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Health Equity Insights | Quality Interactions

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Expert tips and insights about cultural competency, implicit bias, and health equity in healthcare.

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Coloniality lives on through medical education

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Coloniality lives on through medical education

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Thirusha Naidu , associate professor

Department of Behavioural Medicine, University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa

Medical schools must promote decolonial perspectives to counter the bias and discrimination that persists in medical research and practice, writes Thirusha Naidu

The long reach of European colonisation lives on despite many colonised countries having gained political independence. Discriminatory and unjust colonial practices endure through the knowledge, structures, and systems of colonising and settler colonial countries and are replicated in institutions of formerly colonised countries in a powerful condition called coloniality. 1 Medicine was a crucial cog in the colonial machine. 2 3 4 Wherever colonisation originated or existed, medical education is still influenced by colonial tenets, shaping future healthcare practitioners and practice.

The London School of Tropical Medicine was created at the height of colonisation to manage "tropical diseases" such as malaria that hindered colonisation of new territories. 5 Under the British empire, the conquest of land led to the silencing of Indigenous people and denigration of their ways of understanding health, healing, and their relationship with the natural world. Indigenous ways were obscured by colonial thinking. 6

Global health, encompassing research, policy, practice, and teaching is a modern iteration of tropical medicine. It has been criticised for its imperialist and para-colonial practices, including sending students from high income countries to previously colonised countries for electives, thus reinforcing currently unequal relationships through education. 7 Similarly, through "helicopter research" researchers in the global north replicate colonial interactions in formerly colonised countries by imposing Euro-American motivations, knowledge systems, and research methods while marginalising local priorities, extracting local knowledge, and excluding local researchers.

Organisations establishing medical education standards are dominated by high income countries, 8 and representatives of previous colonial and settler-colonial countries determine medical education standards worldwide. Yet institutions in these countries often do not readily accept medical graduates from previously colonised countries as physicians. 9 Medical schools in previously colonised countries comply under internal and external pressure to maintain international standards, resulting in practitioners who are unfit to meet the needs of their countries. 9 Standardised testing for training admissions, feedback, professionalism, and validity in assessment are based on colonially founded global north knowledge bases, perpetuating discrimination towards racially, ethnically, or gender diverse students universally. 10

Medical education's basis in colonial epistemology poorly prepares global south and marginalised students everywhere for practice. At worst it leads them to break medicine's central tenant of "do no harm" by upholding the discriminatory view of the able bodied, white, Christian, straight, cisgender male as the "zero point perspective." 11 Consequently, gender and racially diverse practitioners may doubt their lived experience and discriminate against people who share their identity. 12

Modern medicine is a colonial artifact that racialises and genders the body, blaming or disbelieving illnesses in female and black people under the guise of objective science yet based on the zero point perspective. 13 14 The covid-19 pandemic laid bare medicine's gendered and racialised nature 15- revealing worsening social and structural health inequalities as black and brown people experienced and were blamed for the worst effects. Medical education is complicit in sustaining coloniality in medicine. Medical schools teach evidence from methods skewed to the zero point perspective as scientific fact. This may be colonisation's deepest cut, and its effects will continue to harm the most vulnerable people in society until the epistemology of medical education is revised. 16

Medical education research continues to uphold the colonial project. Much research originates from the global north, with five previously colonising or settler colonial countries-the UK, US, Canada, Netherlands, and Australia-dominating lead authorship positions. The editors in chief of medical education journals are located in the global north. 17

Shifting perspectives

Equity, diversity, and inclusion initiatives in medicine are usually top-down, spotlighting representation and visibility of racial, gender, and ethnic minorities, without confronting colonialism, imperialism, power, and the historical roots shaping inequities in modern healthcare. Decolonial perspectives are bottom-up, placing contemporary life in the context of history. They aim to redistribute power and resources to elevate and restore marginalised knowledge and Indigenous perspectives on health and healing. 18 Decolonising medical education requires changing actors, dismantling institutions, and shifting power concurrently. 10 Equity, diversity, and inclusion initiatives prioritise changing actors, which alone is inadequate for effective change.

Dismantling institutions and shifting power requires decolonising the medical curriculum by acknowledging the historical exploitation of Indigenous knowledge and the impact of modern medical practices on marginalised communities. 2 It involves recognising Indigenous and traditional healing practices as equal or superior to western medicine by incorporating Indigenous knowledge experts and teachings into curriculums. 4 10 Educating students and faculty to employ cultural humility to collaborate equitably with patients and communities is imperative. 19 Local community partnerships, particularly among marginalised communities, should form an integral part of medical education teaching and research. 16 Medical education must look beyond western centric perspectives by studying global healthcare systems. 4 20 The humanities must form part of medical curriculums to improve understanding of the sociocultural contexts and social determinants of health and illness for equitable care. Collective and collaborative action is critical if medical education is to step out of the shadow of its colonial past.

This article is part of a series of articles and podcasts on decolonising health and medicine: www.bmj.com/decolonising-health

Competing interest: None declared

Provenance and peer review: Commissioned; not externally peer reviewed.

Footnotes

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Coloniality lives on through medical education

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Medical schools must promote decolonial perspectives to counter the bias and discrimination that persists in medical research and practice, writes Thirusha Naidu The long reach of European colonisation lives on despite many colonised countries having gained political independence.

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Dissipating historical medical inequity through decolonising healthcare education

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Dissipating historical medical inequity through decolonising healthcare education

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Dissipating historical medical inequity through decolonising healthcare education - Journal of Medical Ethics blog

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By Amali U. Lokugamage Decolonisation is an effort to ‘turn tables’ on the enduring inequities established by colonial rule. It is also about dismantling unfair power imbalances in society. The three authors of the article ‘Decolonising ideas of healing in medical education’ originate from Sri Lanka…

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Dissipating historical medical inequity through decolonising healthcare education

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Supporting equitable nursing education and career progression

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Supporting equitable nursing education and career progression

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Melting the Snowy White Peaks: The needs, expectations and experiences of Black, Asian and minority ethnic student nurses to support equitable nursing education and career progression

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There is an under-representation of Black, Asian and minority ethnic nurses in senior positions within the UK’s national healthcare system.To understa…

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Principles » Center for Anti-Racist Education CARE Principles

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The CARE Principles serve as guidelines to develop curriculum that champions the diverse and complex human experience.

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Anti-Racist Pedagogy in Action: First Steps

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Anti-Racist Pedagogy in Action: First Steps

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Our goal in creating this resource is to provide a synthesis of anti-racist pedagogy research for Columbia University faculty and graduate instructors who strive to incorporate an anti-racist pedagogy into their personal teaching practice. We offer this guide as a point of entry for instructors from a variety of backgrounds, disciplines, identity positions, and levels of teaching experience who wish to engage in this work. The strategies, summaries, and additional links provide instructors with a theoretical framework upon which to make meaningful, intentional choices in their classrooms.

Cite this resource: Columbia Center for Teaching and Learning (2020). Anti-Racist Pedagogy in Action. Columbia University. Retrieved [today's date] from https://ctl.columbia.edu/resources-and-technology/resources/anti-racist-pedagogy/

"The only way to undo racism is to consistently identify it and describe it-and then dismantle it." -Dr. Ibram X. Kendi, How to Be an Antiracist (2019)

The current moment in higher education requires an interrogation and deep reckoning with the academy's role in upholding an inequitable system. At the same time, this moment presents an opportunity to both envision and create a more equitable and just future. While this requires a broader examination of the systems and structures of higher education, it is also about considering the teaching and learning at an institution. It is about considering the classroom spaces and enacted pedagogies therein: are they equitable? Are they anti-racist? Do they seek to remove barriers for learners?

Anti-racist pedagogical practices are in a constant state of "becoming," meaning there is no one single stopping point. Cultivating an anti-racist pedagogical practice requires a commitment to ongoing critical self-reflection, lifetime learning, and improvement. Anti-racist pedagogy is both a framework and a process. As defined in Kyoko Kishimoto's (2018) article, "Anti-Racist Pedagogy: From Faculty's Self-Reflection to Organizing Within and Beyond the Classroom,"

Anti-racist pedagogy is not about simply incorporating racial content into courses, curriculum, and discipline. It is also about how one teaches, even in courses where race is not the subject matter. It begins with the faculty's awareness and self-reflection of their social position and leads to application of this analysis in their teaching, but also in their discipline, research, and departmental, university, and community work. In other words, anti-racist pedagogy is an organizing effort for institutional and social change that is much broader than teaching in the classroom. (p. 540)

This specific definition offers an expanded conception of anti-racist pedagogy, one that includes not just course content or material, but an emphasis about how one teaches, and the importance of self-reflection. Additionally, Kishimoto's definition highlights the various social spheres where anti-racist pedagogy might be engaged, including not only the classroom but more broadly within one's own discipline, department, institution, and beyond.

Anti-Racist Pedagogy: Process for Action

This resource presents five actions for developing an anti-racist pedagogical practice; these actions illustrate themes distilled from the literature on anti-racist pedagogy. Each action is accompanied by individual reflection questions, additional resources, and further reading. Although presented as individual actions, these things happen simultaneously, and often, without any linearity; all that to say, they do not happen in a vacuum. For example, you might find yourself continuously returning to action two: interrogate your positionality and (un)conscious biases; and, in fact, you should! Developing and fostering an anti-racist pedagogical practice is an ongoing and iterative process. It is a journey that one embarks on both as an individual and with a larger community.

The following resource is meant to help guide the Columbia teaching community into discussions about anti-racist pedagogies and teaching practices. This resource is by no means exhaustive but rather acts as a starting point to engage in much more complex and larger discussions. Classrooms serve as microcosms of the larger society, and the resources offered here, while focused on pedagogical practices, support broader commitments to anti-racist actions in higher education. In what follows, you will find suggested resources and further reading associated with each of these actions, as well as reflective prompts to help guide your own journey toward developing an anti-racist pedgoagical practice.

Read on to:

Access initial strategies and reflective prompts for engaging in anti-racist pedagogical practice

Engage with the literature on anti-racist pedagogies

Acquire sources for further development, research, and self-education

1. Self-Educate and Acknowledge Racial Trauma

Essential first steps in this process are to self-educate about anti-racist pedagogical practices and begin an iterative cycle of self-reflection and continuous learning. It's important to understand the racial trauma that students may carry and bring into the classroom. It can help to think broadly about anti-racism, to think of it as a cultural and societal necessity, before making connections to a personal pedagogical and teaching context.

Reflective prompts:

What identities do your students bring to the classroom?

How might your students be impacted by events outside of the classroom?

How might racial trauma affect your learners (and you)?

Related Sources:

The books by authors like Kendi and Tatum present a broader view of what it means to be anti-racist and situate (anti-)racism within larger historical and sociocultural contexts. While this offers a framework for beginning conversations, Freire and hooks offer more direct teaching support, as their work is explicitly about pedagogy that transforms the classroom into a liberatory space. Lastly, for those looking to critically examine their teaching practices, the related sources listed below can help. The National Museum of African American History and Culture's "Talking About Race" webpage offers different starting points depending upon an individual's perspective (e.g.: "I am an educator" or "I am a parent/caregiver" etc.).

Pedagogy of the Oppressed is most known for its critique of the "banking model of education," which Freire describes as mere recitation and memorization of facts. In this model, students "bank" information and facts given to them from the instructor. Instead of the bank model, Freire suggests that educators think about their students as co-creators of knowledge, as critical and reflective participants in the learning process where they construct and reconstruct meaning in their own terms; in doing so, the classroom is transformed into a liberatory and anti-oppressive space.
hooks, b. (1994). Teaching to transgress: Education as the practice of freedom. Routledge. National Museum of African American History and Culture. (n.d.). Talking about Race Tatum, B.D. (2017). Why are all the Black kids sitting together in the cafeteria: And other conversations about race. Basic Books. .
In this collection of essays, directed at both teachers and students, hooks writes about a new pedagogy, one that transforms the classroom into a transgressive space, which is the only way in which education becomes the practice of freedom. hooks writes of helping students transgress the everyday racial, sexual, or class barriers they may face. In doing so, hooks reimagines education as a democratic act and a practice of freedom.

Kendi offers a clear definition of what it means to be racist and, more importantly, anti-racist, arguing that racist policy often hides behind the guise of neutrality. In each chapter throughout this book, Kendi delves into the layers of systemic racism, drawing out the history and connections across identities and positionalities. Reading like a narrative journey, a reflection of Kendi's own anti-racist development and transformation, this book provides an entry into intersectional identities and understanding what it means and what is required to be anti-racist in 21st-century America.

This online guide offers different pathways for talking about race, based on the user's positionality (e.g.: parent, educator, activist, etc.). While the topics and resources included are the same across positionalities, this guide offers different framing and rationales for each perspective, with an understanding that talking about race as an educator is quite different from, albeit just as important as, talking about race as a parent or caregiver.

Tatum's book, first published in 1997, offers important sociocultural context about race and racism in the U.S. She demonstrates the impact that decades of racist police y and decision-making have had on the educational and developmental experiences of people, especially children, of color. This 20th anniversary, 2017 edition cited here offers commentary on post-Obama America and offers signs of hope for the future, despite an acknowledgement that not much has changed since this book's original publication in 1997.

2. Interrogate Your Positionality and (Un)conscious Biases

Reflective prompts:

Related Sources:

The related sources below offer different approaches to this self-interrogation. Adichie's TED talk challenges people to rethink the single stories they may hold about different groups of people, and the harm that those single (and often false) narratives cause. Ahmed, along with Ash et al., offer a wider administrative perspective, which can help with interrogating positionalities within a larger institutional context. Kernahan's chapter, along with the Wheaton College Center for Collaborative Teaching and Learning's resource, offer specific strategies and actions to take during the critical self-reflection process. Lastly, LinkedIn Learning (available to all Columbia faculty, students, and staff) has courses related to unconscious bias and more that could be used personally or in the classroom.

