What To Do About Diversity?
James Rhem, Executive Editor

The day Matt Ouellett and I had a long telephone conversation about diversity, the New York Times carried a frontpage story showing that the immigrant population in the United States has risen 16% since the last census. Five days later, it followed up with a story on the long history of diversity in America with Hispanics, blacks, Asians, and, of course, Native Americans making significant impacts on the culture since before Jamestown in some cases and as far back as the 1700s in others. Said the story, quoting Gary Okihiro, a historian at Columbia University, "Minority communities ‘are yelling for inclusion in the national consciousness.'"

Any skepticism about the importance of diversity awareness as an aspect of teaching in college today vanished long ago. But what ways of talking about diversity and looking into it offer the individual faculty member the greatest benefits?

In our fifth issue (V1 N5, 1992) the Forum took up diversity from the point of view of learning styles. It's been gratifying to see subsequent research and writing on diversity largely underscore learning styles as perhaps the most productive (and least prejudicial) way of approaching the expanding diversity of students filling today's classrooms. Still, some authors insist on framing discussions in terms of "domination and subordination" and similar approaches more polemical and alienating than practical or helpful. Still, polemics aside, a focus on learning styles doesn't tell the whole story.

Matt Ouellett, director of the Center for Teaching at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and editor of the newly published Teaching Inclusively: Resources for Course, Department & Institutional Change in Higher Education (New Forums, 2005), has emerged as one of the sanest and clearest voices in the dialogue about diversity. He puts the other half of the story this way:

"The hardest part for a white teacher is to not take it personally," says Ouellett. "It's hard to step back from who we are and to see ourselves as players in a script, types, not individuals, but the fact is you are a ‘white guy' to some students." However unfair that typing may be, Ouellett points out faculty slip into it themselves, at times in seeing some students as "grade grubbers" or "slackers" or something worse.

Back in 1992 approaching diversity from the perspective of learning styles, the Forum interviewed Pat Murrell of Memphis State University:

"Let's say I have a young black man in my class," Murrell explained. "What is more important? — that he is black or that he learns in a certain way? I can't do anything about his being black, and I wouldn't want to!"

"The point," she continued, "is that there is as much diversity within the black male group as anywhere else. If, as a teacher , you take your cues from the color of a person's skin, you're going to miss the richness of that person, the diversity of their being."

Learning Styles vs. Cultural Styles

For the most part, Ouellett agrees, but when asked which proves more important in dealing with diverse students—"learning styles" or "cultural profile"—he says, "It's both." Research applying the "field sensitivity" and "field independent" constructs does find that white females and African-American, Native American and Hispanic-American males and females tend to prefer "relational, field-sensitive" approaches to learning while Euro-American and Asian-American males incline toward a more "analytical, field-independent" approach. Thus, a "cultural style" operates perhaps alongside well-established "learning styles." The important trap to avoid, Ouellett emphasizes, lies in "essentialism." Most cultural styles reflect cultural history more than any essential human difference in one group of students from another. "The sentinel of essentialism is being challenged by the ‘now,'" says Ouellett, meaning that some things can change.

A Practical Approach

Given that it may be hard for a "white guy" not to take some aspects of diversity personally, how might a white professor who wanted to find out whether or not he (or she) had a problem with diversity in his (or her) teaching begin to examine the question? "The first sign that there might be a problem is when you get a bi-modal evaluation, an evaluation where the students either love you or hate you," says Ouellett. "That's a ‘red flag.' You don't know what it means in and of itself, but it's a sign. Some teachers with very strong transformative styles, big personalities, get this result, for example; so, you have to go on and ask other questions if you get it. You have to ask ‘who' likes you and ‘who' doesn't. Is it [academically] poor students?"

Other signs include a shift (or crack in your bell curve) and a significant shift (usually downward) in enrollment for your courses.

Beyond those signs, faculty have to find out not only "who" finds their teaching unhelpful, but "why" they aren't learning from it. Does it have to do with the writing required in the course? The reading? The speaking? Students for whom English is a second language may have problems in these areas, Ouellett points out, problems that have little to do either with intelligence or with learning style.

"This is where books like Barbara Gross Davis's Tools for Teaching and Cross and Angelo's Classroom Assessment Techniques are so helpful," Ouellet says. "You don't want to rely on only one kind of evaluation or assessment. You want to do formative assessments early, give ‘pre-assignments,' so that you can find out more about how your students are learning or not learning and make adjustments."

