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?