Describing her experience coming to the U.S. for college, Adichie underscores the importance of cultural awareness, and the critical risks that arise when people have single conceptions (or stories) about other groups of people.
Ahmed, S. (2012). Speaking about racism Ash, A. Hill, R., Risdon, S.N., & Jun, A. (2020). Anti-racism in higher education: A model for change Brookfield, S. (2017). Becoming a critically reflective teacher, second edition. Kernahan, C. (2019). Getting yourself together: Developing a secure teacher identity. In C. Kernahan Teaching about race and racism in the college classroom: Notes from a white professor Wheaton College Center for Collaborative Teaching and Learning. (2020). Becoming an anti-racist educator. (pp. 71-98). West Virginia U.P. Jossey-Bass. . Race and Pedagogy Journal, 4(3), 1-35. . In S. Ahmed On being included: Racism and diversity in institutional life (pp. 141-71). Duke U.P.
Ahmed highlights the rhetorical construction of diversity and inclusion initiatives in organizational structures. Ahmed argues that the diversity initiatives of most institutions actually harm those reporting racist incidents, as they necessitate a "we don't have a racism problem" response. In doing so, Ahmed argues, those who report these incidents become "the problem" rather than racism or the racist acts themselves.

In their article, Ash et al. (2020) propose a model for changing the demographics of institutional leadership. They suggest a top-down model requiring White higher administration to participate in critical self-reflection of their own whiteness and privilege, and the conscious and unconscious impact that has on their decision-making. They also envision a future where all the members of a campus community have been educated on racial inequity, and can work together to interrogate and dismantle the systemic racial inequity and inequality in higher education.

Brookfield offers instructors a framework for developing their own critical reflective lens. Interrogating one's own biases and becoming more critically self-reflective is no easy task. Thus, Brookfield's framework of lenses through which one might reflect can help. Whether starting a new reflective process, or sustaining an ongoing one, Brookfield's book will help instructors dig deeper into their own reflective processes.

All Columbia students, faculty, and staff have access to online courses through LinkedIn Learning. While much of the focus of these courses is on business and other technological skills, there are some courses, like "Unconscious Bias" by Stacey Gordon or "Confronting Bias: Thriving Across Our Differences" by Vernā Myers and Arianna Huffington, related to developing awareness of unconscious biases and how to confront those.

Kernahan's book (which is wholly cited under item 3 below) offers concrete strategies and recommendations for teaching about race in higher education. Speaking from her own experience as a White professor, Kernahan notes the most common points of resistance, challenge, and difficulty. This particular chapter stresses the importance of individual teacher identity prior to classroom discussions. Kernahan highlights the need for critical and ongoing self-reflection and self-interrogation, while offering specific ways of doing this work.

Drawing from much of the same literature cited here, this page from Wheaton College's Center for Collaborative Teaching and Learning presents "practices that help us become anti-racist." These practices are further divided into individual practices focused on worldview and perspective, and more specific practices that educators can enact in their classrooms. Much like this current guide, the webpage supports these practices with further reading and resources for ongoing self-education.

3. Address Curricular Gaps with Intentional Course Design

Moving beyond critical self-reflection, it is important to review course materials and content to ensure that your course design is intentionally and explicitly anti-racist. For a course where race is a content or curricular focus, whiteness should be decentered and multiple perspectives and voices should be represented throughout the course. For a course where race is the content or curricular focus, there is an opportunity for disciplinary interrogation: what counts as valuable knowledge or ways of knowing in the discipline? Who makes those decisions? And, because of that, whose voices are left out of the discipline?

Reflective prompts:

material do you assign in your course? (Consider representation across authors and perspectives, but also modes, media, and ways of knowing [e.g., academic journal, narrative].)

What opportunities do students have to address, confront, or discuss system inequity in the field of discipline?

Related Sources:

The related sources below offer support at different stages of the course design process. Though not organized by stages of course design, "Anti-Racism and Allyship in the Classroom" provides further resources categorized by disciplinary focus. The work by Kernahan, Kishimoto, and Smith et al. offer strategies to be implemented throughout course design, as well as within the classroom itself. For instructors interested in enacting anti-racist policies at the university and beyond, Taylor et al.'s social justice syllabus tool offers three principles to apply to a syllabus as a both manageable, yet impactful, starting point.
Brown University Harriet W. Sheridan Center for Teaching and Learning. (n.d.).Effective teaching is anti-racist teaching.
This webpage offers five "starting points" for enacting anti-racist teaching. These starting points connect to the Center's conceptualization of what it means to be an anti-racist teacher. Some of the areas identified include: course goals, content, discussions, and assessments. Related to these areas, this resource offers sample language and examples from Brown's teaching community.

The assessment of student learning is an important aspect of any course. The diversity of learners and course contexts necessitates that we question whether our current assessment practices are serving us: do they meet the needs of all of our students? Do they align with our course learning objectives and promote learning for all students? Through a process of reflection on our assessment approaches, we can recognize and remove barriers to student success and work toward more equitable learning experiences for all students.
Kernahan, C. (2019). Kishimoto, K. (2018). Anti-racist pedagogy: From faculty's self-reflection to organizing within and beyond the classroom Taylor, S.D., Veri, M.J., Eliason, M., Hermoso, J.C.R., Bolter, N.D., & Van Olphen, J.E. (2019). The social justice syllabus design tool: A first step in doing social justice pedagogy. Journal Committed to Social Change on Race and Ethnicity (JCSCORE), 5(2), 133-66. . Race Ethnicity and Education, 21(4), 540-554. Teaching about race and racism in the college classroom: Notes from a white professor. West Virginia U.P.
This document offers further support for anti-racism and allyship. Although not a single source itself, this document categorizes the resources by general topics (social justice, anti-racism, etc.) and then offers resources categorized by disciplinary focus (e.g.: Anthropology, Art, Economics, Health, etc.).

Kishimoto offers a comprehensible definition of anti-racist pedagogy-specifically one that includes classrooms where "race is not the subject matter" (pp. 540). Kishimoto's article provides a five-step overview of an anti-racist approach to teaching and course delivery that instructors can interpret and take up in their own contexts. Most importantly, Kishimoto offers a view of anti-racist pedagogy apart from course content, empashizing that this approach is all about one teaches.

4. Foster a Compassionate Class Community and Meet Students Where They Are

It's important to include opportunities for students to consider their own positionalities and biases to help foster their critical awareness; you may even choose to share your own experience with this critical reflection as a model for the process (see action 2 above). Related to these opportunities, it is likewise important to foster a classroom environment that makes such reflection and interrogation possible. Students come from a variety of perspectives and experiences, with a wide range of beliefs and understanding of a particular topic. No matter the content of the course, when bringing an explicitly anti-racist framework, consider starting by meeting your students where they're at, and work from there. This may mean embracing difficult conversations and student resistance in the classroom. One way to start this process, and to navigate resistance is by engaging students in metacognitive or contemplative practices as it can help students identify their own starting points in the process.

Reflective prompts:

Related Sources:

The related sources included below offer strategies to create a classroom environment that is conducive to engaging in and navigating these discussions. From helping instructors respond to potential bias and microaggressions (specifically in the online environment), to sharing strategies for other challenging classroom moments, these sources are applicable across contexts.
Columbia University Center for Teaching and Learning. (2022). Navigating heated, offensive, and tense (HOT) moments in the classroom.
This resource provides strategies that can be implemented in any course context. ​Regardless of course topic or content, challenging conversations, moments of rupture or disruption, and heated encounters may occur in the classroom. Though they are complicated and can be difficult to respond to, there are steps instructors can take to anticipate and navigate HOT-heated, offensive, or tense-moments before, during, and after they occur.

Cora Learning. (2020, April 28). Responding to racial bias and microaggressions in the online environment [Video]. Youtube.
Harbin, M.B., Thurber, A., & Bandy, J. (2019). Teaching race, racism, and racial justice: Pedagogical principles and classroom strategies for course instructors. Race and Pedagogy Journal, 4(1), 1-37.
This webinar, offered by Cora Learning and facilitated by Drs. Frank Harris III and J. Luke Wood, presents strategies for navigating racial bias and microaggressions in the online space. By establishing shared definitions and understanding and using specific case study examples, the webinar underscores the important role of instructors in addressing these acts in an appropriate and timely fashion. It also underscores the uniqueness of the online environment and the new considerations that such a space requires.

Harbin et al. open their article with an acknowledgement about the challenges and complexities of teaching about race, racism, and racial justice in the college classroom. Following this acknowledgement, Harbin et al. identify of the most common challenges, and potential strategies for addressing these challenges across college classrooms. They balance the focus of these challenges, recognizing that they can arise from the student and instructor perspectives.

Smith, L., Kashubeck-West, S., Payton, G., & Adams, E. (2017). White professors teaching about racism: Challenges and rewards. The Counseling Psychologist, 45(5), 651-68.

In their article, Smith et al. address the challenges that White professors may face when teaching about race and racism. While a number of the challenges identified relate to the process of critical self-reflection, Smith et al. offer strategies for navigating these challenges within the classroom. They further underscore the importance of White professors participating in multicultural initiatives broadly, and teaching about racism specifically, despite potential challenges or concerns.

Supiano, B. (2020). Teaching: When students resist learning about racism. Chronicle of Higher Education.

5. Engage the Wider Campus Community and Commit to Action Beyond the Classroom

When engaging in anti-racist pedgaogy, one important step is to work with students to identify "everyday things [they] can do" (Kishimoto, 2018, pp. 545). While engaging in classroom discussion and activities is certainly impactful for students, it's equally important to help them identify the actions they can take in their lives beyond the classroom. One potential space for engagement beyond the classroom is the wider campus and institutional community. Connect students with available information and resources across campus to help them get involved more broadly; you may even engage these campus initiatives and resources to help students make connections with their in-class discussions and reflections.

Reflective prompts:

What other opportunities or initiatives do you know of, and might you engage in?

Related Sources:

In July 2020, President Bollinger underscored Columbia's commitment to anti-racism , calling upon the campus community to get involved . This commitment is reinforced by several initiatives across campus such as the Voices for Change Columbia News series, the Columbia University Life Racial Justice Mini-Grant Program , and the Office of the Provost Addressing Racism seed grant opportunities .

In addition to these commitments, the related sources below are Columbia-specific and offer just a few available pathways for members of the campus community to commit to anti-racist action beyond the classroom.
Columbia Office of University Life. (n.d.). Resources for Promoting Racial Justice and Eliminating Anti-Black Violence.
Columbia's Office of University Life has curated a list of multimedia resources with the explicit purpose of eliminating anti-Black violence and engaging in anti-racist practice. This collection is ongoing and continuously growing, and the Office actively encourages recommendations for additions. On the list, you will find suggested books, films, articles, podcasts, and more.

Members of Columbia's School of Social Work (CSSW) are actively engaging in racial justice initiatives. This page offers a summary of some of these initiatives, as well as access to videos and further reading to learn more about the work being done.

This website, created by Columbia campus community members, offers information about Columbia's history with slavery. The site itself is broken down by historical periods, historical figures, and student research.

The Gottesman Libraries at Teachers College has a digital book display centered on anti-racism and creating an equitable and just society. From the introduction of the digital book display, "This display embraces a call for wider respect, acceptance, and appreciation of diversity in all its forms, particularly in educational settings, with race as a prime example in teaching for a diverse democracy."

References

Ahmed, S. (2012). Speaking about racism . In S. Ahmed On being included: Racism and diversity in institutional life (pp. 141-71). Duke U.P.

Ash, A. Hill, R., Risdon, S.N., & Jun, A. (2020). Anti-racism in higher education: A model for change . Race and Pedagogy Journal, 4 (3), 1-35.

Blakeney, A.M. (2011). Antiracist pedagogy: Definition, theory, purpose, and professional development. Journal of Curriculum & Pedagogy 2 (1), 119-32.

Brookfield, S. (2017). Becoming a critically reflective teacher, second edition Jossey-Bass.
Teaching is Anti-Racist Teaching.
Cora Learning. (2020, April 28). Responding to racial bias and microaggressions in the online

Teaching Anti-Racism - Gottesman Libraries .

Pedagogical principles and classroom strategies for course instructors .

hooks, b. (1994). Teaching to transgress: Education as the practice of freedom . Routledge.

Kishimoto, K. (2018). Anti-racist pedagogy: From faculty's self-reflection to organizing within and beyond the classroom . Race Ethnicity and Education , (4), 540-554.

National Museum of African American History and Culture. (n.d.). Talking about Race

Smith, L., Kashubeck-West, S., Payton, G., & Adams, E. (2017). White professors teaching about racism: Challenges and rewards. The Counseling Psychologist, 45 (5), 651-68.

Supiano, B. (2020). Teaching: When students resist learning about racism. Chronicle of Higher Education .

Tatum, B.D. (2017). Why are all the black kids sitting together in the cafeteria: And other conversations about race. Basic Books.

Taylor, S.D., Veri, M.J., Eliason, M., Hermoso, J.C.R., Bolter, N.D., & Van Olphen, J.E. (2019). The social justice syllabus design tool: A first step in doing social justice pedagogy . Journal Committed to Social Change on Race and Ethnicity (JCSCORE), 5 (2), 133-66.

Wheaton College Center for Collaborative Teaching and Learning. (2020). Becoming an anti-racist educator

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Anti-Racist Pedagogy in Action: First Steps

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Classrooms serve as microcosms of the larger society, and the resources offered here, while focused on pedagogical practices, support broader commitments to anti-racist actions in higher education. This resource centers on citing the experts in this field, synthesizing their work to encourage furthe…

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‘Pray(ing) the person marking your work isn't racist’: racialised inequities in HE assessment practice

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‘Pray(ing) the person marking your work isn't racist’: racialised inequities in HE assessment practice

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Abstract

Antiracism constitutes an important component of social justice in ELT. Yet, discussing racism is often evaded, leaving the concept of racism inadequately understood. This article aims to illuminate racism and invite readers to engage in race-aware discourses and enact critical antiracism. I first outline key issues, including what race is, how race and language are related, and what different forms of racism exist. The complex nature of racism invites ELT professionals to engage in critical antiracist pedagogy, which requires de-essentializing, de-simplifying, de-silencing, and decolonizing antiracism. Critical antiracist pedagogy recognizes intersectionality, different forms of racism, the need for explicit discussion, and the privilege that settlers of color possess in settler colonialism, the latter of which indicates the need for forging solidarity among racialized groups. It also requires critical reflexivity of complicity and privilege involved in antiracist enactment. I provide pedagogical recommendations founded on a dialogic approach with situational ethics and reflexivity.

Introduction

Racism was brought to the global spotlight in 2020, prompted by anti-Asian racist attacks during the early stages of the coronavirus pandemic and anti-Black police violence in the United States. These disturbing events led the fields of ELT and applied linguistics to arrange special publications, such as Race, Identity, and English Language Teaching - A Joint TESOL Quarterly and TESOL Journal Publication and special papers and authors' online presentations on 'the role of race in applied linguistics' in the Annual Review of Applied Linguistics.

