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

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