans bag.

Academic environments are of the most diverse places where local/international scholars get together. It is definitely very crucial to train students, faculties and staff of such environments to learn more about (1) the “hidden brain” which implicitly generates the above prejudgments, (2) techniques to terminate/dilute these thoughts, (3) polite yet frank dialogues to deal with discriminating conversations. What if we consider the whole community as one organ whose members endeavor to LEARN, and all speak in one language called SCIENCE? Is not it a more respectful, inclusive and effectual alternative?

GEDI Post 5: Inclusive pedagogy, diversity and implicit bias



Inclusive pedagogy deals with creating a supportive and inclusive classroom that ensures all students have equal access to learning, and both professor and student participate in this environment with mutual respect to differences among groups. Inclusive pedagogy is crucial to student’s learning because social identities of both student and teacher have a direct impact on the learning experience. Also, when students feel they socially belong to the academic community, they increase their probabilities of both academic success and well-being.

Creating an inclusive environment in the classroom, involves thinking about six main aspects of your teaching philosophy: content, pedagogy, assessment climate and power (check out more details about this topic in this link).
  • Content: What material have you chosen? In what ways is your curricular design accessible and relevant to your students? Are there any barriers to inclusion?
  • Pedagogy: How are you promoting student engagement in ways that are meaningful and relevant to students?
  • Assessment: How are you asking students to practice and perform what they’re learning? How can we diversify the ways that students demonstrate their growing proficiencies?
  • Climate: In what ways are you creating an atmosphere for learning that is accessible and meaningful for all?
  • Power: How can you craft a learning environment that empowers students and helps to bring attention to or disrupt traditional power dynamics between teacher and student and among students?
Besides these points, I believe it is crucial that we understand the difference between inclusion and diversity. This is important because: a) with inclusion we can be diverse; b) with diversity we might not be inclusive.

Just pay attention in the following images and you will understand what I am talking about:

Exclusion: 


Segregation:



Integration: 


Diversity:


By promoting an inclusive environment, we also can promote a diverse environment in our classroom. Diversity is important because it enhances creativity, encourages the consideration of alternatives even before any interpersonal interaction takes places and it leads to better decision making and problem solving. However, by promoting diversity in our environments, we are also subject to the pyramid of hate:

Source: https://darfurgeno.weebly.com/pyramid-of-hate.html

In this sense, it is crucial that we understand how our hidden brain works (see How 'The Hidden Brain' Does The Thinking For Us for more details) , because we are all subject to implicit bias towards some topics that might prevent us to promote a truly inclusive classroom.

But what is implicit bias?

According to the Ohio State University implicit bias, also known as implicit social cognition, refers to the attitudes or stereotypes that affect our understanding, actions, and decisions in an unconscious manner.

I always thought of myself as being conscious, intentional and deliberate about my actions and behavior. I never thought I was a biased person regarding religion, sex or age. However, when I took an implicit association test, I got shocked! Look at my results:
  • Automatic preference for Judaism over Islam.
  • A moderate automatic association for Male with Career and Female with Family.
  • A slight automatic preference for Young people over Old people.
I am only a MS student going for a Ph.D in the next semester. I do not have classroom experience to share regarding how I have been dealing with inclusion, diversity and implicit bias. After reading more these topics, I can say that I have become much humbler about my views and much less certain about myself.

How about you?
  • Have you taken the implicit association test? Did you get shocked with your results?
  • What have you done to promote inclusiveness in your classroom?
  • How do you deal with implicit bias?





Changing our Approaches to Diversity and Inclusion

This week’s readings brought me back to the 2016 presidential elections. I was genuinely surprised that someone could run for and win presidency with a platform that revolved around racial hate. It made me think about all of the racial equality themes that were stressed in grade school. I messaged a friend after the election and said “What happened? We live in a society where we all say “end racism!” (because no one would ever say “I support racism” besides hate groups). In grade school, we were taught about racial equality and to treat everyone with kindness. I’m surprised someone like him could be elected in the United States.”  Sure there are other reasons why he was elected but in my mind, I couldn’t fathom how someone could even run on a platform that stressed hate. It didn’t sit well with me. Is racial equality something that people just say but don’t take action because we know that racism is bad?

You really don’t know your biases unless someone points them out to you and I went through a similar struggle myself. This is something I haven’t really shared because it made me so uncomfortable and I didn’t come to terms with it until very recently. After I was accepted into Virginia Tech for undergrad, I looked into scholarships and decided to apply to a 4-year diversity and inclusivity fellowship because I thought, “Hey, I’m Asian, this is great for me. I know a thing or two about diversity.” So I wrote my essay and submitted the application. I was accepted into the program. But now when I think about my essay, I cringe. I basically wrote something like “Colorblindness doesn’t bother me because we should treat everyone equally.” I remember writing the word “colorblind.” I also had a couple of my teachers look over it and they all thought it was a great essay. No one called me out. As a minority, why did I write something like this? Growing up as an Asian-American in a community that was predominantly white and where Asians were the largest minority, I never really encountered racial inequality. This could be in part that Asians are seen as the “model minority” because we study hard and don’t get into trouble (which is not the case). College was about to change this for me.