While the year 2020 seems to mark the beginning of attention paid to antiracism in ELT, discussions on race, racialization, and racism in ELT are actually not new. There has been interest in race, racialization, and racism related to English language education since the 2000s (e.g. Curtis and Romney 2006; Motha 2014; Jenks 2017; see Von Esch, Motha and Kubota 2020 for more details). Yet, racism is not as widely recognized or understood as more familiar topics in ELT, such as communicative language teaching; teaching grammar and vocabulary; motivation; NS/NNS; and global Englishes. The reason perhaps derives from a sense of discomfort attached to the concept of racism. It is often the case that people regard themselves as not racist or they say they do not see color, participating in a discourse of colorblindness or color evasion. Furthermore, for many White people, racism is a disturbing moral offense, and being White alone can evoke emotions of fear and guilt, causing defensiveness or silence. DiAngelo (2018) calls this White fragility. To give an example, almost two decades ago, I published an article, problematizing a scholarly discourse that positions English and related culture as superior to other languages and cultures. I argued that this discourse reflects a colonial legacy, which includes White racism. However, my argument was interpreted by a scholar as a construction of ESL teachers and applied linguistics as racist. This kind of misrecognition still takes place in everyday interactions.

This article, thus, aims to bring the concept of racism to light and invite ELT professionals to critically engage in race-aware discourses. In order to do so, I will first recap what race means, in what way race and language are related, and what forms of racism exist. This will be followed by a discussion of issues and concerns related to critical antiracist pedagogy, a principled approach to antiracism in ELT that takes into account intricacies and pitfalls in enacting antiracism in teaching. Finally, I will offer some suggestions for approaching critical antiracist pedagogy. I should note that the perpetrators of racism on a broader scale are not always White people; there are historical power relations among racial or ethnic groups in different geographical locations. However, because English is traditionally associated with White users, I will mainly focus on White racism. I write as an Asian female immigrant settler in Canada. Although my views and experiences presented here are influenced by my positionality and the specific context I work in, I hope readers will apply relevant points to their own contexts.

Race

In our everyday discourse, race is typically understood in terms of physical characteristics such as skin color and facial features. However, recent scientific research has revealed that the genetic makeup of all humans is 99.9 per cent identical. This means that the racial differences that we often perceive are not biologically based but rather socially constructed.

The idea that race is socially constructed does not imply that race does not exist. Rather, the idea of race influences our value judgments of different groups of people based on perceived bodily differences. These judgments exist on a continuum of sophistication and crudeness, ability and inability, and superiority and inferiority, (re)producing stereotypes, biases, and prejudices. It is thus necessary to question everyday racial stereotypes, which often accompany unfounded biological explanations, and critically understand how such beliefs are socially, historically, and ideologically maintained. For instance, it is widely believed that Asians are good at math and Black people are fast sprinters. However, these racialized groups do not biologically excel in these skills; rather, they tend to fulfill expectations that are constructed socially, historically, institutionally, and economically.

A concept frequently conflated with race is ethnicity. Although these two terms are often interchangeably used, ethnicity is a category that distinguishes groups of people according to sociocultural characteristics, including ancestry, language, religion, custom, and lifestyle. In fact, ethnicity and culture, especially the latter, often serve as a euphemism for race because the term race, which evokes racism, is unsettling for many. Thus, when people discuss cultural difference in people's behaviors and views, they may implicitly refer to perceived racial difference.

The understanding that race is socially constructed provides important implications for English language teaching and learning. Leaners are always surrounded by discourses disseminated by the media, pop culture, online information, and other semiotic representations. In the classroom, learners are also exposed to perspectives conveyed through textbooks, other materials, and classroom discussions. These discourses are likely to convey taken-for-granted racial, ethnic, or cultural differences. When common stereotypes, such as Asians being good at math or Black people being fast sprinters, are expressed during a classroom discussion, teachers may seize this teachable moment to question these beliefs through a problem-posing dialogic approach. I will discuss issues of pedagogy later.

The relationship between race and language

The English language is traditionally linked to Whiteness due to its origin and spread through settler colonialism. Native speakers of standardized varieties of English are often imagined as White people. This is manifested as linguistic stereotyping, in which listening to standardized English evokes White speakers, as well as reverse linguistic stereotyping, whereby the perceived English speaker's race influences the listener's judgment of the speaker's English proficiency and professional competence ( Kang and Rubin 2009).

However, the racial background of English language users has diversified significantly due to the historical and contemporary mobility of people on a transnational and transregional scale, which has been caused by colonialism, economic displacement, and globalization. The resultant diaspora and hybridity have disrupted the ideology of 'one nation, one race, one culture, one language'.

In ELT, teachers and teacher educators may discuss issues of linguistic diversity and hybridity in terms of world Englishes, English as a lingua franca, translanguaging, and plurilingualism. They can also add an inquiry angle of human diversity-the racial diversity of the people who use English in diverse ways.

Different forms of racism

Racism can be defined as 'discourse, knowledge, and social practices that, by means of inferiorization, denigration, marginalization, and exclusion, construct and perpetuate unequal relations of power between groups of people defined by perceived racial difference' ( Kubota 2020: 712-713). It manifests itself in different forms: individual, institutional, and epistemological. These types of racism interact with each other to form and maintain a system of domination and subordination.

The first type of racism is individual or interpersonal racism. As implied in the introduction, racism is often understood only as personal indignities, such as racial slurs and insulting behaviors. These intentional or unintentional acts of racism, especially in subtle forms, are often called microaggressions, and they communicate hostility and offense to the victim. For example, in a study conducted by Lee (2011) in Canada, an Asian Canadian NS teacher was asked by many of her colleagues 'Where are you really from?' Additionally, she was often mistaken for a student and treated as a student when she was included in a student group photo for a program advertisement.

The second type of racism is systematic injustice seen in social institutions, as the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement has brought to light. Institutional racism is observed in under- or over-representations of certain racial groups in the systems and structures of education, healthcare, business, media, entertainment, incarceration, politics, and more. It is reflected in the patterns of inclusion or exclusion of certain racialized groups in social organizations, services, or activities. A clear example in ELT is recruiting and hiring teachers. A preference is often given to White NSs from Inner Circle countries ( Ruecker and Ives 2015). This tendency also perpetuates (reverse) linguistic stereotyping.

The third type of racism is epistemological racism, or racial biases ingrained in our knowledge system ( Kubota 2020). It is like a lens through which we see and interpret social, cultural, and historical products, practices, and perspectives. For instance, national holidays-seemingly innocuous events-may celebrate the heritage of a dominant racial group over others. In the United States, for example, the White settlers' perspective has been celebrated on Columbus Day. However, this tradition has been challenged by Native Americans' perspectives, encouraging many states to replace the name with Indigenous Peoples' Day. In education, the perspective presented in the curriculum and textbooks tends to be outweighed by a dominant racial group in a particular society (e.g. White settlers' view of history in North America as opposed to Indigenous peoples' views). In EFL teaching materials, topics related to stereotypical White middle-class English-speaking people's culture and history (e.g., holidays, heroes, customs) reinforce the conceptual association between English and Whiteness. Furthermore, in conducting research in our field, scholars are compelled to use and cite concepts, theories, and knowledge developed by mainstream White Euro-American scholars. Such citation practices consequently reinforce institutional racism because scholars' achievements are in large part judged by citation records.

White superiority as a discursively and materially entrenched condition becomes taken for granted. Many people of color too unconsciously support it, making them complicit with White racism. White supremacy unchallenged by people of color further makes racism invisible, perpetuating institutional racism and even interpersonal racism. This suggests that having a racialized identity does not necessarily make a person antiracist.

Critical antiracist pedagogy

Discussions thus far indicate that ELT is not immune to various forms of racism. Given that language teaching aims to cultivate mutual understandings among people from diverse linguistic, cultural, and racial backgrounds, it is necessary for teachers to engage in antiracism in their professional activities. However, because explicit discussions of racism tend to be shunned in society, antiracist engagement in teaching may simply be reduced to the rhetoric of being respectful to racially minoritized peers and others in everyday interactions. While students and teachers should indeed promote respectful human interactions across racial differences, antiracist engagement should go further. It should question power and ideologies that reproduce the system of domination and subordination and enact antiracism with critical reflexivity on power dynamics, one's own privilege, and potential pitfalls in enactment. In this sense, I advocate the type of antiracist engagement in ELT as critical antiracist pedagogy. The following five principles are essential for promoting this pedagogy: (1) de-essentializing antiracism; (2) de-simplifying antiracism; (3) de-silencing antiracism; (4) decolonizing antiracism; and (5) exercising critical reflexivity.

De-essentializing antiracism

Although racism is the primary focus in antiracist advocacy, social injustice is not caused only by racism, nor can racism explain all forms of oppression experienced by racialized people. Other types of inequalities related to gender, class, language, sexuality, ability, religion, and so on intersect with racism, shaping human experiences in intricate ways. Thus, antiracism cannot be conceptualized as a catchall remedy of social injustice in an essentialized way. Instead, the experiences of subordination and oppression need to be understood through a lens of intersectionality ( Collins 2019).

The concept of intersectionality has been used to understand especially the marginalized experiences of African American women, which are not identical with the encounters experienced by Black men or White women. Thus, it is important to consider how multiple identity categories intersect with each other in understanding systems of marginalization and privilege.

In ELT, students and teachers of color in ESL contexts can become a victim of not only racism but also linguicism, as demonstrated by (reverse) linguistic stereotyping. If they are women, religious minorities, LGBTQ, or disabled, they would experience different kinds of challenges. Furthermore, students from an immigrant or refugee background may suffer from economic hardships. Conversely, even if students or teachers of color are racially marginalized, their privileged economic status may give them more advantages than White working-class peers. Critical antiracism should recognize and challenge all forms of injustice, rather than attributing all inequalities to race.

De-simplifying antiracism

As mentioned earlier, racism is typically understood as acts of individual offense. To confront racism, teachers may tend to encourage students to simply respect each other despite racial difference, or worse, not to see racial difference. In fact, the discourse of color/difference blindness is prevalent in education-teachers often claim that they treat all students the same because race doesn't matter. Time and again, I have witnessed cases in which critiques of institutional and epistemological racism get interpreted as a personal attack, resulting in defensive reactions based on White fragility. This is perhaps because racism is not understood beyond the individual level. Critical antiracism transcends such a simplistic understanding of racism by acknowledging and problematizing multilayered manifestations of racism.

De-silencing antiracism

Just as the intersectional and multilayered nature of racism is not easy to comprehend, open discussion of racism is often challenging due to negative meanings associated with the idea. Sometimes those who discuss or write about race and racism are accused of promoting racial divisions. However, without open discussion, the status quo will continue. The BLM movement has proved the positive effect of de-silencing antiracism. In ELT, when the topic of racism-whether it is individual, institutional, or epistemological-is raised in the classroom or in other contexts, open space for discussion needs to be created.

Decolonizing antiracism

Antiracist efforts are often made by people of color who know how outrageous and painful it is to be a target of racial discrimination. Antiracism in Canada, for instance, often focuses on discrimination against settlers of color, such as people of African, Asian, and Middle Eastern origins. However, this focus ignores historical oppression experienced by Indigenous people ( Lawrence and Dua 2011). Settlers of color are certainly disenfranchised, but they have also benefited economically from settler colonialism. In a broader spectrum, they are positioned favorably in a racial hierarchy of power vis-à-vis Indigenous people. In advocating antiracism, it is necessary to recognize the racial hierarchy of power that is embedded in settler colonialism. In this sense, antiracism needs to be decolonized.

More broadly speaking, however, racism should not be understood as a binary relationship between settlers and Indigenous people. Although settlers of color in settler colonialism are all positioned with a privileged status vis-à-vis Indigenous people, they belong to diverse racialized groups that are hierarchically positioned in the power structure due to historical and economic factors. For these diverse minoritized groups, the concept of equity is important for achieving equality of outcomes, which should not be confused with an equal treatment of different groups that are unequally privileged to begin with. Nonetheless, trying to justify the severity of oppression experienced by a certain group compared to others, including Indigenous groups, leads to an oppression Olympics, a problematic exercise that pits minoritized groups against each other.

In decolonizing antiracism and recognizing the problem of oppression Olympics, teachers and students need to question their own privilege in a power hierarchy and a specific context. It is important to always exercise reflexivity to recognize where multiple types of privilege exist and question complex relations of power for the purpose of establishing equity through solidarity.

Exercising critical reflexivity

As mentioned earlier, epistemological racism is not only imposed by the colonizer/oppressor but also supported by the colonized/oppressed. The hegemony of Whiteness legitimates its power via consent and it is reflected in the desire of the people of color to emulate the perspectives and practices of White NSs of English. A parallel phenomenon is seen in how nonnative English-speaking professionals self-marginalize in their preference for the NS norm in teaching and research ( Kumaravadivelu 2016). This indicates that racially marginalized people often end up legitimating the oppressive racist system, instead of advocating their unique identity or disrupting the existing power relations.

Complicity with oppression is exacerbated by today's neoliberal academic activities in ELT. As English is considered to be the most important language worldwide for research and career advancement, many NNS post-secondary students learning academic English and post-graduate students are compelled to acquire White Eurocentric academic knowledge and standardized English used by White NSs. Critically reflecting on one's complicity with epistemological racism and seeking alternative ways of knowing and expressing is one way of decolonizing academic knowledge. Furthermore, in affirming alternative expressions in world Englishes, English as a lingua franca, and translanguaging, teachers and learners should think beyond linguistic plurality and critically reflect on how English users' race and other identities, such as gender, class, and religion, shape particular power relations, which influences the nature of interactions.

Additionally, exercising critical reflexivity enables teachers and learners to recognize their own privilege not only attached to race but also other identities including gender, class, sexuality, and ability ( Vandrick 2009). Privilege may also accrue from performing antiracist identity as a savior. This would create another kind of power relation between the rescuer and the rescued. All antiracists must be aware of these types of pitfall involved in antiracist engagement.

Recommendations and challenges

Critical antiracist pedagogy challenges power and ideologies that reproduce the system of domination and subordination. It also invites learners and teachers to critically reflect on their complicity and privilege. In this sense, it is compatible with critical pedagogy ( Crookes 2013). Critical pedagogy is founded on a problem-posing dialogic approach to raise students' critical awareness of the existence of inequalities among different groups that are reproduced by discourses, ideologies, and economic systems. A combination of critical awareness and praxis-critical reflection and action-enables transformation of the status quo.

