L: So, what would be ways for you to make the curriculum account more for the diversity of students, specifically with regards to your reality of studying and… being a human?
I think the key is diversity at all levels of the organisation. If you have that it’s not even something that you have to think extra about, it’s just there in the organisation, where those perspectives and those concerns are being talked about and counteracted. So, that’s the big one.
“The key is diversity at all levels of the organisation.”
In terms of shorter term solutions that do not involve large structural change, it just so happens that I am part of asterisk⁵, and we have been working, albeit very slowly, on a project that counteracts some of that. We had a meeting with the GFN this week to talk about inclusion at university, and I like to think of that meeting as part of this project.
From my perspective, it’s a little bit of qualitative research into what topics the community wishes educators knew more about at the university. And hopefully we can take this information and bring it to the drawing table to create a programme for educators to be just more aware of diversity, of inclusion and of how to create safer spaces in their classrooms.
Basically, the reason why I wanted to do this was because in my first year, I was asked to interview someone who was playing the role of someone struggling with the same thing one of my parents struggled with. And it was very bad, it was a very bad interview in general, but also for the remaining part of the day I was pretty shaken up, and I remember that afterwards, I was talking about it with the person I was interviewing, and it was the exact same thing for her, one of her parents was also struggling with the same thing, so it was just a bad experience for both of us and we didn’t have space to communicate, or we didn’t even know that we could stop this interview.
“I’m a big fan of establishing group norms early on, because otherwise we have no idea what the fuck is going on.”
It was not a pre-established group norm, which is why I’m a big fan of establishing group norms early on, because otherwise we have no idea what the fuck is going on, and what you’re allowed to do and what you’re not allowed to do. And for me this sort of setting of ‘Well, I have to do this for my grade, I need this interview to pass this course’ meant that I was not allowed to stop it. Which in fact was not true, but we found that out afterwards.
So that’s why, when I started teaching this course, I firstly gave my students all the information on… that they can stop the interviews if they do not feel comfortable continuing, that it’s not going to impact their grade, that they can still write a self-reflection note and get a pass etc. So, basically just establishing as many group norms as possible.
And at the end of this course I had to give them questionnaires about how I did as a teacher, as a mentor, and one person, like it was a scale from one to five for ‘creating a safe space for learning’, and one person made another, like, 6-box next to it.
L: That’s amazing, that’s so heartwarming.
Yes, and it also shows that… I mean, most people in the classroom won’t give a shit. But there will be this one person for whom this will be the difference between failing the course because you cannot cope with what is going on at the moment and with the course or passing it and feeling safe in the classroom. So yeah, that’s sort of the Why.
“There will be this one person for whom this will be the difference between failing the course because you cannot cope or passing it and feeling safe.”
And I wouldn’t have known about… now that I think back to it, of course I wish that I didn’t have this interview because it was very difficult for me, but it was because I knew that this could happen that I had all these systems in place, and I honestly cannot even conceive of the number of different perspectives that I am not aware of at the moment, that I would like to be made aware of.
Before teaching I had pretty recently found out that you can get headphones from the IT-service that you can use during lectures, and it’s again something that you will not know unless you find someone who had this experience, right? So, what I’m saying is, all these perspectives, all these experiences are something we can learn from, so why not listen to them? Put them in the curriculum, teach them to all the teachers so we all have access and are aware of these resources.
“All these perspectives, all these experiences are something we can learn from, so why not listen to them?”
⁵ groningen action group for policy change and trans* visibility.