As part of this fellowship, I had to attend a certain number of events that addressed diversity and inclusion each semester and blog about our experiences with diversity each month. The first year was easy for me. I had much to talk about the diversity on campus. I joined Asian-American student groups and I thought the amount of diversity on campus was amazing given that most of my high school friends were white. Then the second year set in and I really started to struggle. At the time, I felt like I attended the events but felt like I didn’t agree with everything that was being said. Basically, some of the sessions gave me the vibe that “All white people are bad because they did so many bad things to us (minorities) and we need to start doing something about it.” I didn’t agree with that. Not ALL white people are bad. Yes, bad things happened in the past but we need to move forward. I was hung up on “equality” and at the time, did not realize that “equity” is what we needed to achieve. Then, something happened in one of my friend groups.

My friend groups were very homogenous. In fact, the majority of my friends were Asian-American who grew up in similar situations as me and never personally encountered racial attacks or situations where they realize “wow someone is purposefully being racist to me.” We had a couple of white friends in our groups. On one occasion, one of my Asian-American friends attacked my White friend for appropriating Japanese culture. He lashed out at her while we were all at lunch one day and caused a scene in the middle of Hokie Grill. My friend started crying, I started crying, and some of our other friends straight up left because they were so uncomfortable but I stayed with my friend until my other friend was done ranting. It was extremely uncomfortable. My White friend wasn’t intentionally trying to appropriate Japanese culture. In fact, we were all in an organization called Japanese Culture Association because we all loved Japanese culture. What’s worse and something that my friends and I still don’t understand is that our friend who lashed out at her isn’t even Japanese. So then is it okay for another Asian-American, not of Japanese descent, to appropriate Japanese culture but not for a white person to? The logic didn’t make sense. My Asian-American friend was a “social justice warrior” and this was my, and most of my friends, first encounter with social justice. After this encounter, we all had a bad feeling of social justice. It didn’t seem inclusive of everyone, instead it seemed like a movement where only certain groups of people wanted power, but still didn’t stress equality for everyone, which didn’t sit well with us. We didn’t realize that what we witnessed was one extreme side of social justice.

That situation, coupled with attending seminars and workshops that I didn’t agree with, eventually stopped me from writing my monthly blogs and attending events. I didn’t feel comfortable about sharing my thoughts and feelings on my blog or with the program coordinators because I didn’t agree with how people were approaching these issues. I knew that there was still racism in America and something had to be done but these approaches were just too extreme. Since I stopped everything, I was dropped from the fellowship program during my junior year. Could I have reached out to someone about my thoughts and what I was going through? Sure. I just didn’t because I was so uncomfortable.

What my friends and I needed were time and understanding. A couple of years later, we all started to realize, one way or another, that racism does happen to Asian-Americans in America. We all just needed to have those personal experiences, whether it be micro-aggressions or blatant racist actions. We needed someone to educate us in a way that wasn’t so radical and we needed open discussions about inclusivity and racism. Perhaps approaches to these issues need to be tailored so they can be relevant to different groups of people. Obviously, my experiences gave me a bad taste about social justice. I felt like my narrative can be best described by the typical “Stages of Grief.” Not like I was actually grieving about anything, it just took me a long time to realize why I was approaching diversity and inclusivity incorrectly and how to have appropriate conversations around racism.

Kubler-Ross – Five Stages of Grief

Many parts of my narrative bring me to this week’s readings. I knew that people create social groups that are homogenous (as mentioned by Steele in Whistling Vivaldi). My friends and I are no exception. We felt like we could relate to each other with our experiences, which is why we are friends. Another point is that the way that racism, inclusivity, and diversity is taught in schools, both k-12 and college, is not effective. We all need to work together to make these topics into something that is more digestible. Like mentioned in the “How Diversity Makes Us Smarter” article, the discourse around diversity and inclusivity is particularly negative. It shouldn’t feel like a burden to have these discussions but we have to keep in mind that these conversations have to be inclusive (of course) and we have to allow everyone to speak their mind. In addition, I think that discussions about diversity and inclusion can be applied to any topic. As a student conducting social science research in the health field, these discussions are especially pertinent in the classes that I take. What are other ways we can incorporate discussions around diversity and inclusion into our classrooms?

A couple years ago, I stumbled across an article that I thought was relevant to today’s reading. It’s a quick read and I encourage you to check it out. It’s titled “Doing science while black” by Dr. Ed Smith, who is a professor at Virginia Tech.

http://science.sciencemag.org/content/353/6307/1586?fbclid=IwAR1WuaRECKrjrIAXMkTcWBaz9fVQAd7BJtteJatkk2WR7R6iI3uyk9plCeQ

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