However, as in critical pedagogy, implementing critical antiracist pedagogy is not easy. In what follows, I will discuss some key considerations for teachers and teacher educators to take into account.

Raising critical awareness

To begin with, teachers and teacher educators must develop a critical awareness, knowledge, and stance regarding issues of racism and antiracism. White professionals need to first overcome White fragility and resist a colorblind rejection of racism. They also need to critically understand how Whiteness can increase its advantage by engaging or not engaging in antiracism. Conversely, professionals of color must become aware of their complicity with White superiority as well as their privilege as settlers of color if they are in a settler colonial society. They need to be aware of the risk of playing oppression Olympics and seek solidarity among racialized peoples in striving to establish equity for all.

To raise awareness, teachers and teacher educators need to engage in continuous professional development to learn about racism and antiracism individually and collectively through reading, viewing online materials, holding antiracist discussion forums, and so on. Teacher education programs need to review their curriculum, course contents, materials, and the diversity of instructors to see whether antiracism is explicitly addressed. They should review what kind of course readings are used-whether they derive from White Eurocentric theories and practices only or whether local knowledges and perspectives are addressed, how field experiences prepare teachers to work on antiracism, and who they recruit and hire as instructors. Learning opportunities can also be offered by professional associations through publications, webinars, and discussion forums.

Engaging in dialogic approaches

Awareness raising for teachers and learners should be done in a dialogic manner rather than top-down lecturing of predetermined knowledge presented as the correct answer or solution. The ultimate goal is for the learners to recognize that racism exists in different forms and alignments; explore antiracist ways of understanding the self, the other, and the world; and engage in antiracist praxis. As such, the goal is not necessarily to reach a consensus or to find a single right answer, but rather to explore how views, meanings, politics, and economic conditions produce and reproduce structures of racial inequality.

There are many topics and materials to use, including current topics or events in the media (e.g. BLM, COVID-19, immigration policies), familiar topics (e.g. sport events, entertainment films), teaching materials (e.g. readings, activities, and visual images in the textbooks), and more. Learners can be invited to explore the following questions: What racial and linguistic stereotypes are represented in multimodal resources? In what ways are such stereotypes (re)produced? Are certain racialized groups over- or under-represented? Why or why not? What historical, economic, political, and discursive forces construct racial stereotypes and representational inequalities? Who benefits and who suffers? How can the stereotypes and inequalities be transformed?

In exploring these questions, concrete examples and focused questions would be useful to prompt dialogues. Teachers would also need to effectively moderate the discussion to keep it on track.

Although critical antiracist pedagogy can be planned in combination with other topics, it can also take place in unplanned ways, in which case, the teacher must decide how to approach the teachable moment. Addressing racism can become quite personal, sensitive, and emotionally charged. Similar to dealing with sensitively controversial issues in general, critical antiracist pedagogy should consider contextual appropriateness and the affective dimension of the learners ( Kubota 2014).

Dealing with tension

Critical antiracist pedagogy entails a tension between an open-ended dialogic approach for exploration and teachers' professional desire to orient learners toward a certain way of thinking. Indeed, critical approaches to teaching may be viewed as indoctrination when the teacher has a strong belief on the issue and imposes it onto the learners ( Crookes 2013; Kubota 2014). This tension becomes more problematic in a context where discrimination against racially minoritized groups cannot be openly criticized. In that case, different approaches to antiracism need to be explored. It is thus important to find a delicate balance between an anti-oppressive stance and a noncoercive and contextualized approach to antiracism. This will require teachers to exercise hyper-self-reflexivity in employing situated ethics and recognizing diverse values and stances that are also partial and provisional in nature.

Conclusion

Critical antiracist pedagogy is about fostering awareness, knowledge, and attitudes regarding the intricate nature of racial inequities and approaches to challenge them. It requires an understanding of what race is and what forms racism assumes. It also goes beyond mere respect for racial difference, and instead engages in the complexities of racism and racial politics with critical reflexivity on power, privilege, and complicity. There is no single right way of doing critical antiracist pedagogy because racism manifests in intricate and contextual ways. Thus, teachers and teacher educators must continue to learn and enact critical antiracism with open-mindedness, perseverance, and vigilance.

The author

Ryuko Kubota is a professor in the Department of Language and Literacy Education in the Faculty of Education at University of British Columbia (Canada), where she teaches applied linguistics and teacher education. Her research draws on critical approaches to language education, focusing on race, gender, culture, and language ideologies. Her work has been published in journals such as Applied Linguistics, Critical Inquiry in Language Studies, Journal of Second Language Writing, TESOL Quarterly, and World Englishes, and in many edited books. She is a co-editor of Race, culture, and identities in second language education: Exploring critically engaged practice (Routledge 2009).
Email: ryuko.kubota@ubc.ca
References

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Antiracism constitutes an important component of social justice in ELT. Yet, discussing racism is often evaded, leaving the concept of racism inadequately understood. This article aims to illuminate racism and invite readers to engage in race-aware discourses and enact critical antiracism.

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Tensions and overlaps between Whiteness and culturally sustaining pedagogies

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Tensions and overlaps between Whiteness and culturally sustaining pedagogies

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Abstract
This article takes up the questions: How does Whiteness affect conceptions of Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies (CSP)? Specifically, when it comes to Whiteness, is there a culture worth sustaining? To begin this examination, we first outline what CSP and Whiteness are. Second, we review the literature within Critical Whiteness Studies (CWS) that takes up pedagogical questions. Third, we theorize the tensions and places of overlap across CSP and CWS-specifically that when it comes to Whiteness there is not a culture worth sustaining, but there is space for White people within CSP as long as they take account of Whiteness. Fourth, we propose a framework for merging CSP and CWS, W.A.A.C.K. C.S.P. (White folks Applying Anti-Racist Cultural Knowledge for Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies). We conclude with implications of this framework for future educational research and practical implications for White teachers and White students.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Authors' note

This article was written in a collaborative and democratic way where each author contributed equally. Therefore, the authors are ordered alphabetically, but this does not reflect anything about each individual's contribution. An earlier version was presented at the 2019 meeting Toward a Comparative Perspective of Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies: A Symposium for Dialogue and Collaboration.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Notes

1 The term "color-blind" has been critiqued for being ableist. We are very sensitive to this issue, and we only use it here to reflect the authors' terminology usage.

2 We have not been able to find proper attribution for this quotation in four years of looking.

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W.A.A.C.K. C.S.P.: the tensions and overlaps between Whiteness and culturally sustaining pedagogies

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Abstract This article takes up the questions: How does Whiteness affect conceptions of Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies (CSP)? Specifically, when it comes to Whiteness, is there a culture worth sustaining? To begin this examination, we first outline what CSP and Whiteness are. Second, we review the literature within Critical Whiteness Studies (CWS) that takes up pedagogical questions.

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Disrupting white hegemony: A necessary shift toward adopting critical approaches within the teaching and learning environment

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Disrupting white hegemony: A necessary shift toward adopting critical approaches within the teaching and learning environment

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Disrupting white hegemony A necessary shift toward adopting critical approaches within the teaching and learning environment

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Decolonizing the Business School Curriculum | AACSB

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Decolonizing the Business School Curriculum

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Decolonizing the Business School Curriculum

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The views expressed on AACSB Insights do not represent an official position of AACSB, unless clearly stated. For more information on AACSB's position on diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging, please visit aacsb.edu/diversity.

Business schools in Western and European countries have benefited from an imperialism that placed their ideologies in a powerful and privileged position.

To decolonize the curriculum, schools must do more than diversify the reading list; they must incorporate the knowledge and educational approaches of scholars from different philosophical and cultural backgrounds.

By doing this, we will open our field to greater diversity and wider analysis, which will strengthen the discipline as a whole.

Education is powerful, and the knowledge that forms the root of any curriculum is even more so. Business academics often take for granted our sources of knowledge, but we need to realize how those sources have influenced the way we think and the way our discipline has evolved.

For too long, thinkers and scholars from wealthy countries that make up a minority of the world have been privileged over those in poorer countries that represent the majority of the world's population and landmass. Business school research has continued to focus on the white, the Western and Eurocentric, and the male.

But today, business schools around the world seek to become more inclusive and diverse. Some of us want to go even further-to address racial injustices, dismantle global power structures, and decolonize the typical business school curriculum. This requires us to do more than broaden our reading lists, change the language we employ, and ensure that the images and examples we use with our students are more representative. It requires us to engage in a fundamental rethink of business education and question the sources that form the base of our knowledge.

To do this, we must engage in a deeper level of reflection and change at every level of the faculty. We must revise established programs through unlearning and critical questioning.

Such a massive overhaul presents us with both a challenge and an opportunity. Judy Muthuri, a professor of sustainable business and development, explains it this way: Each of us needs "to be an activist in our classroom" so we can build anti-racist, socially just business programs. Ultimately, we will strengthen not only our understanding, but also our discipline as a whole.

Countering the Arguments

When I discuss decolonizing business education, I often face skepticism and reluctance. "The business theories are the theories-they're not malleable like the arts and humanities," other professors tell me. But these established theories did not develop in a bubble, away from the realities of imperialism and the legacies of colonialism. Universities in Western countries benefited greatly from having their ideologies prioritized and lauded above other forms of thought from the wider world.

I have regularly been told that the established models need to be taught to put business in a historical context. But if we're going to make that argument, we need to understand how financial global business operations were influenced by the interconnected histories of wealth-what Yasmeen Narayan, a scholar on postcolonial and psychosocial studies, calls "the detailed cartographies of colonial wealth production."

Colonization is not an artifact of the past-it's happening right now as multinational corporations exploit the dependency relationship between the Global North and the Global South.

For example, as British historians Catherine Hall and Nicolas Draper point out, those of us in the U.K. must look at the legacies of British slave ownership and be open about how Britain benefited-and still benefits-from the " slavery business." On a broader scale, we should not shy away from considering how central the plantation economy was to the development of capitalism globally.

Just as important, we need to recognize that colonization is not an artifact of the past-it's happening right now as multinational corporations exploit the dependency relationship between the Global North and the Global South. It is incumbent upon business scholars to highlight how contemporary geo-colonial capitalist formations are playing out in business practices in today's world. If we don't, as South African scholar Stella Nkomo has pointed out, we may well be perpetuating the "miseducation" of our students.

Going Beyond the Reading List

If we are serious about decolonizing the business school, we must take four vital actions:

Question and expand our sources of knowledge. While the demographics of business school professors and students have changed significantly in recent decades, the scholarship we draw on for our course materials frequently remains Eurocentric and American. Therefore, the first thing we must do is actively unlearn the knowledge and approaches that have dominated business education. We must rethink what we have been taught to prioritize and legitimize.

To do so, we must include materials from a range of scholars from different philosophical and cultural backgrounds. This is not to suggest that all theories and thought that come from outside of Western traditions are identical or even similar. But practices and theories that have their foundations outside of colonial realms provide valuable and essential contributions to our fields of study. Including them in our classes will enable us to create more just and inclusive learning environments.

As part of this change, we should amend assessment criteria. Professors should cite different perspectives in their classroom materials, and students should include perspectives from scholars in the Global South.

We must actively unlearn the knowledge and approaches that have dominated business education. We must rethink what we have been taught to prioritize and legitimize.

Design and teach courses in an inclusive manner. In addition to focusing on the topics we teach and the materials we use, we need to consider how we teach. Does our personal teaching style encourage diverse perspectives to be presented? What voices do we listen to in class? What types of stories do we perpetuate?

Engage a diverse range of internal and external stakeholders. Inside the classroom, this means ensuring that people who are Black, Asian, and from marginalized ethnic populations are sufficiently represented as students and teachers. Outside the classroom, it means seeking out guest speakers and community leaders who come from diverse backgrounds.

Hold a collective conversation with our colleagues about decolonization. If we each reflect on our own privilege and positionality, we can lay the foundation of an honest dialogue. When we discuss new theories and make visible what for so long has been invisible, we are taking steps toward decolonizing our thought processes.

Inviting Student Voices

Another powerful way to achieve decolonization is to seek input from our students and make sure their voices are truly heard. So often business educators do not have the lived experiences to authentically relay the impact of imperialist thinking on daily life, but our students do. We must give students the chance to speak truth to power.

Recently, we did just that at King's Business School at King's College London when we invited some of our MSc International Management students to present their own research on the importance of Indigenous management theories. They outlined the chronological shift in how management theory has treated the importance of the natural environment. They also explored how Indigenous practices can contribute to the formulation of corporate social responsibility strategies-not by appropriating Indigenous knowledge, but by incorporating it alongside Western knowledge.

As one student put it, "After all, the business leaders of tomorrow will only be able to have a holistic worldview if their education is holistic and inclusive in the first place." Their work was enlightening for us all.

As we decolonize the curriculum, we broaden the epistemologies that shape our knowledge. We expand the methods we use to investigate ideas, gather data, and conduct analysis.

We also held a universitywide event in which 100 students offered their views on how to decolonize the curriculum. One noted that decolonizing is about more than just learning about other cultures; it's about celebrating them as well. A different student said that teachers should be made aware of the importance of decolonizing the curriculum, because such a shift crucially transforms the educational experience.

Others were equally blunt. One felt that the term itself was important because it "imposes a certain obligation on the 'colonizers' to decolonize the curriculum since they have been in control of the whole narrative." A fourth one summarized it this way: "It is time to hear from other people and groups."

Building a Stronger Discipline

As we take a deeper approach to decolonizing the curriculum, we open up our discipline to greater academic rigor. We show that we recognize the ways that empire and racism have shaped management forces and business practices.

Not only that, we broaden the epistemologies that shape our knowledge. We expand the methods we use to investigate ideas, gather data, and conduct analysis. Frameworks and disciplines that have sat too comfortably on their pedestals will be thoroughly tested by a greater range of thought. This will allow us to come to more thoroughly contested conclusions and build a stronger discipline.

It is easy to virtue signal and talk about making changes, but decolonizing the business school curriculum is a challenge. We cannot expect to easily undo ways of thinking that are so deeply entrenched.

Nor is it possible to make these changes within one specific academic cohort. It is up to all of us in our fields to challenge our familiar mental habits, no matter how uncomfortable that is. We must all be involved, and we must all be responsible for achieving change.

