The last month marked a year since the murder of George Floyd and reminded me of color students in my class last spring semester whose humanity is at stake with inclusive education.
“Inclusive Education” made headlines during the pandemic and whenever racial conflicts broke out across the country. However, it is not a new approach, as documented in previous Inside Higher Ed advice; existing faculty development in the areas of diversity, equity and inclusion; and decades of research in many disciplines, such as gender, race and disability studies. In 2018, I even worked with teaching center directors in the Georgia university system to design and run an inclusive education workshop for the Chancellor Nationwide Learning Scholarship Program.
But the past year has brought much stronger feelings of racial injustice into the classroom, and as a white woman teaching colored students, has required me to assume a much greater responsibility and mutual accountability to me. Other faculty members likely have had similar experiences and are taking time this summer to reflect on inclusive teaching, the outcomes for the students and themselves, and the lessons learned.
Below are three overarching integrative educational strategies that I have found effective in teaching a bachelor’s communication course in Spring 2021. I also mention some challenges that have arisen and will continue to exist.
These strategies were inspired by my expertise as a professor of communication, feminist rhetoric scholar and head of a teaching center at a southern state university. It is crucial that they also came from the students when we helped design the course. Another influence was a local anti-racist activist who was a guest speaker in a class coordinating the Mary Turner Project, a restorative racial justice organization in Georgia. Some of these ideas also overlap with previous advice columns and research on inclusive education, showing what this ongoing and evolving work is like for everyone involved in teaching and learning.
Ultimately, I offer inclusive education a communication perspective that enables my students and me to rediscover our voices. To be clear, we had our voices all along, but the prevailing culture had stifled those voices – and is still trying to do so. But with integrative pedagogy, our voices reappeared and could be heard.
Participation in the design of the course and constitutive communication. Some student-centered teaching approaches encourage teachers to work with students to create the curriculum, for example by working with them to design an objective for a course, for which they then design and complete an assignment. This gives students control over their learning. Significantly, faculties that participate in open education promote it as the best practice for democracy and diversity in education.
When white supremacists stormed the U.S. Capitol in the week leading up to my first course in January 2021, I felt responsible to the enrolled colored students, who made up more than half of the list. I hesitated to give up control of the curriculum and help shape it – until I realized that I had to do just that to integrate.
Participation in the design of the curriculum is an integrative educational strategy, as it calls into question the racist structure of the course design and the traditional power dynamics in the classrooms, for example when (white) professors “confess” that they know more than (black) students and when curricula are marginalized Silence voices. Specifically, I added a student discussion leader role for which the students selected readings and enabled active learning for an entire class time by imparting new knowledge related to the course to their colleagues and myself and by including guest speakers. I left several days off the curriculum for the students and myself to decide together what exactly we would do. And over the course of the semester, the students led almost half of the content and teaching to the top.
Another way of thinking is the course design as “constitutive communication”. Researchers in my area of communication and rhetoric studies have long argued that discourses (in this case words on a curriculum or discussions between faculty and students) are constitutive communication because they construct social reality and people’s identities. Contributing to the curriculum reconstituted racial identities in the classroom to be more inclusive.
White teachers and students need to be careful not to include racial injustice in their communication, even accidentally, which happened when we set interview guidelines on the first day. So on the second day we had to go through, reflect on and revise the discussion guidelines again with insights from Özlem Sensoy and Robin DiAngelo. For example, the class changed the guideline “Respect everyone’s opinion” to “Recognize your positionality, shape your limited worldview”.
Dialogic and peer learning pedagogy. Many critical racial theorists and social activists criticize interracial dialogue for reproducing racial hierarchies rather than reducing racial differences. I agree with their concerns and have seen this phenomenon occur, but my discipline of rhetoric and the application of dialogic pedagogy in class this spring semester have shown the possibility of alternative inclusive models for dialogue.
