Inclusive pedagogy is a comprehensive topic. To discuss it, we need to fully understand diversity issues first.
I took the course, Diversity and Inclusion for a Global Society, last semester with Dean DePauw. The course talks about diversity issues from different aspects. I learned a lot from that course, I do suggest anyone who would like to learn more about diversity and inclusion can think about taking that course.
The most important lessons I learned from the course is that we always thinking about diversity issues as big, obvious aggressions, but microaggressions in daily life are more urgent for us to realize and solve. I recommend a short video from YouTube for microaggressions, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hDd3bzA7450.
The video used a metaphor that comparing microaggressions to mosquito bites to emphasize how microaggressions hurt people in daily life. Sometimes, even if people think they are so nice to say something can hurt others in different ways. Once we understand that and pay attention to details, we may think differently when we deal with inclusive pedagogy.
I am happily to learn that diversity help with creation from the assigned readings this week, and I would like to have inclusive pedagogy and even achieve diversity without doing a disservice. Why do I say this? Because when we try too hard to achieve diversity, that may lead to opposite effects. When we try to assign more diverse study groups, we may make people feel awkward since people will feel that we treat them different as “diverse people”, even if we just want to do something good for them. That will be the same when we want to include more diverse members in our course, association or department. If we do not pay attention to the way we take to achieve inclusive pedagogy, we might easily end up like those mosquitos annoy people.
What I can think of to achieve inclusive pedagogy would be to minimize stereotype threat and microaggressions when we interact with students inside the class or outside of the class. We need to learn more about diversity and inclusion before we talk to students or colleagues, so we can avoid a lot of words related to stereotype threat and microaggressions.
What do you think of how we can achieve inclusive pedagogy without doing a disservice? I would like to hear more ideas.
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