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Decolonizing the Business School Curriculum | AACSB

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As more business schools strive to become diverse and inclusive, they should consider the very sources of knowledge they teach in their classrooms.

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For decades, researchers have found that teachers in public schools have undervalued the potential for academic success among students of color, setting low expectations for them and thinking of cultural differences as barriers rather than assets to learning.

In response, scholars developed teaching methods and practices-broadly known as asset-based pedagogies-that incorporate students' cultural identities and lived experiences into the classroom as tools for effective instruction. The terms for these approaches to teaching vary, from culturally responsive teaching and culturally sustaining pedagogy to the more foundational culturally relevant pedagogy. Though each term has its own components defined by different researchers over time, all these approaches to teaching center the knowledge of traditionally marginalized communities in classroom instruction. As a result, all students, and in particular students of color, are empowered to become lifelong learners and critical thinkers.

This explainer unpacks what it means to be a culturally responsive teacher, how all these research terms are related, and where other academic concepts such as critical race theory tie in-or not.

What is the definition of culturally responsive teaching?

Culturally responsive teaching means using students' customs, characteristics, experience, and perspectives as tools for better classroom instruction.

The term was coined by researcher Geneva Gay in 2000, who wrote that "when academic knowledge and skills are situated within the lived experiences and frames of reference for students, they are more personally meaningful, have higher interest appeal, and are learned more easily and thoroughly."

It's the kind of teaching that helps students of color see themselves and their communities as belonging in schools and other academic spaces, leading to more engagement and success.

What is culture, and why is it relevant to student learning?

Culture refers to the customs, languages, values, beliefs, and achievements of a group of people. Students' culture and lived experiences that influence how they understand and make sense of the world or themselves are an integral part of who they are as learners. As Emily Style, the former founding co-director of the National SEED Project (Seeking Educational Equity and Diversity), once wrote, "Half the curriculum walks in the door with the students."

While more than half of public school students are students of color, most schools are organized around the mainstream culture of white Americans. The culture that many students experience at home and in their communities is not always represented at school-or is represented in a stereotypical way.

Also, 80 percent of teachers are white. Research has found that teachers are just as likely to have racial biases as non-teachers, and those biases tend to influence the expectations they have for their students and their ways of managing their classrooms. For example, past research has found that white teachers have lower expectations for Black students than they do for white students, and those can turn into "self-fulfilling prophecies" when students internalize them or when teachers change their approach to students as a result of their mindsets.

One study found that white teachers were more likely to praise a poorly written essay if they thought it was written by a student of color than if they thought the essay was by a white student. Teachers' racial biases can also result in decreased access to advanced coursework and higher rates of suspensions.

When did culturally responsive teaching start?

Culturally responsive teaching stems from the framework of culturally relevant pedagogy, which was introduced by scholar Gloria Ladson-Billings in the 1990s. Ladson-Billings was tired of the commonly held narrative that Black children were deficient and deviant, and that there was something wrong with them. Instead, she wanted to find out what was right with Black children, their families, and their communities. To do so, she researched the practices of effective teachers of Black students.

For about two years, Ladson-Billings observed teachers who were identified by both principals and Black parents as being excellent. The teachers had different ways of teaching, but they all had high expectations for their students and fostered academic success. They also all valued and integrated themselves in the community from which their students came.

Ladson-Billings distilled the commonalities in those teachers' beliefs and practices into the framework of culturally relevant pedagogy, which she defined as a model that "not only addresses student achievement but also helps students to accept and affirm their cultural identity while developing critical perspectives that challenge inequities that schools (and other institutions) perpetuate."

There are three components of culturally relevant pedagogy:

student learning-prioritizing students' intellectual growth, including their ability to problem-solve;

cultural competence-creating an environment where students affirm and appreciate their culture of origin while also developing fluency in at least one other culture; and

critical consciousness-teaching students how to identify, analyze, and solve real-world problems, especially those that result in societal inequities against marginalized groups.

So, what are the characteristics of culturally responsive teaching?

Gay's research shows five essential components of culturally responsive teaching:

A strong knowledge base about cultural diversity. Teachers should understand different racial and ethnic groups' cultural values, traditions, and contributions to society, and incorporate that knowledge into their instruction.

Culturally relevant curricula. Teachers should include multiple perspectives in their instruction and make sure the images displayed in classrooms-such as on bulletin boards-represent a wide range of diversity. Teachers should also contextualize issues within race, class, ethnicity, and gender.

High expectations for all students. Teachers should help students achieve academic success while still validating their cultural identities.

An appreciation for different communication styles. Teachers should understand different communication styles and modify classroom interactions accordingly. For example, many communities of color have an active, participatory style of communication. A teacher who doesn't understand this cultural context might think a student is being rude and tell the student to be quiet. The student may then shut down.

The use of multicultural instructional examples. Teachers should connect students' prior knowledge and cultural experiences with new knowledge.

Doesn't that require teachers to reinforce stereotypes about students of color and even discriminate against white children?

In short, no. While the academic framework of culturally responsive teaching and other asset-based pedagogies emerged from how to best support students of color, it evolved into a teaching approach that serves all students, regardless of their racial background.

Sharroky Hollie, the director of the nonprofit Center for Culturally Responsive Teaching and Learning, works with teachers to practice what he calls cultural and linguistic responsiveness. In his work, he talks about the rings of culture, meaning the various aspects of students' identities that can impact how they interact with the world around them.

To Hollie, it's not just about thinking of ways to validate and incorporate a student's racial background into the classroom. It's not about thinking of students in a one-dimensional, stereotypical way. Culturally responsive teachers must also consider the student's gender, age, socio-economic status, whether they live in the suburbs or a rural area, and more.

"It's not as simplistic as we're trying to value our students of color," he said. "We're actually trying to value the rings of culture that they bring to our schools, regardless of their racial background."

For instance, in predominately white school districts, there are white students who, due to where they live or their family's socio-economic status, are underserved by their school district and could benefit from a culturally responsive approach to education, Hollie said.

What is culturally sustaining pedagogy, and how is it different than culturally relevant teaching?

Schools are still places where white norms are considered the default standard in the curricula, behavioral expectations, linguistic practices, and more. Culturally sustaining pedagogy says that students of color should not be expected to adhere to white middle-class norms, but their own cultural ways of being should be explored, honored, and nurtured by educators.

The framework builds on the work of Ladson-Billing and others but offers a "loving critique" that cultural relevance in the curriculum is not enough for students in today's world, given demographic shifts toward a more diverse society. Paris and Alim also argue that asset-based pedagogies, like culturally relevant teaching, traditionally haven't paid enough attention to young people's more fluid relationships with their identities.

Ladson-Billings has embraced the evolution of her foundational pedagogy, writing in 2014 that "culturally sustaining pedagogy uses culturally relevant pedagogy as the place where the beat drops." She also told Education Week that she is now paying close attention to how teenagers shape culture, an aspect that wasn't present in her original work.

It's important to remember that these asset-based pedagogies-culturally responsive, culturally relevant, and culturally sustainable, among others-are not in conflict with each other. While their frameworks vary, they all have the same goal of dismantling a deficit approach to educating students of color and focusing instead on their strengths, assets, and communities in the classroom.

What does the research say about the effectiveness of these teaching frameworks?

A 2016 synthesis of decades of research on culturally responsive teaching and related frameworks found that engaging in culturally affirming practices across subject matters, including mathematics and science, led to positive increases in students' understanding and engagement with academic skills and concepts.  For instance, students in high school math class could learn about statistics by assessing the probabilities of racial profiling cases in various neighborhoods or using other datasets applicable to their communities that bring up questions about justice and injustice.

Culturally responsive teaching and similar approaches to teaching also increased students' motivation, interest in content, and the perception of themselves as capable students, among other benefits, the study found. Brittany Aronson, an associate professor in educational leadership at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, and a co-author of the study, said, whenever teachers drew direct connections between classroom lessons and students' experiences outside of school, students could see greater value in the academic content as it applies to the real world. Such work helps students see themselves as knowledge producers and researchers.

Overall, teaching that makes school relevant to students helps them succeed both in terms of quantitative measures such as high test scores, and more qualitative measures such as becoming life-long learners able to ask critical questions about the world around them, both in and out of school, Aronson said.

What are some examples of culturally responsive teaching?

Teachers who practice culturally responsive teaching have a classroom full of books featuring characters and images that represent a variety of ages, genders, ethnicities, and other types of diversity. They share the achievements and expertise of people from different ethnic groups in every subject area. They include multiple perspectives when discussing historical and contemporary events, including those from oppressed groups who are often left out of the narrative. And they encourage students to draw on their prior knowledge and cultural experiences to make connections to the academic content.

Culturally responsive teaching also must have an element of critical consciousness, where students are empowered to critique and analyze societal inequities. For example, Teddi Beam-Conroy, an associate teaching professor at the University of Washington, was teaching the Declaration of Independence to a class of 5th graders. When they got to the line that said, "All men are created equal," Beam-Conroy asked her students, "Who were the men who were considered equal at that point?" To illustrate the point, she asked everyone to stand up-and then told them to sit down if they didn't identify as male, if they didn't identify as white, or if their parents rented instead of owned a home.

That exercise opened the door to a conversation about how Americans weren't all equal in the late 18th century. Beam-Conroy's students discussed when women and African Americans got the right to vote-and what implications that has had on the composition of U.S. Congress or the Supreme Court. The critical consciousness piece is "examining how historically, power has been distributed and guarded among particular folks who make the laws," Beam-Conroy said. "Fifth graders can understand that."

Culturally responsive teaching can also involve a deeper reimagining of classroom codes of conduct. For instance, in some students' culture, talking while someone else talks shows how invested and engaged they are in the conversation, said Hollie with the Center for Culturally Responsive Teaching and Learning. Culturally responsive teachers find ways to incorporate that verbal overlap into their lesson rather than seeing it as rude or worthy of discipline.

What isn't culturally responsive teaching?

Researchers note that some educators say they're practicing culturally responsive teaching, but it's an overly simplified version. For example, for some teachers, a multicultural school potluck meal or adding diverse books to their classroom library sufficiently counts as affirming students' culture in education. But culturally responsive teaching is deeper, more critical work.

"There's a tendency to truncate culturally responsive teaching to be about a whole myriad of things-it's about relationships, it's about anti-racist education, it's about diverse books," said Zaretta Hammond, the author of Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain. "It's like that old parable of the king who asks nine blind men to describe an elephant. Each one grabs a different part of the elephant. 'Oh, it's flat and wide'-he's got the ear. 'No, it's like a rope'-he's got the tail. No one has the whole picture."

Too often, she said, white progressive educators view culturally responsive teaching as an add-on to their regular instruction instead of a fundamental shift in their pedagogy. For example, a teacher might think students of color just need to see themselves in order to feel motivated and do the work, so she'll incorporate diverse books into her classroom or syllabus-but not change anything to the content or her way of instruction.

Another common misconception is that culturally responsive teaching is a way of addressing student trauma, which is a deficit-based ideology that assumes the universal experience of people of color is one of trauma, Hammond said.

How widespread is culturally responsive teaching?

Most teacher-preparation programs have also incorporated culturally responsive teaching into their courses. And some school districts, including New York City and Baltimore City, have adopted a culturally responsive and/or sustaining approach to education.

Still, experts say it's difficult to pinpoint exactly how many teachers have adopted these asset-based pedagogies because some may use only certain tenets. For instance, helping students develop a critical consciousness is often ignored.

What does all of this have to do with critical race theory?

Critical race theory, broadly speaking, is an academic concept with the core idea that race is a social construct, and racism is not only the product of individual bias or prejudice but is also embedded in policies and systems, such as a legal system-or as some scholars such as Ladson-Billings propose, an educational system.

Aspiring K-12 teachers in graduate level courses may study aspects of critical race theory to better understand how school systems are designed in ways that don't serve the needs of students of color. But critical race theory is not taught as a guide for classroom instruction, nor is it typically used as a culturally relevant or culturally responsive lesson plan for kids and teens, said Aronson with Miami University.

Asset-based pedagogies, like culturally relevant or culturally responsive teaching, are not the same thing as critical race theory. They have different theoretical bases and different goals. However, there might be some commonalities-for example, the questions students are encouraged to ask about social systems, including education, may ring close to the consciousness critical race theory is meant to evoke.

In an interview with Education Week, Ladson-Billings stressed that culturally relevant teaching, as she defined it, has nothing to do with critical race theory. But opponents to critical race theory have glossed over those nuances, she said, adding that deliberative public debate is hard when people don't know what they're talking about.

"The attack on anything that allows more participation and moves us toward equity is going full force," she said.

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Here's what it means to be a culturally responsive teacher and where critical race theory ties in-or not.

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Last month, in response to public demonstrations and support for the Black Lives Matter movement, Architectural Record began reaching out to architects and designers to explore racism in the profession and the built environment. As part of that ongoing conversation, RECORD convened a panel of three professionals in practice and education: Mabel O. Wilson, Mario Gooden, and Justin Garrett Moore.

Wilson is a Professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (GSAPP), whose field of scholarship is architecture and race. She also has a design practice, Studio &, and is part of the team that designed the just-completed Memorial to Enslaved Laborers at the University of Virginia. At Columbia, she co-directs the Global Africa Lab with Mario Gooden, who is a professor of practice at the GSAPP and founding principal of the firm Huff + Gooden. His work engages the cultural landscape and the intersectionality of architecture, race, gender, sexuality, and technology, and bridges architectural design and writing, research and performance. Moore, the executive director of the New York City Public Design Commission, has extensive experience in urban design and planning, focusing on excellence in the public realm and fostering accessibility, diversity and inclusion. An adjunct faculty member at Columbia, he is co-founder of Urban Patch, which supports the equitable revitalization of communities.

Wilson, Gooden and Moore spoke together with RECORD Editor-in-chief Cathleen McGuigan.
Cathleen McGuigan: I want to begin by asking how racism has shaped and operated in architecture, both as a practice, and in the environment that architecture has built.
Mabel O. Wilson: The idea is, typically, to be inclusive and to bring people into educational institutions and disciplines, but the challenge is that those spaces, those structures, are already racialized. And to understand that, and start to talk about whiteness and white supremacy-whether the oppressor is a human or a system-is really vital for change. As people of color, we can't just continually describe what we're experiencing without everyone understanding the origins.

