2008 APSA Teaching and Learning Track Summaries—Track Three: Diversity, Inclusiveness, and Inequality

Extract

The participants in the Diversity, Inclusiveness, and Inequality track represented a great deal of diversity themselves and included faculty and students from a rich variety of research institutions, private liberal arts colleges, and community colleges. While participants engaged issues and strategies in each of the three substantive areas—diversity, inclusiveness, and inequality in education (DIIE)—the bulk of our conversations focused on diversity and inequality. Topics included curriculum and course content issues, negotiating institutional support for DIIE, challenges of student recruitment and retention, and negotiating power relationships and identities among different kinds of student populations both within and outside of the classroom. This summary reviews four sets of questions that the group addressed and that point to critical areas rich for future research and reflection. In brief these are: (1) How can we simultaneously promote learning about difference and learning about ourselves? (2) How can faculty develop a range of strategic pedagogies and classroom environments in order to avoid some of the challenges inherent in teaching about DIIE? (3) How can we move beyond narrow understandings of diversity that limit the concept solely to a category of identity, neglecting the ways in which diversity and inequality are categories of analysis, processes, and indicative of power relations? (4) What steps are necessary to more fully integrate DIIE across the political science curriculum?