Journal of Academic Development and Education JADE Issue 10 | Page 30

JADE | 30 HIGHLIGHT #1 Title Reflections on Issues of Student Diversity Author Rebecca Yearling DOI http://dx.doi.org/10.21252/ KEELE-0000029 Contact [email protected] In an academic environment, in which students from a wide variety of different backgrounds and personal circumstances come together, issues of diversity and equality are extremely important. In this short essay, I would like to consider the role of diversity and equality issues in my own teaching, by reflecting on an incident that occurred a few years ago, with a student whom I will refer to as K. K. was enrolled in a Level 4 English module on which I taught, which was designed to introduce students to a variety of works of literary theory and to teach them how to apply these theories to literary texts. K. was the only black student in the class; I knew from conversation with him that he was born and raised in England, but came from a family of Caribbean origin. In the early weeks of the module, we were studying Joseph Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness (which is about a white European’s experience in colonial Africa), alongside some theoretical works about literary treatments of race and colonialism. About a month into the semester, K. came to me with a concern. In small group discussions, he said, other students were repeatedly assuming that he could ‘speak for’ black people in general: that he would have some special insights into the text on account of his skin colour and cultural heritage. He was unhappy about this: he felt that not only were assumptions being made about himself and his background (which he considered to be English as much if not more than Caribbean), but also that other students were responding as if all black people were alike, and all black experience was the same, attempting to reduce a wide diversity of black experience and opinions down to a single perspective which was assumed to be representative and ‘typical.’ I was troubled by this situation, and initially uncertain how to respond to it. My students, in my experience, believed themselves to be (and usually were) supportive of diversity. They would not, I thought, react well if they suspected that I was accusing them of treating K. differently because of his skin colour. 1 That said, I could not, of course, prioritise the other students’ feelings over K.’s. Moreover, it felt like this was an important issue— particularly in a class that focused in part on issues of racial and cultural difference 1. This assumption is supported by a study of classroom bias and instructors’ responses to it, which reports that, ‘Research indicates that people who confront prejudice are perceived negatively and that confrontation leads to negative emotions among those who are confronted (Czopp & Monteith, 2003; Czopp, Monteith, & Mark, 2006; Shelton & Stewart, 2004).’ In: Guy A. Boysen, David L. Vogel, Marissa A. Cope and Asale Hubbard ‘Incidents of Bias in College Classrooms: Instructor and Student Perceptions’, Journal of Diversity in Higher Education. 2.4 (2009) 219–231, 222. HIGHLIGHT #1 | 31 REFLECTIONS ON ISSUES OF STUDENT DIVERSITY and ways of talking about such difference. I decided that this apparent problem could in fact be reframed as an educational opportunity: a way of exploring the pervasiveness of racially-based assumptions even in communities that consider themselves unprejudiced and inclusive. I therefore decided to use our next session to address this issue. I was careful not to make the discussion too personal, by referring directly to what K. had told me. Instead, I initiated a whole-group debate in which the subject was identity politics and the way in which our sense of our community and identity might or might not shape the way we viewed the world. I encouraged the students to write down a list of things that they felt were important parts of their own identity: nationality, home town (or specific area of that town), religion, education, friendship groups, personal interests and hobbies, and so on. They then compared the lists with each other. Through this exercise, they were encouraged to see how many different things might shape people’s sense of themselves. The lists also showed why making assumptions about others based on factors like education or religion was problematic: even when people’s lists corresponded on one or two areas, they often differed radically in others. From this, we progressed into a discussion of the appeal of stereotypes: why human beings might want to assume that they can understand another person or group of people through making assumptions based on features such as skin colour or accent or dress or place of origin. Stereotypes allow us to feel that we can make sense of a hugely diverse and potentially confusing world, by allowing us to fit people into simple categories. We also talked about the way in which such stereotyping may be insidious: we may not even consciously realise that we are making judgements about others based on stereotypical assumptions. We moved on to discuss the way in which stereotypes can be dangerous, because they allow us to partially or wholly dehumanise others, by not recognising their individuality. We discussed ‘stereotype threat’: the research from experimental psychology that explores ‘the psychology of stigma—the way human beings respond to negative stereotypes about their racial or gender group.’ 2 Research into stereotype threat suggests that, for example, reminding female students of the stereotype that women are not good at maths can have a real and immediate effect on the way that they perform in a subsequent maths test. We ended by thinking about the stereotypes that might affect us personally: the assumptions others might make about us, based on our own appearances and backgrounds. At the 2. Joshua Aronson, quoted in ‘Stereotype Threat Widens Achievement Gap,’ Report from the American Psychological Association, July 15, 2006. At www.apa.org/research/action/stereotype.aspx. Accessed 26 November 2014.