Recently, our Director of the Office of Teaching, Learning, and Assessment asked us to consider how we can improve Inclusion and Diversity into our mission and goals for the upcoming year. Before I could start thinking about making strategic improvements, I realized that I wanted to better understand forms of discrimination. I started brainstorming a list and ended up adding additional items from the web:
- Skin color, phenotypes
- Religion
- Class/power, education, hierarchy
- Sexual identity, sexuality (incl. sexual harassment) and gender identity
- Non-english speakers and national origin
- Age
- Politics
- Disability
- Employment, military service, wealth/poverty
- Body-image and pregnancy/parenting
- Addiction, drug use
- Reprisal/retention/retaliation
- Personality, idiosyncrasy, phobias
- Reverse discrimination
The list isn’t meant to be authoritative or comprehensive. I did it for me as an exercise to think about ways I’ve seen people be discriminated, how I’ve made mistakes and ways I’ve never even thought of before. If I can’t be mindful of how I discriminate, I can’t do better, I can’t grow.
I remember that I made fun of a classmate, a friend, back in the first grade for being what I thought was fat. I don’t remember doing it, but I very clearly remember my teacher pulling me aside and scolding me for that because she heard/saw what I did. I grew up with him in school and Boy Scouts and considered him a friend, but always felt guilty for doing that.
I’ll add that I found this cartoon that made me wonder about how we treat each other. It’s meant to be funny and I think it is is a dark way.
https://i.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/ifm4su/the_world_without_religion/
It’s a reminder to me that when looking back at my list, we’ll find all sorts of ways to hurt one another. I don’t know if I can ever live a life free of discrimination or bias–I’m not even sure if that is possible, but at the very least I have to try to be aware and make the best choices I can.
How does this impact my work? My office is learning together about Inclusive Teaching and Design. We are transforming how we design classes and work with faculty to encourage design decisions that are inclusive from the start. We’re trying to expand the definition of Universal Design based on Chris Gamrat’s recent work. I’m not sure that’s how he would define it, but I’m still learning.