ABCs of pedagogy: D is for diversity

Welcome to the fourth post in the ABCs of Pedagogy. One of the aims of this series is to support learning and teaching award applicants. Although deadlines for internal awards have closed, external award and recognition applications remain open. The skill of using scholarly language to describe your teaching and learning practice is also valuable for the purposes of reflection, conversations about teaching and learning, scholarly activities, and career progression.

Teaching for diversity, equity and inclusion have been a focus at Macquarie this year, and the conversations that have resulted have been challenging and rich. These have included the Inclusive Teaching event and the questions it generated on teaching for accessibility, teaching for diversity, reasonable adjustments; exemplars of Indigenous learning and teaching; focus groups with staff and students on supporting inclusive teaching; and podcast discussion club sessions on belonging and including teachers.

For the purposes of this series, what scholarship can you use to describe your diversity pedagogy or inclusive teaching pedagogy?

These pedagogical approaches draw on constructivism’s active learning and student-centred learning approaches (see C is for Constructivism), special education (supporting students who have physical, sensory, cognitive and social learning needs) and universal design for learning (see this self-paced module from Disability Awareness available in Workday).

If you are applying for a learning and teaching award, or otherwise documenting your teaching practice, and would like to describe your diversity pedagogy, start with your students.

Your classroom has students with diverse backgrounds, genders, religions, accents, ethnicities, abilities, ages, and experiences, including students who are first in family, underachieved at school, have had interrupted education, manage learning or health difficulties, are studying part-time, and a myriad of other factors that can impact learning.

Reflect on your responses to the following questions: What strategies do you use to get to know your students, especially early in the course? How do you ensure students feel welcome in the classroom? How do you make visible that diversity is a strength? Do you support individual students or cohorts with varying needs? How do you invite feedback on inclusivity and respond to what students tell you?

Continue reflecting on your practice and your teaching strategies, learning materials, assessment design and student evaluation. What can you evidence through student outcomes and feedback, collaboration with colleagues, curriculum design and engagement with professions, industry or community?

This reflection (I recommend making notes!) will enable you to be specific about your practice and apply an appropriate theoretical or conceptual framework to describe your philosophy of valuing student diversity.

Perhaps your focus is building your students’ academic capital.

Rowlands (2018) defines academic capital as the “various inherited and acquired resources that students bring to bear upon their education” (p 1824). The concept comes from the work of French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (1986) on social, cultural and symbolic (as opposed to economic) capital.

At the risk of over-simplifying these concepts, here are brief definitions based on how Bourdieu (1986) described these currencies of power and privilege. Social capital refers to connection to a network of recognition, support and esteem (an old boys’ club). Cultural capital includes access to resources: material (a musical instrument), institutional (a musical education) and dispositional (an appreciation for opera). Symbolic capital is more abstract but can be understood as the recognition of status and prestige, and the extent to which a person able to ‘fit in’ or belong in a particular context.

Academic capital is a combination of these forms of capital and is enabled by quality education and facilities, access to resources and technologies, participation in extra and co-curricular activities, and social and community support.

Referring back to your reflective note-taking, how do you work with students to alleviate the constraints of the uneven distribution of academic capital in your classroom? Do you include an accessibility statement? Do you scaffold assessment tasks and share exemplars? Do you provide feedback on an early, low stakes assessment task?

Or, perhaps, your focus is improving students’ self-efficacy, or belief in their capabilities for learning, which is a powerful predictor of student success (see Bandura’s social cognitive theory (1997) which builds on the theories discussed in C is for Constructivism). This might resonate if you have interest in self-regulation, motivation and other psychological concepts. More on these ideas when we reach M is for Metacognition.

The topic of inclusion has been interrogated from multiple perspectives which gives teachers from different disciplines an opportunity to connect to it. Other ways of describing your diversity pedagogy include social justice, students as partners, decolonising pedagogy, trauma-informed pedagogy. More on these ideas in future posts when we reach F is for Freedom, N is for nurturing, S is for student-centred learning and U is for universal design.

Next in the series: E is for experiential learning.

Acknowledgement: In developing this series on the ABCs of Pedagogy, I would like to acknowledge the teaching and scholarship of current and former Macquarie University staff members including Vanessa Fredericks, Marina Harvey, Mathew Hillier, Olga Kozar, Danny Liu, Karina Luzia, Margot McNeil, Anna Rowe, Cathy Rytmeister, Theresa Winchester-Seeto and others.

References

Bandura, A. (1997). Self-efficacy: The exercise of control. New York: Freeman.

Bourdieu, P. (1986) ‘The forms of capital.’ In J. Richardson (ed.), Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education, pp 241-258. New York: Greenwood Press.

Rowlands, J. (2018). Deepening understandings of Bourdieu’s academic and intellectual capital through a study of academic voice within academic governance. Studies in Higher Education, 43(11), 1823-1836.

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