Guest Discussion: Seeing Your Classroom Through a DEI with Carmine Stewart

Submitted by Erin Vobornik on Tue, 08/06/2024 - 13:36
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Join us all week for an engaging discussion with Dr. Carmine Stewart, LINCS Moderator, Diversity, Equity & Inclusion Group for an insightful session on integrating DEI principles into your teaching approach. Don't miss out on this valuable opportunity to enhance your classroom practices and foster inclusive learning environments.

Check back each day for new discussion questions and engage in conversations with expert Carmine Stewart!

Comments

I think instructors struggle with the idea of seeing their classroom through a DEI lens because DEI tends to come up in the media related to incidents involving the police, or controversial hiring.  People think of DEI in a very limited way so they wonder what it has to do with instruction.  What's true is that many instructors are already doing some DEI, so incorporating DEI is just an expansion of their professional practice.  DEI put simply is working to incorporate as many perspectives as possible when designing policies, programs,  and lessons so that they benefit everyone, and so that they cause the least amount of harm to particular groups of students.  Looking at your classroom through a DEI lens means thinking about all of the social identities in your classroom, and finding ways to reflect those cultures back to the students so that they can see themselves in your classroom, and so they have space to learn about other cultures as well.  

As educators we already take learning differences and learning disabiliites into consideration as we design learning.  DEI is expanding that to include identity and culture.  As an instructor teaching a lesson on any topic, I can ask myself what perspectives are represented in my class (usually male, Protestant, middle to upper middle income) and which ones are not (women, lgbtqia, women, different ethnic groups, ELLs), and look for ways to represent those missing perspectives in my classroom.  Representation can exist in a few ways: 

  1. Visually - are there images of people who look like my learners on the classroom walls, in my slideshows, in our program brochures
  2. Psychologically- how do we involve students in planning and designing our program? How do we create spaces for students' voices, or for students to voice concerns.
  3. Academically- how do we supplement our curriculum with materials that include the contributions of women, people with disabilities, and people from different ethnicities and cultures?  Every lesson does not need to include every marginalized group, but each lesson could include some type of diversity. 

 

What is one thing that you can do today to increase representation in your class?