It’s been a tough couple of years for higher education, and I’m not talking about funding or enrollment. Whether we point to the pulling down of Confederate statues, to heated discussions about racism in our academic organizations, to photoshopped recruiting materials that exaggerate campus diversity, it is clear that things are not going as we had hoped. We have reached a point of cognitive dissonance, with our sense of ourselves as fair and equitable routinely contradicted in academic and main stream media. And that cognitive dissonance is making us very uncomfortable.
Good. We should be uncomfortable. We should be questioning our ability to support inclusive educational experiences that grapple with hard questions and take honest looks at discriminatory narratives and inequitable social structures.
A few weeks ago, I wrote about diversity (or the lack thereof) in our curricula. I argued that we should get started with looking at our syllabi, course offerings, and majors with eyes toward greater inclusivity. The importance of this task cannot be overstated. Regular exposure to that diversity has the potential to weaken pervasive stereotypes or what Banaji and Greenwald call “mindbugs.” (Their book, Blind Spot (2013), by the way, would be an excellent text for a psychology course addressing our biased social constructs around race, gender, and age.) When we are not intentional about creating curricula that draw on excellence from all groups, we are supporting discriminatory narratives and inequitable social structures. There is no time to waste on this project. It is time-consuming, but it is the easiest of all the tasks associated with creating an inclusive learning environment because it is entirely within our control.
But there is more to do. Our next step is to work harder at supporting dialogues that address systemic inequity. This is much harder than updating our curriculum. Let’s face it, leading those conversations is fraught with risks. There is a chance we may get the words wrong and inadvertently offend someone. There is a chance that our students will not wish to participate. There is fear that administrators like me will not understand the complexity of the situation when a conflict does emerge in a class. These are all valid concerns, but we do no good avoiding difficult subjects. So, what do we do?
I have one suggestion to get us started. Let’s see how far we can get by adopting a debate across the curriculum model. We can identify classes in every major that will include structured debate. It is important that we don’t default to debate in general education and ignore all of the other areas where these arguments should take place. Students need to see the value of this investigative strategy in all disciplines. It would be great to lay foundations in general education and then follow up in majors so that the form of inquiry supported by this pedagogy becomes a habit. I’ve selected courses from nearly every discipline at WCSU where I’d love to see debate included:
- ED 206 Introduction to Education
- NUR 301 Nursing Leadership in Health Care Organizations
- HPX 200 Introduction to Community Health and Organizations
- SW 210 Social Welfare as an Institution
- ACC 340 Business Law I
- FIN 370 Financial Institutions
- JLA 100 Introduction to Criminal Justice I
- MGT 251 Human Resources Management
- MIS 307 Social Media in Business
- MKT 200 Principles of Marketing
- AS The American Dream: Visions & Revisions
- ANT/SOC 204 Culture and Personality
- AST/ENV 134 Extraterrestrial Environments and Intelligence
- BIO 200 Ecology
- CHE 102 Everyday Chemistry I
- COM 190 Introduction to Mass Communication
- CS 110 Website Production
- DIMA 200 Storytelling for Digital and Interactive Media
- ECO 211 Principles of Macroeconomics
- ENG 108 Introduction to Literature
- HIS 148 American History: To 1877
- HUM 110 Moral Issues in Modern Society
- MAT 110 Great Ideas in Mathematics
- MTR 240 Climatology
- PHI 100 Introduction Philosophy
- NWC/HIS 115 Latin American and Caribbean Civilization
- PSY 202 Abnormal Psychology
- SS 201 Researching Social Issues
- SOC 100 Introduction to Sociology
- WS 200 Introduction to Women’s Studies
- WRT 171W Craft of Writing I: Conversations with Predecessors
- ART 101 History and Appreciation of Western Art: Renaissance to the Present
- MUS 100 History & Appreciation of Music
- THR 180 Introduction to Theater Arts
- All introductory language courses
In some cases, the debate should be, “why is this a category?” (Non-Western Cultures and Women’s Studies come to mind). In all cases, the debate topic should include some question of equity and students should be required to find evidence for their arguments from a body of literature that represents a diverse group of contributors. This will require us to consider evidence from marginalized voices and people who do not have access to the traditional scholarly outlets associated with higher education, but I think we can do that.
The value of this approach is that it allows us to guide challenging conversations without taking a position on the topic. This is important because our positions frequently leave our students feeling like they can’t disagree. Instead, we can focus on teaching about asking good questions, finding follow-up lines of inquiry, discovering contradictions, and evaluating evidence. Our students will take the lead in the debates, learning about the contributors to their position and anticipating the arguments of those who disagree. It’s a great approach for developing knowledge of a discipline and the structure of argument. It also helps us all become better listeners.
As students and faculty dive into this curriculum, we will be cultivating a habit of listening. We will be hearing points of view we have never considered. We will be considering diverse bodies of evidence that we may not have encountered before. And we will be discussing questions of equity as a regular practice, not as an add-on to our courses.
Learning with our students, about all of things we forgot to consider as we shaped our understandings of our disciplines and of education more 1!generally, seems to me to be the best path to reconciling the gap between who we thought we were and who we want to be. This step toward resolving our cognitive dissonance will be imperfect and require further review, but it is does offer a way forward and I’m ready for the first step.
Banaji, M. and Greenwald, A. (2013). Blind Spot. U.S.: Delacorte Press.