Justin Garrett Moore: The predominantly white, male profession needs to focus on this. What happens typically is, "Okay, we need to hear from people of color, we need to learn and we need to listen," and it becomes like a hamster wheel. Black people are tired of having that conversation over and over again-but I think this pivot that Mabel has introduced is having the conversation about whiteness. It's so important-it really needs to be the arrow to the heart at this critical time.

Mario Gooden: Yes, the issues need to be unpacked from the other side. Perhaps it can be uncomfortable for those in the profession to put the mirror on themselves. We as Black architects understand those systems. But it's time for you, the profession, to really come to terms with it and own it-and then let's figure out how to dismantle it.
Mabel, the subject of whiteness in the built environment is a big part of your research and scholarship. Can you start to enlighten us?

In my 30 years as an academic, and also having worked in practice, I have come to really understand how much whiteness permeates what we do, from how we are educated in architecture and, really, what architecture is.
-Mabel O. Wilson

Mabel O. Wilson: How does racism operate-and not just anti-Black racism, but also whiteness and white supremacy? Fundamentally, it is the power relations that the concept of race enables, in a range of practices and disciplinary frames. In my 30 years as an academic, and also having worked in practice, I have come to really understand how much whiteness permeates what we do, from how we are educated in architecture and, really, what architecture is. I see architecture as the European art of building that Leon Battista Alberti described-a European way of understanding building.

Filippo Brunelleschi, you know, designed his famous dome not long before Christopher Columbus sailed, right? So at a moment of colonial encounter, and the rise of Renaissance humanism, comes this sense of the European understanding himself in relationships to others. So race has to be conceptualized. It is not natural, but a construct. Yet is has real implications in terms of how architecture is created within those relationships of the nation state, and the bodies of knowledge of philosophy, technology, racial science-and they all have their own impacts on the discipline of architecture and on the discipline of architectural history.

In the West, the concept of the past is riddled with racial assumptions about who was civilized, who was progressive and modern, and who was primitive-who was ahistorical and left behind.

And when we have to read Adolf Loos on ornament and crime in school, it is a racial narrative of white European cultural superiority, of what it means to be civilized and modern, but it's rarely taught that way at all. It's taught about a polemic to remove ornament and advance beyond folk culture, so that it's about "progress." Thus, it's important to recognize how deeply race is embedded in the discipline, and also in civil society-all the things that shape us as beings, our ontology and epistemology in the ways we know the world.

Mario Gooden: Whiteness is at the heart of architecture as a discipline. People tend to think of white supremacy as being about people in white hoods. But white supremacy is a hierarchical system of patterns and practices that continuously privileges the white subject and consistently disadvantages the Black body and people of color. This really goes back to the foundation of architectural theory rooted in Vitruvius's ideal man-a white male European subject-that is formulated and inscribed in architecture in Vitruvius's Ten Books on Architecture. So the discipline of architecture as a system of orders and rules that we follow is all predicated upon that ideal subject.

And then when we come to modernism, which assumes what I call the myth of the universal subject, we are still dealing with white male European subjectivity. This stems from Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, who wrote in his Philosophy of History that the Negro lacks subjectivity, consciousness, and had nothing to provide to civilization. Hence from the Enlightenment to today, European epistemology is based upon this white subject that we continue to perpetuate in architecture schools. Even for schools that claim the mantle of experimentation, the conditions of white supremacy continue within the confines of the discipline. And discipline means to follow a set of rules, a set of orders, or else you are subjected to retribution, punishment, or the assessment that your work doesn't belong.

So other bodies are excluded-Black bodies, Brown bodies, people of color-if they aren't following those orders, and that they are somehow in need of bringing back into the discipline. We've heard a lot in the last 10 to 15 years about the re-disciplining of architecture and that architecture should not be engaged in cultural critique or critical theory. Those voices made the claim that architecture needed to be brought back from its margins. This was and is really a kind of conservative backlash and desire for reinstating the privileged white male point of view-away from, for example, discussions from the late 1970s through the '90s of architecture and gender; architecture and sexuality; and architecture and race.

Mabel O. Wilson: Can I just add what I always describe as the boys jumped into cyberspace? With people adopting the computer and paperless architecture in the 90s-and the guys with their algorithms. In a way, with the adaptation of parametrics and fabrication, there was a recuperation of masculinity. And that jump flattened any understanding of what became known as identity politics-race, feminism, and sexuality-in architecture.
Mabel and Mario, please talk about the Global Africa Lab that you co-direct at the Columbia University GSAPP, where you break with the European-centric model that has ruled architecture.
Mario Gooden: When we started Global Africa Lab about seven years ago, it was really looking at the world in terms of architecture and urbanism through the lens of what had been excluded from architecture-and that is the African subject or the Negro subject that Hegel had excluded.

The majority of the world exists in the Global South. Architecture and building had been going on there for centuries before Europe. So the question is, what can we learn from those places that have not been brought into the discourse of architecture?
-Mario Gooden

The lab is not just about the African continent, it's about the diaspora. Our work has been on the continent, yes, but it's also been in Detroit, in other places in the States, and in South America, and in Europe. To be clear, the majority of the world exists in the Global South. Architecture and building had been going on there for centuries before Europe. So the question is, what can we learn from those places that have not been brought into the discourse of architecture?

Mabel O. Wilson: And while those places in the diaspora weren't brought into the discourse of architecture, they were still necessary for architecture's imagination. Africa is central to the creation of whiteness and the concept of Europe through constant scientific, cultural, and historical comparison with those colonized in Asia, Africa, and the New World. There was even the incorporation and desire for African motifs in modernism-masks and textiles-whose legacy has been studied more thoroughly in art history, for example. Part of what Global Africa Lab is trying examine is to show that modernity is not possible without the African continent. African people, resources, land, and culture are how the modern is imagined and how the project of the transatlantic slave trade literally builds the wealth of capitalism as racial capitalism.

As we've seen with the recent toppling of the monument of the slave trader Edward Colston in Bristol, England, you cannot have an industrial revolution in England without the mills receiving cotton from India and Jamaica. The Lab is trying to foreground that history, but also emphasize contemporary global linkages by looking at what is happening in the urban spaces of Rio de Janeiro; Detroit; Dakar, Senegal; and Cape Town.
Justin, you work extensively in urban design and planning-can you talk about how our cities have come to be so imbued with racism?
Justin GarrettMoore: The conversation about white supremacy and racism is important, but we equally need to put the focus on the racist-not only the "ism" or the system. One of the ways that architecture and the built environment work is by distancing and "othering." We talk all the time about the policies-whether it's redlining or urban renewal, or the disciplines being regulated-that then become abstract systems of racism. But we don't spend enough time talking about the racist white people that built those systems. It's still acceptable for individuals to not take responsibility for that. So, was Robert Moses a complicated figure? Was Thomas Jefferson a complicated figure? That conversation is not had enough.

There is a gap between being racist and racism existing. Very often we see people operating in ways that are racist but they would never self-identify to say, "I'm being racist." They'll say that "racism is the system that I'm operating within. That's not me, that's not my action." That kind of reflection doesn't happen.

That's why we see difference and racism persist in systems and structures like policing. And when we discuss urbanism, we see the same things, but scaled up and exaggerated, into operations that radically are transforming and shaping space. We get the collective, environmental version of "othering." The white suburb versus the inner city, all of these dynamics are just so ingrained and embedded. And through language, through practice, through culture, all of that racism is acceptable-regardless of the very tangible, real, visible, negative impacts. What is it about white people or people who are in power or have agency that allows that?

To shape space or to control capital or to create conditions-what we're doing as designers constantly is manipulating how space and people operate. That's our job. And architecture is very smart about new ways to exploit and categorize people.
-Justin Garrett Moore

To shape space or to control capital or to create conditions-what we're doing as designers constantly is manipulating how space and people operate. That's our job. And architecture is very smart about new ways to exploit and categorize people.
Mabel, beyond what we have already discussed, what specifically have been your own encounters with racism in architecture?
Mabel O. Wilson: As my initial introduction into architectural education, I never saw myself reflected. How many times have each of us been the first Black person hired in the office? Once I was the second person, and that was huge. And when I decided I wanted to do a Ph.D., the logical place would have been architectural history. But lo and behold, I didn't get into the two architectural history programs I applied to-but I did get into an American studies program. About a year later, I got a call from the dean of one of those institutions with a big fat apology saying, "Oh, I'm sorry, we should have probably let you into our Ph.D. program." Apparently, I was just a very controversial applicant, and I guess some of the older faculty just didn't feel comfortable with me and what I wanted to work on, which was race and architecture. That was not relevant to the field 35 years ago.

Justin GarrettMoore: For me, the most violent or vile example is erasure. Think of "blight" elimination or urban renewal. There's a pipeline problem, yes-not enough Black kids have exposure to architecture and enter the field. That is true. But once you are in this field, the understanding of your culture, your kind of knowledge, your value is just completely erased. It puts one in this very difficult space, emotionally and mentally, where it's very challenging to find power, a base and a platform for your work, because over generations, if not centuries, there has been this complete destruction of everything that is connected to you.

I have many, many different versions of erasure, but I just want to talk through a couple of them to understand how wide-scale and systemic it is.

In Indianapolis, where I grew up, there's this really incredible, wonderful project called Fall Creek Homes, done by an organization called Flanner House. In the '30s and '40s, they did a lot of social service work in the Black community. Different supporting organizations, such as the Quakers, developed an incredible community redevelopment plan that included parks and flood mitigation design for the neighborhood. And it included self-help housing construction, with Black leadership and Black architects- Hilyard Robinson was the architect-and with a complete conception, generated by how these Black people in this community chose to make urban space. It's a great story. I did seven years of education in architecture and design at presumably elite schools. And I learned a lot about what white men think about cities, and what white men think about Black people in cities, and what white men did to Black people in cities, and what Black people couldn't do in cities. And every time as a student, I would kind of challenge and push my knowledge of Fall Creek, I would get, "Oh, that's interesting, but let's talk about this instead." That literally happened to me over and over again in my career. But this was my history-I found out later in life that my grandfather was one of the people who did that work-and yet it was absent, erased. I get in trouble for saying this, but the Black people that we learned about were typically sort of contorted into being European, or modernist, or being near-white, frankly. Their work was considered valuable.

A second form of erasure is when you're in offices, you are constantly erased. Because of all the dynamics and systems at play, very often Black people are in some form of disadvantage. It's just hard because you're doing your work, and you're bringing your value and knowledge, but it's not seen as valuable. It may not be reflecting things that the dominant culture cares about and can relate to. What you're presenting is simply not right-it happens in school, it happens when you go into an office.

And another version is in university admissions. Architecture schools are continually building a community for who gets to participate in design. I was doing admissions and we got applications from all over the world, a lot of students from Asia, some from Europe and Latin America. And I was lamenting to the others on the committee, "Wow, I really wish we had more Black students and students from Africa." And someone commented, "Well, there are over a billion people in China and they really need to have the best education and access to this kind of knowledge." So I challenged that-there are over a billion Black and African-descent people in the world.

That level of just pure dismissal of Black people and African people we know is pervasive. The schools say they are global-but it is acceptable to be global and international and diverse to the exclusion of Black people explicitly, and people of African descent explicitly. It's just fine!

To be Black and in architecture, you cannot be mediocre: to be visible, you have to be excellent. And you have to be excellent at every second of every moment of the day... Yet, sometimes, even with excellence, you can still be invisible.
-Mario Gooden

Mario Gooden: This also operates in very subtle ways. To be Black and in architecture, you cannot be mediocre: to be visible, you have to be excellent. And you have to be excellent at every second of every moment of the day. This is a very subtle but heavy burden that we, and our Black students, are carrying every day. When I grew up, this is one of the first things my mother taught me. I know Justin's parents probably told him the same, as Mabel's did as well, that you have to be twice as good. Yet, sometimes, even with excellence, you can still be invisible.

Justin GarrettMoore: A lot of people will talk about Black people having what W.E.B. Du Bois called the veil or double consciousness, and having to live in two worlds. It's challenging and, sometimes, demoralizing.
How can the profession-within both practice and education-work toward an anti-racist position? What has to happen?
Mabel O. Wilson: When Obama became president, we as a nation claimed that we were post-racial, but we clearly are not. And that's a very difficult thing to comprehend, because if race structures the world for everyone and not just for Black people, the trick that racism does is that it makes itself transparent-especially to those who can claim "the wages of whiteness," David Roediger's term for white privilege-and cannot perceive how race operates, or that they are racialized, too.

And people don't like to bring up race because it makes them uncomfortable, and you quite frankly don't like or want to shame people. But we all have to be accountable, so when someone is erased, someone else has done the erasure. How then should someone be accountable for those actions and the institutional frameworks that allow those actions to occur, to be validated?

I've heard people say, "Why should I be accountable for the sins of my father? Slavery, Jim Crow is in the past." But I would say that if you're white, you benefit from that history. You have opportunities, advantages and wealth. And even if you're poor and white, according to statistics you will still possess more wealth than most Black people. This historical difference in wealth is what allows white Americans to live well, and then pass that wealth on to the next generation. And at the other end of those benefits and privileges, we find historical legacy of deprivation and struggle, when you don't have those opportunities and will not inherit wealth because of slavery and Jim Crow segregation. We have to look at who benefits and who struggles.

We need a holistic accounting of the impact of race in the U.S. I think there are ways to be critically distanced in order to begin to understand and articulate that legacy, but as Black people, we can't be the only ones to do that work. It has to be done by those who benefit from whiteness. That is the work that has yet to be done.

The profession is in crisis, and perhaps it has been for a very long time. It's in crisis not only because it has been complicit with the systems that we've been talking about, but also because it's given away its agency.
-Mario Gooden

Mario Gooden: The profession is in crisis, and perhaps it has been for a very long time. It's in crisis not only because it has been complicit with the systems that we've been talking about, but also because it's given away its agency, in terms of how the city gets formed. Just take New York City, for example, in which the architects have ceded their influence to the developers of Hudson Yards, or to the super-rich commoditization of architecture along Billionaires Row on 57 th Street.

The other truth is that it's very difficult to enter the profession unless you come from money. But because of structural racism and white supremacy, Blacks did not have the ability to acquire wealth through home ownership, for example, because of red-lining. Therefore, there was very little to pass from one generation to the next and the wealth disparities between Blacks and whites are enormous. Unless you're white and you have a lot of money, it's very difficult to enter the profession.