Mikhail Bakhtin, Paulo Freire and Gloria Anzaldúa have guided rhetors and educators to implement less oppressive polyphonic dialogues. Sometimes referred to as “collaborative” or “peer learning strategies,” the bullet points below include five favorites that we made throughout the course, along with a note on at least one feature of their inclusiveness. Number 6 on the list is a podcast that the students completed for their dialogical thesis. I encourage students and teachers to practice, review, and repeat such activities and assignments to help them communicate in an inclusive and non-exclusive manner.
- Conversion stations. Two students switch stations while others stay, adding different voices to the conversation and additional ideas from the new group.
- Speed up dialogues. As on a speed date, students sit in close proximity to dialogue, face-to-face in pairs, and communicate with people they normally don’t speak to, such as someone of a different race.
- Cassette recorder. One student listens while the other speaks and needs to paraphrase what he has heard from the other person to ensure that traditionally dominant speakers do not take up as much airtime and marginalized voices are heard.
- Fresh person standing round up. Students find someone in the class they haven’t met and share what they’ve learned from this fresh person, learn to value voices beyond their own, and interact with people they don’t normally speak to, z.
- Conversation roles. Students are assigned roles such as questioners or even democratic champions, whose job it is to invite students to speak in order to inject additional ideas into the conversation and to ensure that traditionally dominant speakers do not take up as much airtime and marginalized voices are heard.
- Podcasts. Students are given an intermediary public speaking platform to interview other people to learn to appreciate voices beyond their own and to ensure that traditionally dominant speakers do not take up as much airtime and marginalized voices are heard.
Rhetoric of (racial) feelings and rehumanization. My last proposed strategy for inclusive education is affective. Conventional teaching privileges facts over feelings, often suppressing emotions or removing them from content and the classroom. But none of us can deny that there is a jumble of emotions in the class. So let’s use emotions to counter the marginalization and dehumanization of color students.
Dehumanization is at the root of racial injustice. Dehumanization occurs when a person or group of people denies humanity to other people, often by comparing them to nonhumans – for example, animals or inanimate objects. With mechanization, dehumanization also increases, for example through the standardization of processes and dependence on technology. I wonder if dehumanization in higher education, even if not explicitly referred to as such, is the impetus for much of the research and education advocating the “personalization” of the classroom and the “humanization” of the instructor? If so, then personalization and humanization could be viewed as inclusive pedagogical strategies.
Another quality of “humanity” that usually denies dehumanization, especially blacks, is the ability to feel pain and express emotions in general. In contrast, our class took up the rhetoric of racial sentiment and thereby rehumanized colored students by giving them back a human quality that was deprived of them.
One black student wrote of the course: “I’ve learned more about myself as a businesswoman and as a black woman in America. It was amazing as a class to deal with very uncomfortable topics and still feel comfortable when we share our feelings and emotions. When I started this course, I believed that we were going to learn to change people’s minds and views on certain subjects – oh boy, how wrong and superficial I was to think such a thing. This course taught me to feel people’s emotions. “
Let me refine my earlier claim: Emotional work as a trainer is difficult without affirming racism and sticking the lesson with interpersonal. Sometimes I rushed to comfort white women when I should have left them uncomfortable. In doing so, I put their needs as a dominant racial group problematically in the foreground and short-circuited the dialogue about solutions on a social level. This example also shows the complications of intersectionality as an instructor – the prevailing patriarchal culture taught me that white women like me need protection.
At the same time, my expertise and intersectional identity as a feminist rhetorician made it possible for me to hold black men accountable in the course when their feelings and voices have overwhelmed students, especially women of color. White and / or female tolerance is not the answer to social injustice. Inclusive teachers cannot remain silent even when they have difficulty speaking.
In summary, it can be said that inclusive education is still in the works. Here, I’ve added an emphasis on communication to the growing number of best inclusive educational practices in the hope that all college students and faculties will find their voice and speak loudly.
source https://collegeeducationnewsllc.com/advice-to-instructors-for-making-classes-more-inclusive-opinion/
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