A Larger Picture

Overworked faculty not infrequently fail to consider an institutional perspective, says Ouellett. A lot of information on one's students, however, lies in those data sets on incoming enrollees. Such data sets will tell who is being admitted, profiles according to race, gender, high school GPA, whether your school was their first choice, and so on. The National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) offers valuable additional information about the level of satisfaction of students on your campus. Looking into these things, says Ouellett, is all part of what he calls "teaching as research, which basically means learning as you do it."

"We have this inclination to feel either ‘I'm an expert in it' or ‘I don't need to think about it,'" says Ouellett. "You don't have to be an expert in any of the things that impact the larger issue of diversity," he continues, "but you can become an expert in asking for more information, an expert in asking better and better questions." Most faculty already have that capacity developed to a high degree in some areas and, indeed, that's the place to start, according to Ouellett. "You don't have to be an expert in pedagogy, for example: the key is to think about your strengths, know, consciously know, what they are and then go beyond them."

"I like Stephen Brookfield's take on this, the Buddhist stance of not knowing, learning new things always," he says.

Key Questions

If an individual faculty member's inquiry into diversity can begin with an institutional overview, questions about an individual course may begin from that perspective as well. "Many faculty don't think about this, the larger program of their studies," says Ouellett. "‘Why this course? Why now?'"

Once faculty have a clear sense of where a particular package of material fits into a larger course of study, several key questions present themselves. Among them are:

• What do you want students to know?

• What do you want students to do?

• What are the values or appreciations you want students to have and to continue to refine with regard to this material once the course is over?

Interestingly, these questions have no overt diversity stamp on them. They apply to good teaching across the board. Diversity literature repeatedly makes that point, that good teaching and diverse teaching are usually synonymous.

Ouellett believes part of the questioning posture that allows a teacher to see "teaching as research" includes not only asking questions about students and how they learn, but also asking students about how they learn. "I think it's part of asking better and better questions," says Ouellett. "Ask students to think about their learning at a meta level. ‘Is what we're doing working for you? Are you learning? Why? Why not?'" This tactic of bringing students consciously into the inquiry essentially asks students to do something akin to what faculty do when they inventory their strengths and then try to go a step beyond into learning and trying something new. The questions invite students not only to recognize themselves as learners with individual strengths and preferences, but also tacitly suggests the value of expanding their modes of learning.

Grading?

Faculty who've made changes in an effort to engage "visual learners," "relational learners," and so on, and have offered a variety of new modes through which students may demonstrate what they've learned sometimes worry how to assess these new displays. "You are the consistent judge," Ouellet reminds faculty. The key to fairness in grading a variety of different displays of learning lies in establishing "learning outcome goals" with great clarity, he says. Here, he says, "rubrics" can be of considerable help.

"It may take doing the course several times to get really comfortable with it," says Ouellett, "but creating rubrics for grading causes us to re-examine our standards of judgment as well as our learning outcome goals. And once that's done, grading is much faster and easier and fairer."

Why Diversity?

One of the significant obstacles to giving more attention to diversity lies in the tacit sense that it must begin with an admission that one's doing something wrong or exhibiting some level of racist, ablest, colonialist, sexist, etcist behavior. However good confession may be for the soul, it isn't always necessary or appropriate for building its health, Ouellet believes. "To turn and value a different way can feel like repudiating what you are or did before," he says. "And it's very true that doing diversity work means being vulnerable and making your mistakes publicly." So why do it? "I think in the end we've got to be very narcissistic about it," Ouellett says. "We've got to reach down—not act out of liberal guilt—but reach down deep to see the costs to us as white men of the status quo, of living without integrity when we are perhaps quietly complicit in not being inclusive of others who are different and who will be different from us."

When it comes to teaching, he says, it really all boils down to something fairly simple: "It's basically a shift in thinking to ‘What needs to be happening here to give the students what they need to learn?'" 

Contact:
Dr. Mathew L. Ouellett, Director
Center for Teaching
301 Goodell Building, UMass
140 Hicks Way
Amherst, MA 01003-9272
Telephone: (413) 545"1225
E-mail: mlo@acad.umass.edu
Web: http://www.umass.edu/cft/