Hence, how do you support other modes of practice and recognize those as being just as important to the built environment? Practitioners may not be working for developers, but they are working in, let's say, cultural practice, trying to formulate different ways of questioning the discipline and making buildings in the public realm. Furthermore, professional organizations have to question themselves, and by that I mean the AIA, for example, really needs to question what it is that it's supporting and what it is that it's propping up.

Justin GarrettMoore: I would echo that practice has been so outmoded that it's no longer well-structured or equipped to serve people and the environment. It's very good at serving wealth and capital, but it's not so good at serving people and places. It is an everyday, common, and accepted practice that you could be paid well, with a lot of public money, to have white people in a room making decisions about what happens to Black people. I think that is unethical and the discipline has to revise, review, evaluate all of its codes of ethics and how it operates to enforce those unethical practices in the built environment, especially as they connect to people, our society and the work that needs to be done.

Mabel O. Wilson: Fundamentally, you have to look at how architecture in the West has always been allied with power and wealth, whether it's the monarchy, the state or private capital, and the church. As architects, how we work is speculative. We're always thinking about the future, which is why architecture allied easily with modernity's concept of progress. Through our drawings we project the future, and that space of projection allows us to imagine that what we're doing is always morally good and will make the world better. But if that was the case, then how do you explain "poor doors"-separate entrances for affordable housing units in high rise development buildings in New York City? Or a past failure like Pruitt-Igoe housing in St. Louis? Buildings are erected but there is no social investment, no financial resources for maintenance. You end up with constant structural neglect and wholesale degradation of Black life in America.

Justin GarrettMoore: And the architecture profession still elevates these figures who did all these things as the most important people that every architect has to learn about and refer to. It's crazy. What Mabel said was something I want to put a pin on, which was talking about care. We don't concern ourselves enough with care-or maintaining things or having a different orientation about what needs design and thought and creativity. And that radically needs to change.

Mario Gooden: We as a profession now also have to recognize the full humanity of who we're designing for-and within the schools and within the profession, we can't proclaim to be champions of the environment, designing for sustainability or for climate change, and not understand the relationships between race and climate change.
How do we get young people of color more interested in the profession so that people who are designing our world reflect our diverse society?.
Justin GarrettMoore: I have a positive story about how I got into architecture. I went to a probably 95 percent Black high school in Indianapolis. At the time, the school was getting a new gymnasium, and the MWBE contractor, Jimmy Beard, said to the architects on the project, "In order for me to work on this, you're going to hire students from this school to work in your office." So as a 15-year-old Black kid, and as Ferguson-like protests against police violence flared in my neighborhood, I started working 40 hours a week as a summer intern for Jim Schellinger at CSO Architects in Indianapolis..

Providing opportunities for young people does not cost a lot; just a little money and making some time to care. This is something that a good number of the firms that read your magazine can do tomorrow.
-Justin Garrett Moore

I think they paid me something like $8 an hour-probably twice the minimum wage at the time. And it was great to have that early exposure, to see what people do, and to make some money. I got behind the curtain of the Wizard of Oz and saw that what these people were doing was not magic or completely exceptional. I saw and understood that I could do it, too. Providing opportunities for young people does not cost a lot; just a little money and making some time to care. This is something that a good number of the firms that read your magazine can do tomorrow

Mabel O. Wilson: But in practice, and in academic institutions, the conversation around whiteness has never happened. And until that does, real change can't be instituted, because you can't understand how race operates to produce inequalities. You're just trying to place the Band-Aid on something that's a far deeper social wound and problem.

Justin GarrettMoore: The final thing I would say circles back to the question of personal responsibility: that people need to do more than only say "What can I do," or join a group, or go to a meeting or march. It needs to expand to the personal reflection, conversation, and evaluation that people need to engage around the issues of whiteness and anti-Black racism, and to really try to challenge themselves and each other. It's uncomfortable, and it's going to take time, energy, and resources. This work shouldn't only be happening with allies, or only happening with Black and Brown people. It needs to happen at a much broader scale and with more people being willing to do the work.

Cathleen McGuigan is editor-in-chief of Architectural Record. She is responsible for leading the award-winning editorial team to deliver thorough coverage of news, projects, and practice issues to architects, design professionals, and building product manufacturers. Her broad experience as an editor, journalist, and critic provides strong leadership for this integrated print and digital portfolio, as well as strikingly relevant professional and cultural content for readers across the globe. Cathleen joined RECORD in 2011. Previously an architecture critic and arts editor at Newsweek, she has more than three decades of cultural journalism experience. Cathleen's work has also been published in The New York Times Magazine, Smithsonian, Harper's Bazaar, and Rolling Stone. A Michigan native, she serves on several design juries and is a former adjunct professor at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism.

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Three Architects Discuss Whiteness and Racism in the Built Environment

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Last month, in response to public demonstrations and support for the Black Lives Matter movement, Architectural Record began reaching out to architects and designers to explore racism in the profession and the built environment. As part of that ongoing conversation, RECORD convened a panel of three professionals in practice and education: Mabel O.

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Anti-racist labs in teaching and research

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Anti-racist labs in teaching and research

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Abstract

Demographics of the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) workforce and student body in the US and Europe continue to show severe underrepresentation of Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC). Among the documented causes of the persistent lack of diversity in STEM are bias, discrimination, and harassment of members of underrepresented minority groups (URMs). These issues persist due to continued marginalization, power imbalances, and lack of adequate policies against misconduct in academic and other scientific institutions. All scientists can play important roles in reversing this trend by shifting the culture of academic workplaces to intentionally implement equitable and inclusive policies, set norms for acceptable workplace conduct, and provide opportunities for mentorship and networking. As scientists are increasingly acknowledging the lack of racial and ethnic diversity in science, there is a need for clear direction on how to take antiracist action. Here we present 10 rules to help labs develop antiracists policies and action in an effort to promote racial and ethnic diversity, equity, and inclusion in science.

Citation: Chaudhary VB, Berhe AA (2020) Ten simple rules for building an antiracist lab. PLoS Comput Biol 16(10): e1008210. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1008210

Editor: Russell Schwartz, Carnegie Mellon University, UNITED STATES

Published: October 1, 2020

Copyright: © 2020 Chaudhary, Berhe. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Funding: VBC and AAB are supported by the National Science Foundation (DEB-1844531 and HRD-1725650, respectively). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Introduction

Racial and ethnic diversity in the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) workforce remains low, particularly at the PhD level and above [ 1- 3]. The May 2020 murder of George Floyd sparked a global uprising against systemic racism and police brutality against Black people [ 4]. At the same time, racism faced by Christian Cooper while birding in Central Park in New York City demonstrated the danger that Black scientists face in natural spaces, including during scientific fieldwork and while being #BlackInNature [ 5]. Days later, Black academics began sharing on social media thousands of harrowing stories accounting the racism they face in academic institutions using the hashtag #BlackintheIvory [ 6]. On June 8, 2020, Black scientists initiated a global strike to eliminate racism and encouraged colleagues to spend the day reading about antiracism, reflecting on its pervasiveness, and developing antiracism plans of action [ 7]. These events infused new energy into decades-long efforts working to address racial inequities in STEM [ 8- 10].

Scientists increasingly acknowledge the problematic lack of racial and ethnic representation of Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) in science and are in search of clear actionable steps they themselves have the power to immediately enact. Professional scientific organizations, universities, and departments all have a role in developing programs and policies that promote racial and ethnic diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). In addition, there are swift actions that research group leaders or primary investigators (PIs) can take to build a lab environment that fosters a racially inclusive environment and ultimately promotes DEI across scientific fields.

Scientists who are beginners to discussions of race, lacking guidance or background knowledge, may adopt unevolved viewpoints or weak policies that unintentionally harm BIPOC [ 11] or contribute to an erosion of trust among people of different racial or ethnic backgrounds in a lab group. Harmful approaches include engaging in objectifying thought experiments that question the instrumental value of BIPOC in science, confusing race as a biological entity as indicated by human genetic variation instead of a socially constructed concept [ 12], arguing that the unbiased nature of science and scientists precludes racial biases in scientific workplaces, and hijacking discussions of race with anecdotes from other types of discrimination (e.g., gender-based and/or class-based) without employing an intersectional framework [ 13]. As scientists of color who actively engage in work to promote racial and ethnic DEI, we have encountered all of these harmful scenarios and more.

Building a lab that is antiracist is very different from building a lab that simply avoids racism. Avoiding racism or stating that one's lab is "not racist" adopts a neutral stance in a struggle that inherently has no neutrality [ 14]. As the scholar Ibram X. Kendi writes, "One either allows racial inequities to persevere, as a racist, or confronts racial inequities, as an antiracist. There is no in-between safe space of 'not racist.'" [ 15]. We support recent calls to promote the health and well-being of lab members [ 16] and supportive lab groups that are resilient to outside stressors [ 17]. But building an antiracist lab goes beyond being kind, treating people equally, or taking a color-blind approach. Being antiracist means developing and supporting antiracist policies through intentional introspection and subsequent action.

Many current and future PIs are looking for clear advice on how to move beyond statements of solidarity and toward concrete achievable antiracist action in their labs. We share these 10 rules (Figs 1 and 2) to contribute to antiracist STEM discourse and help springboard scientists toward immediate achievable action in realms under their control. It is our hope that partaking in such actions will help lead to improved racial and ethnic diversity and inclusion in the lab and successful scientific lives for all.

Rule 1: Lead informed discussions about antiracism in your lab regularly

Most PIs would be appalled to learn about members of their lab group being victims of racism. Unfortunately, both overt and covert racist incidents (e.g., microaggressions, tokenism, white savior complex, tone policing, etc.) routinely occur in science labs and go unreported. Unreported racism leads to isolation, anxiety, and stress among BIPOC and can ultimately lead to BIPOCs leaving STEM fields. Part of the responsibility of a PI in creating a safe working environment is developing a lab where lab members feel comfortable talking about race and reporting racism, including individual, institutional, or systemic racism in society and especially within academic workplaces [ 18]. Leading regular discussions on race informed by scholarly readings signals to lab members, BIPOC and white, that racial discrimination is not tolerated and that silence is implicit acceptance of racism [ 19]. Initiate a preliminary discussion on promoting antiracist STEM with lab members and then revisit the topic each term. Discussions can be structured around journal club readings of peer-reviewed literature on equity in STEM, invited DEI speakers, and/or brainstorming sessions to develop antiracist lab policies. PIs should initiate conversations and actively moderate them to ensure that privileged individuals do not dominate the conversation and racial and ethnic minorities are heard [ 20].

Rule 2. Address racism in your lab and field safety guidelines

Racist violence targets BIPOC in the workplace and threatens the ability of students and staff to work safely. Black and Brown people are particularly targeted, even in academic institutions and at research sites. Lab and field safety guidelines should be written with the recognition that some lab members require additional supports to safely conduct their work. Ask BIPOC lab members what you can do to facilitate their safety on campus and in the field. PIs should advocate for BIPOC lab members who may be harassed or harmed by campus security or others that think they don't "belong" in academic spaces. In the field, PIs should familiarize themselves with any historical and contemporary racist climate present at field sites and prepare accordingly. Provide BIPOC with safety nets such as easy-to-see identification, official-looking field apparel, or work buddies. An open dialogue about race will encourage BIPOC lab members to speak up about what measures they want or need to ensure their safety.

Rule 3: Publish papers and write grants with BIPOC colleagues

The most important metrics of success in the academy are papers and grants. Publications and grants are also key to tenure, promotion, and career longevity in the academic and other STEM professions. More and more, the most impactful science is done in teams [ 21], but collaboration networks can be insular. Supportive peer networks in STEM that involve diverse voices produce better quality and highly cited publications [ 22]. Hence, the most important thing anyone can do to improve the success and retention of BIPOC folx in STEM is to provide opportunities for collaborations that lead to publications and grants. For scientists that work with minoritized communities, it is particularly important to ensure BIPOC are involved in not just manual work and/or data entry but are also provided opportunities to make intellectual contributions that lead to publications and further funding. When organizing workshops or symposia, invite BIPOC scientists to co-lead and not just participate.

Rule 4: Evaluate your lab's mentoring practices

Building antiracism into your lab's mentoring strategy begins with the recognition that racial biases, conscious and unconscious, have the potential to taint mentor-mentee relationships and hinder mentee success. BIPOC mentees report racially motivated gatekeeping behaviors by mentors such as being advised not to pursue advanced degrees or prestigious opportunities, receiving little mentorship in areas associated with issues of identity, experiencing tone policing, and being advised to avoid politics (real and perceived) [ 23]. Increasingly in STEM, multi-mentor models are being favored over one-on-one top-down mentoring relationships to better center mentee needs and career goals [ 24]. PIs can help mentees build networks of mentors outside of the lab or institution through culturally relevant professional societies (e.g., Society for Advancement of Chicanos/Hispanics and Native Americans in Science, the different national associations and societies for Black scholars, and Black British Professionals in STEM) or strong online communities (e.g., #BlackandSTEM, #VanguardSTEM, #NativeandSTEM, and #LatinxandSTEM on Twitter) that contribute to a greater sense of agency and confidence and lead to increased academic success. This also encourages lab members to think deeply about their various mentoring needs (e.g., substantive feedback, sponsorship, professional development, and emotional support) and take an active role in cultivating their own science networks [ 25, 26].

Rule 5: Amplify voices of BIPOC scientists in your field

Read papers by BIPOC scientists in your lab group meetings, cite the work of BIPOC scholars, and nominate BIPOC for awards. Social media outlets like Twitter are a good place to identify BIPOC scholars that are in your field but outside of your professional bubble. When amplifying BIPOC voices, ensure to highlight their science achievements and not just their contributions to DEI. For example, if you want a BIPOC scientist to speak about DEI to your group or department, first make sure they have a venue to speak about their science. Even if you have a policy of not compensating speakers for presenting on their scholarly work, consider compensating them for the extra labor of educating your community on DEI initiatives.

Rule 6: Support BIPOC in their efforts to organize

Support the development of safe and brave spaces for BIPOC to organize and discuss issues surrounding race in the absence of white people. For students and trainees, provide meeting space (and additional resources to facilitate effective discussions) where BIPOC can meet and share experiences without fear of retribution. Likewise, support faculty of color in efforts to form separate identity affinity groups within your institution and/or professional organizations. As scholars, we should not forget that our job literally is to educate and mentor the next generation of scholars on how to identify barriers that affect our academic endeavors (including issues related to justice, equity, and inclusion) and come up with plans of actions needed to break down barriers that can prevent us from furthering scientific knowledge.

