I was reading a blog post last week (I’m not linking to it for reasons that will become obvious) by an English teacher at a college preparatory high school. He was talking about how to be a “culturally responsive” teacher, so he related an incident that happened in his classroom. In the midst of one of their discussions, a student commented that poor people are lazy. The teacher, in an attempt to be “culturally responsive” encouraged the class to discuss this idea, letting students on both sides put forth arguments on this issue. I should point out that most of the students (and the teacher, it sounds like, but I’m making an assumption here) come from upper-class households, many of whom would be in the 1%. However, we can’t change the students we have in front of us, so this post isn’t about them; it’s about what we assign our students and the material we discuss in our classes.
In this case, the class was covering Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography, a good book for understanding much about America; in fact, I’m teaching it this fall in my United States Literature: Colonial to 1865 class. However, all I could think when I was reading his blog post was, “Why aren’t you assigning a broader range of readings to expose them to diversity that’s clearly not present in the class?” We can’t change the students we have, so, in Lee’s case, we do have students from a wide variety of socioeconomic backgrounds; we don’t, though, have a large number of students from American racial minority populations. We also don’t have much religious diversity (granted, we have denominational range, but few students in each class outside Christianity), nor do we have a large number of LGBTQ students (especially who are open about such). Thus, my question has become, “What does an upper-middle class, well-educated, white, straight, cisgender male do to increase diversity in classes where almost all of the students are white, straight, and cisgender(and, in the English department, female)?”
One of the best ways I’ve found to increase diversity when neither I nor my students are very diverse is to look at what I’m teaching. Thus, while I do teach Ben Franklin in U.S. Literature: Colonial to 1865, I also teach Navajo and Iroquois creation stories, slave narratives by Harriet Jacobs and Frederick Douglass, writings on gender and race from Margaret Fuller, among a variety of other writers. Of course, we’ll talk about Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, Dickinson, and Poe, but I don’t have to make an either-or choice; I can include a true variety of writers to show students the complexities of the time, giving them a fuller education, while also showing them writers who are different than they are.
Some classes lend themselves to this approach better than others, I’ll admit. I teach a Contemporary Literature class, and it’s fairly easy to increase the range of diverse authors there, given the rise in publishing from around the world in the past fifty years. However, there are a number of places we can include a broader range of views and people, even in classes where that might not seem as evident. In science and nursing classes, we could reference Daniel Hale Williams, who founded the first interracial hospital, which also served as the first school for African-American nurses in the country; we could talk about Jacob Lawrence and Augusta Savage in art classes; we could go beyond Marie Curie and talk about people like Caroline Herschel, who discovered new nebulae and star clusters in the late 1700s; or we could mention John Herrington, a member of the Chickasaw Nation who spent more than 330 hours in space before retiring more than a decade ago.
Of course, I’ve been working on the assumption that increased diversity in classes is a positive, an assumption that not everyone shares. I would think, though, on a campus where one of our core values is the global experience we want our students to have that we mostly share that assumption. We don’t simply want our students to encounter other cultures when they’re on their cross-cultural trip, whether that’s two weeks or a semester abroad. We want them to have global experiences throughout their time at Lee, whether that’s through the curriculum or speakers in chapel or meeting other students from through the world. We know that, if students encounter ideas and people from other cultures, they are more likely to be responsible citizens and that they will be more able to live meaningful lives “in a complex world,” as our Mission Statement says.
At Lee, we recognize the importance of taking our students out into the wider world, but we can also bring that world closer to them throughout their time with us. Even those of us who check off all or almost all of the majority boxes in America today (as I do) can bring other voices and other perspectives into the classroom. I can’t speak on behalf of those who have less privilege or less opportunity than I do, but I can share their stories and their experiences with my students.
There is one other benefit I’ve found. Years ago, I brought a poem I loved into one of my Rhetoric and Research classes. The poem is “Some Like Poetry” by a Polish poet, Wislawa Szymborska, and I read it in class. It didn’t have anything to do with what we were discussing that day; I just wanted to take a couple of minutes and read it. One of my students in that class was Polish, and she told me she had never heard anyone in America read a poem (or anything else) by someone from her country. She brought me cookies the next two class periods. She also taught me and the class how to pronounce Szymborska’s name. I learned something; the rest of the class learned something; and my student from Poland saw that a professor who specializes in literature from the United States can also read poetry from Poland and around the world.
If we model global citizenship for our students, if we include readings and people and ideas from around the world, we’re more likely to live up to one of our core values and a centerpiece of our university. We also might learn something ourselves in the process. It is more work, given that many of us will have to go outside of what we learned in graduate school, but it’s worth the effort for our students and for ourselves.