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The participants in the Diversity, Inclusiveness, and Inequality track represented a great deal of diversity themselves and included faculty and students from a rich variety of research institutions, private liberal arts colleges, and community colleges. While participants engaged issues and strategies in each of the three substantive area—diversity, inclusiveness, and inequality in education (DIIE)—the bulk of our conversations focused on diversity and inequality. Topics included curriculum and course content issues, negotiating institutional support for DIIE, challenges of student recruitment and retention, and negotiating power relationships and identities among different kinds of student populations both within and outside of the classroom. This summary reviews four sets of questions that the group addressed and that point to critical areas rich for future research and reflection. In brief these are: (1) How can we simultaneously promote learning about difference and learning about ourselves? (2) How can faculty develop a range of strategic pedagogies and classroom environments in order to avoid some of the challenges inherent in teaching about DIIE? (3) How can we move beyond narrow understandings of diversity that limit the concept solely to a category of identity, neglecting the ways in which diversity and inequality are categories of analysis, processes, and indicative of power relations? (4) What steps are necessary to more fully integrate DIIE across the political science curriculum? If there was one common lesson that emerged from our group, it was the notion that our roles as educators include nurturing self-discovery both in ourselves and, most importantly, in our students on their journey to understanding the complicated world that surrounds us. Put differently, instead of conceptualizing DIIE as learning about “the other,” it is better conceived as a process of learning about oneself—it is about coming to recognize oneself as a social, historical, and political being. This realization is perhaps the most important liberating moment for our students and a point of freedom for faculty seeking to teach DIIE. Yet, faculty who embrace their role as nurturers of self-discovery are themselves vulnerable—open to a range of criticism, conflicts that emerge through our own processes of critical self-reflection, and potential negative reactions from our students and unsympathetic colleagues. Students may be especially wary of classroom experiences that require them to critically reflect on who they are; it safer for them to reflect on who “others” are. Similarly, faculty may be reluctant to employ strategies that cede classroom control to students. How can faculty work to minimize cognitive dissonance, or at a minimum channel it in productive ways? We discussed several pedagogical strategies for lessoning these sorts of anxieties. Role plays, simulations, and small class activities, for example, allow students to adopt and act out multiple identities, characters, and personalities different from their own and in a way that insulates their own identities, character, and personality from direct critique. Case studies may fulfill a similar role and are especially useful in getting students to employ moral reasoning. Experiential learning, community based research, and service learning are ripe terrain for engaging students in DIIE. Innovative pedagogical strategies discussed included the concepts of empathy and compassion as points of departure for learning about difference and inequalities; others drew on critical pedagogies of a range of political theorists from Plato to Spinoza to explicitly recognize the ways in which students’ emotive reactions can both hinder and aid their ability to learn about diversity, inequality, and inclusiveness. Another especially promising approach to draws on students’ involvement in extracurricular and co-curricular life; similar to the institutions of civil society, it is in students’ associational lives outside of the classroom that they learn how to practice DIIE. What kinds of organizational and group experiences, for instance, can we facilitate on our campuses that fulfill the mission of DIIE? Despite the apparent range of teaching strategies, it is particularly difficult to negotiate the challenges of DIIE as a young faculty member, untrained by virtue of graduate training alone. In many cases graduate curricula fail to provide a strong intellectual basis for faculty interested in teaching DIIE. The APSA Teaching and Learning conference is one way to address these concerns—indeed; it is both reassuring and troubling that so many graduate students and recent Ph.D.s seek broader professional development in DIIE at the conference. Nonetheless the feeling of the DIIE workshop was that college and university institutions need to make a more concerted effort to employ and teach engaged pedagogy to graduate students. If we expect our undergraduate students to take DIIE seriously, then we need to do so ourselves. APSA can play an important role in providing a forum to discuss these points of departure in our discipline and can lead by example by providing sustained institutional support for DIIE at both undergraduate and graduate levels. Diversity, inclusiveness, and inequality education is not simply about adding content to existing courses, or developing new pedagogies, however. Certainly student expectations about course and disciplinary content are related to the extent to which DIIE is integrated or segregated across the broader field of political science. DIIE educators frequently encounter complaints, for example, that “this course isn’t about race!” as participant Catherine Paden put it, in courses ranging from Introduction to American National Government to classes on comparative political processes. Beyond the substance of DIIE, the methods, subjects, and objects that define subfields in political science are themselves laden with power relations. If we are familiar with students’ complaints about unexpected encounters with DIIE content, we understand little about the mechanisms by which students self-select into particular courses. Yet, it is these very mechanisms that both reflect and reify the position of DIIE in political science research and scholarship, restricting the entry of women and students of color into traditionally male-dominated and white-dominated subfields of political science. Thus truly integrating DIIE requires deliberate and deliberative reflection at individual, department, and institutional levels. Perhaps most importantly, it requires being reflective not only about the content of our courses, but the processes through which that content is revealed. One way of approaching this issue is to think of diversity as a “way of knowing” rather than simply as a category of identity or difference. Diversity can be conceptualized as a process that both constructs and is constructed by the subjects of our discipline. Integrating diversity across the political science curriculum, then, requires us to better understand how DIIE is limited, shaped, and created through institutional and political processes that cut across our disciplines and the institutions in which we teach and learn. |
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