Teaching for Diversity

Laura L.B. Border and Nancy Van Note Chism,
Editors New Directions in Teaching and Learning, 1992, Volume 49

Adams, M. Cultural Inclusion in the American College Classroom.

The traditional college classroom has a distinct culture that often constrains the success of students from other cultural backgrounds. Traditional culture has remained unnoticed becau se the mismatch with student's culture is never identified, and there is a general absence of conscious cultural identity among European American students. The call for multiculturalism depends on faculty's acceptance and implementation, but it is difficu lt for faculty to see beyond their own acculturation. A college teacher's explicit and ongoing attention to the cultural assumptions behind many aspects of classroom teaching will facilitate the learning process for students from all cultural traditions. This does not necessarily mean dismantling of traditional teaching; rather, teachers could incorporate flexible, alternative teaching modes in order to engage the broad range of diverse, cultural derived orientations to learning.

Anderson, J.; Adams, M. Acknowledging the Learning Styles of Diverse Student Populations: Implications for Instructional Design.

Issues regarding teaching effectiveness and excellence are increasingly tied to issues of diversity; therefore, one should be examining the interplay of social and cultural diversity with learning styles, curricular content, and instructional styles. Effective teaching cannot be limited to delivery of information. Studies that have examined different groups' orientations to cultural values support the contention that non-traditional groups who share common conceptualizations about basic values, beliefs, and behaviors exhibit similar socialized differences and stylistic learning preferences. The authors use, as an example, Kolb's model of experiential learning to show how teachers can develop a multicultural teaching repertoire that takes into account cultural style differences. While identification of styles with particular social and cultural groups helps alert teachers to important differences, a full range of instructional strategies should be employed.

Border, L.; Chism, N. The Future is Now: A Call for Action and List of Resources.

The authors list programs and contact persons for "train-the-trainer" strategies for multicultural teaching. They also list print and video resources on multicultural teaching in higher education.

Collett, J.; Serrano, B. Stirring It Up: The Inclusive Classroom.

Looking at the experience of institutions where women and minorities have been either the sole constituency or the vast majority provides many lessons in academic success. The greater success of students in these institutions is due to common factors: a supportive atmosphere, respect for cultural identity, high expectations, positive role models, and vigilance against bias. Multicultural education on mixed campuses, on the other hand, is currently failing to address needs of many students. The worst problem is the resistance and inability of predominantly white male faculty to recognize and respect gender and cultural differences among students. In this article, the authors provide a model of cultural continua, with one axis reflecting a continuum of cultural experiences embedded in home culture at one end and mainstream culture at the other end. The cross-axis is a continuum of English proficiency. Understanding in which quadrant a student falls can help teachers adjust their instructional approaches to meet that student's needs. Faculty can also place themselves along the continua, to become aware of their own cultural embeddedness and move away from it to better communicate with students and other colleagues. The task of progressing to a truly multicultural curricula and classrooms requires institutional and personal transformation because diversity challenges the structure of the disciplines.

Maher, F.; Tetreault, M. Inside Feminist Classrooms: An Ethnographic Approach.

The authors describe two feminist classrooms where the instructors' and students' relationship to mastery, voice, authority, and positionality are explored. An understanding of these helped the teachers construct their alternative pedagogies. In the traditional classroom, teachers' pedagogical choices are the guiding theories and worldview of a particular discipline. However, feminist theorists, as well as postmodernists, argue that truth is gendered, raced, and classed. It is also dependent on context, including the context of the classroom. By addressing issues of mastery, voice, authority, and positionality, each teacher in the two feminist classrooms repositioned the relationships among herself, the students, and the material, away from herself as authority and toward learning as a function of complex interactions among teacher and student voices. These choices had different effects on different students. The authors conclude that feminist approaches to pedagogy provide alternative ways of attending to the multiplicity of student backgrounds and the constantly expanding set of perspectives to contend with and honor.

Sadker, M.; Sadker, D. Ensuring Equitable Participation in College Classes.

Interactive teaching, for all its benefits, has the potential for interjecting subtle bias into the college classroom. Teachers are more likely to interact with white male students than with female or minority students. Boys get more attention because they grab it. Teachers, however, are often unaware of the inequities. Informal segregation, through seating and group work patterns, for example, also intensifies inequitable participation. This is usually done by students, but a teacher rarely intervenes to integrate seating and group work, especially in higher education. Segregated patterns influence the distribution of teacher attention. The authors describe an equity training program for faculty that focused on eliminating inequitable instruction. Some of the strategies they recommend include: (1) objective coding - a frequency count of teacher-student interactions that takes into account race and gender of students whom the teacher calls upon, to see what the distribution of teacher's attention is; (2) increased wait time; (3) becoming an intentional teacher - engaging the silent students; (4) desegregation of student seating; and (5) use of teaching tactics such as shuffling name cards or moving around the room.

Schmitz, B.; Paul, P.; Greenberg, J. Creating Multicultural Classrooms: An Experience-Derived Faculty Development Program.

Campuses nationwide are struggling to find effective and appropriate responses to diversity in the classroom, with many clinging to the traditional and naïve assumptions that the classroom is a value-neutral space. Because of the differential rates of students' success in traditional classrooms, however, the issue of classroom climate is raised. The authors state that a multicultural classroom creates the potential for a fully effective learning climate. They describe the development of a program at the University of Maryland at College Park, which focused on the improvement of undergraduate women's education and of the classroom environment for all students. The authors discuss the assumptions, process, and key decision points that guided the development of their Classroom Climate Project. "Decision Points: included (1) articulating a program rationale, (2) choosing a theoretical framework for development programs, (3) deciding on the content of the development program, (4) deciding on a pedagogical approach and testing the model, (5) developing formats and scheduling, and (6) evaluating the success of the programs. Key components include a needs assessment, program support, resource development, faculty/TA development, and evaluation.

Vom Saal, D.; Jefferson, D.; Morrison, M. Improving the Climate: Eight Universities Meet the Challenges of Diversity.

This chapter presents a survey of eight universities' programs for helping faculty and teaching assistants meet the instructional needs brought about by changing campus populations. Each institution has made conscious choices about target groups to be covered in sessions designed to increase sensitivity. Most programs emphasize racism and sexism; other issues include homophobia, xenophobia, heterosexism, ableism, ageism, anti-Semitism, and classism. The eight institutions are: University of Colorado-Boulder, Harvard, University of Hawaii, University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, University of Missouri-Columbia, Ohio State University, Stanford, and University of Tennessee-Knoxville. The authors stress administrative support for multicultural programs, as the administrator's commitment inspires participation and interfertilization.

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