Rule 7: Intentionally recruit BIPOC students and staff

After working to foster an inclusive, antiracist lab environment, PIs can begin to evaluate their lab hiring practices for racial or ethnic biases. This rule focusing on increasing lab diversity is purposefully placed after the above rules, which prioritize efforts towards inclusion and retention that should be addressed first. Developing programs for support and retention first helps ensure that BIPOC are not recruited into toxic environments. In recruitment efforts, do not assume racial or ethnic identity from appearances or names; information should be collected from lab members or applicants in a self-reported and voluntary manner. Many of the same efforts used to improve equity in faculty hiring, such as candidate and job ad diversity statements, targeted recruitment of promising candidates, and targeted listservs and databases (e.g., DiverseScholar.org), also apply to recruiting BIPOC lab personnel and trainees [ 27]. Along with recruiting, PIs can advocate for targeted retention and inclusion initiatives at the department or university level, such as a cohort or cluster approach to diversify STEM student and/or faculty hiring [ 28, 29].

Rule 8: Adopt a dynamic research agenda

PIs may be hesitant to hire prospective BIPOC trainees or staff if their research interests do not align closely with the specific research agenda of the lab. A flexible research agenda that accommodates intellectual perspectives outside of the prevailing conversations in one's field could not only help diversify the lab but also lead to more innovative science. URM scholars produce higher rates of scientific novelty but are also more likely to have their novel contributions discounted and not incorporated into dominant paradigms [ 30]. PIs, by cultivating dynamic research agendas, can amplify and champion out-of-the-box, innovative contributions from BIPOC scholars.

Rule 9: Advocate for racially diverse leadership in science

Too often, BIPOC are encouraged to participate in the scientific endeavor in purely supportive or subjugative roles. Go beyond mentoring BIPOC scholars in your lab to sponsoring them (i.e., talk about them to others) to improve their chances of securing jobs, fellowships, awards, and, eventually, leadership roles. Efforts to promote racial and ethnic diversity in science must advocate for BIPOC in leadership positions in labs, institutions, professional societies, editorial boards, and funding agencies. Nominate BIPOC for status elevating roles in science. Early career scholars working in your group should feel empowered to get involved in leadership and advocacy groups within the university and beyond. If possible, their labor in advocating for leadership that addresses the needs of all members of the research group should be accommodated, including with provision of time and resources.

Rule 10: Hold the powerful accountable and don't expect gratitude

The goal of cultivating an antiracist lab group is to improve a broader system with known racial inequities. Recognize that white scientists are frequently lauded for DEI work while BIPOC are punished for it [ 31]. Recognize the difference between performative action and action that doesn't bring personal glory. We should educate ourselves on effective bystander intervention techniques for addressing issues of inequity, harassment, and discrimination. We should also be able to use accountability mechanisms in our own institutions (if we don't have them, work to set them up) and hold our colleagues and ourselves accountable for creating healthy workplace climates. Academics are noted for holding those who mishandle text or data (plagiarize or fabricate data) accountable as we consider these acts to be scientific misconduct. Well, if these constitute misconduct, then mistreating people who do the research should definitely rise to the same level of concern and be considered scientific misconduct too [ 32].

Conclusion

Scientific labs play an important role in confronting the racism that permeates our social institutions and PIs are uniquely positioned to step up and be leaders in confronting this racism in our everyday work environments. Despite the title of this paper, it may not be easy to rectify the long history of racist behaviors and structures that permeate all scientific disciplines [ 33]. However, as leaders in science, it is our responsibility to take action and simple concrete steps can and must be made toward addressing individual, institutional, and systemic racism. The work in our labs can begin today; no additional committees, focus groups, or surveys are required.

Acknowledgments

VBC and AAB met on Twitter, where they both sought and found a community of like-minded scholars who are passionate about equity and inclusion in the academy.

References

1. 25. Gleßmer M, Adams A, Hastings M, Barnes R. Taking Ownership of Your Mentoring: Lessons Learned from Participating in the Earth Science Women's Network. The Graduate School Press; 2015.

2. 28. Kosinski-Collins MS, Godsoe K, Epstein IR. The brandeis science posse: Building a cohort model program to retain underserved students in the sciences. Diversity in the Scientific Community Volume 2: Perspectives and Exemplary Programs: ACS Publications; 2017. p. 45-58.

3. 33. Saini A. Superior: the return of race science: Beacon Press; 2019.

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Ten simple rules for building an antiracist lab

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Demographics of the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) workforce and student body in the US and Europe continue to show severe underrepresentation of Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC). Among the documented causes of the persistent lack of diversity in STEM are bias, discrimination, and harassment of members of underrepresented minority groups (URMs).

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Students' Learning Characteristics, Perceptions of Small-Group University Teaching, and Understanding Through a "Meeting of Minds"

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Students’ Learning Characteristics and Understanding Through a “Meeting of Minds”

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Students’ Learning Characteristics and Understanding Through a “Meeting of Minds”

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University of Ioannina, Ioannina, Greece

University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, United Kingdom

Previous research has described some of the main characteristics of university teachers who teach in different ways, using a variety of methods and conceptions. What is generally missing from previous research is the impact of contrasting teaching approaches on students with different learning characteristics. The present investigation builds on a previous case study that identified the potential influence of a "meeting of minds" between tutors and students in developing personal understanding and also suggested contrasting perceptions of differing forms of teaching. Twenty-one in-depth interviews were used to identify distinctive perceived ways of teaching and groups of students with contrasting learning intentions, looking in particular at the perceptions of tutors who were seen to encourage a "meeting of minds." The main characteristics of these tutors were found be tolerating ambiguity, showing authenticity and empathy, which led to providing opportunities for discussion in breaks, and offering thinking spaces within class. The analyses identified contrasting perceptions of teaching among students who differed in their learning characteristics and suggested how cognitive and affective elements in students' experiences of teaching might be intertwined in influencing the development of personal understanding.

Previous Research into Student Learning and University Teaching

Given space limitations, it has proved impossible to provide detailed reviews of the extensive research previously carried out on university teaching and student learning, but examples have been chosen to indicate the scope of the theoretical framework within which this study was conducted.

University Teaching

Previous research on teaching explored students' preferences for different types of teachers and teaching using both observation and student questionnaires ( Wubbels and Brekelmans, 2005). Their questionnaire was subsequently adapted for use in higher education and indicated that students preferred teaching based on emotional proximity - directing, helping, supporting, and understanding ( Fraser et al., 2010). In other research, the main characteristics of outstanding university teachers, as described by other academics, were "recognizing the student perspective," "creating a learning ethos," and "conveying feelings and arousing interest" ( Ballantyne et al., 1997). This latter aspect also implies "authenticity" ( Kreber, 2007); teachers openly express enthusiasm for the discipline and talk about their own ideas, values, and feelings about the subject, as well as showing a warm regard for students.

The phenomenographic approach to research ( Marton and Booth, 1997) provides a way of systematically differentiating between different approaches to teaching through in-depth interviews with university teachers. Using this approach, Prosser and Trigwell (1999) identified five categories of approaches to teaching, which ranged from a predominant focus on transmitting information to encouraging conceptual change. In this nested hierarchy, lower levels are progressively incorporated within higher ones to offer increasingly more sophisticated conceptions of teaching. A sixth category subsequently added a category of "relationships between teachers' world-views and students' world-views, seen as open to change" ( Prosser et al., 2007, p. 54; Prosser and Trigwell, 2014). This last category is closely linked to the ideas about teacher-learner relationships explored in the current study.

Cognitive and affective characteristics of university teachers were brought together within a "sophisticated conception" of teaching and learning in research by Entwistle and Walker (2002), based on differing forms of teacher knowledge identified by Shulman (1987). The cognitive elements were seen as "conceptualizing the topic and the discipline," "strategically linking teaching with learning," and "understanding how students learn," while the affective characteristics involved "expressing feelings for the discipline," "commitment to fostering conceptual development," and "showing empathy with students."

Research specifically focused on students' perceptions of teaching has been widely reported in the literature (e.g., Ramsden, 1979; Prosser and Trigwell, 1999) and has demonstrated a clear influence of such perceptions on students' approaches to learning and grades awarded.

Student Learning

The range of research into student learning involves a wide range of perspectives, but here we focus mainly on the strand of this research, stemming from the work of Marton and his colleagues in Gothenburg ( Marton, 1975; Marton and Säljö, 1984). They introduced the distinction between deep and surface approaches to learning. Initially, this idea was related to a specific experience of learning but was subsequently extended to fairly consistent approaches found across similar learning tasks. These approaches are related to high achievement at university, at least when "understanding" is central to assessments. Central to the notion of approaches is the intention of the learner when deciding which learning processes to adopt, and the level of understanding being sought. Interview studies with university students produced a nested hierarchy of six levels: mentioning, describing, relating, explaining, conceiving, and expansive awareness ( Entwistle, 2018). The final category involves a broader understanding of the discipline as a whole and a readiness to reinterpret it within new contexts and to establish a personal relationship with the phenomena being understood (see also, Fyrenious et al., 2007; the final category described by Van Rossum and Hamer, 2010).

Earlier, Perry (1970) had described students' experiences of learning by tracking their evolving conceptions of knowledge during a whole degree course. He introduced the distinction between dualism and relativism, which evolved gradually as students recognized the importance of justifying their conclusions with evidence and logical reasoning.

Recent research has looked at a range of individual factors ( Gijbels et al., 2014; Postareff et al., 2014; Postareff et al., 2015) along with the strong feelings that students express about their aspirations and sense of identity as a learner ( Haggis, 2007; Karagiannopoulou, 2010), with other studies concentrating on emotions expressed by students in their learning experiences, with "enjoyment" and "relief," for example, contrasting with "boredom" and "anxiety," and all of these feelings being related to the level of academic performance ( Pekrun et al., 2011; Trigwell et al., 2012; D'Mello et al., 2014; Postareff et al., 2017).

Hagenauer and Volet (2014) have recently suggested that future research should focus directly on conceptualizing the influence of student-teacher relationships on students" learning ( Rowe et al., 2013; Raisanen et al., 2016). An exploratory study along these lines identified a meeting of minds, as a particular form of learning relationship between teachers and their students ( Karagiannopoulou and Entwistle, 2013), and suggested the need for further such research.

Theoretical Framework

Empirical research into student learning, derived from Marton's ideas, led to a series of theoretical frameworks showing the influences of student characteristics and teaching approaches on learning. Biggs (1987) (see also Biggs and Tang, 2007) introduced a "presage-process-product model" (developed by Prosser and Trigwell, 1999) indicating a flow of influences on the quality of student learning. Figure 1 is developed from other more detailed conceptual frameworks based on similar principles ( Entwistle, 1987; Entwistle and Peterson, 2004).

Figure 1. Model of student and teaching characteristics and learning outcomes.

The vertical line in the top half of the diagram follows a time sequence beginning with students' aspirations and sense of identity as a learner, through a sense of agency in learning, to specific learning intentions and awareness of the learning process, through which the monitoring of learning takes place. These processes are seen to affect students' perceptions of teaching, which in turn relate to the different forms and levels of understanding reached. The terms didactic and explanatory come from the literature described above, but the idea of dialogical comes from, among others, Hay (2010).

The Present Study

The present study explores the relationships between differences in student learning characteristics and perceptions of contrasting approaches to small-group teaching. It was based on previous research, but particularly on the findings of our previous exploratory study ( Karagiannopoulou and Entwistle, 2013), which had introduced the notion of a meeting of minds between student and tutor and suggested that there might be striking differences among the students in their perceptions of small-group teaching, as illustrated in the following interview extracts from that study.

In the past I presented my own perspective in the exam, I was critical to the theories and I failed. Now, I develop my answer close to the tutors' ideas, adding only few personal thoughts, if necessary. They treat us like machines; we're asked to regurgitate knowledge. I'm always seeking meaning, but I can't be bothered any more to develop my understanding in ways that meet the tutors' demands.

I try to take a critical stance on the material. The germ of it can be found in tutor's thinking, which is 'feeding' mine. This gets me into more thinking. I initially try to understand the issue, by putting myself in the tutor's shoes, how she appeared to think on an issue. You start with the tutor's perspective, you bring in previous knowledge and experiences, and that gets you to a different end point from where you started. ( Karagiannopoulou and Entwistle, 2013, pp. 90, 91)

Both these students had a strong intention to reach a personal understanding of academic material but had experienced contrasting forms of teaching. The present study was designed to explore this finding in more depth, and with a larger sample, strategically chosen from highly successful students, more likely to have experienced a "meeting of minds" with tutors.

Methodology

Research Questions

1. How do students with differing learning characteristics perceive contrasting approaches to teaching?

2. What are the perceived characteristics of teaching that specifically encourage a "meeting of minds"?

Sample and Educational Context

Twenty-one final semester Honor students (18 females and 3 males) were selected, all of who had top grades and were taking a joint degree in Philosophy, Education, and Psychology. In Greece, the gender ratio in Schools of Social Sciences is overwhelmingly in favor of women. All of the students had taken psychology as a major. The mean age of the participants was 21.5 years ( SD = 0.4). All of the students were studying their first degree; no student having completed a previous degree participated in the study. The Honor students were identified through the University records. In final-year teaching in this department, students are taught in small groups, where they present papers, take part in thematic groups, and are trained in specific skills. This context enables a close relationship to develop between students and tutor, although not all tutors necessarily adopt that approach.

Data Collection

The interviews were carried out by one of the authors who was a university teacher. However, the participants had not taken any of the courses she had been teaching in the year the study was conducted. Moreover, they were not expected to enroll in new courses until the completion of their studies; they scheduled to get their degree in the next months. The interviewer is an experienced researcher who has carried out and published a number of interview studies (e.g., Karagiannopoulou, 2006; Karagiannopoulou, 2010; Karagiannopoulou and Entwistle, 2013; Entwistle et al., 2016). Individual semi-structured interviews, lasting up to 90 min, used the conversational style adopted in phenomenographic studies, in which students are encouraged to reflect on their own experiences in depth and to clarify their initial descriptions. The interview schedule was designed to obtain comparable data from all respondents and covered, first, their learning characteristics and then experiences of different kinds of teaching, although both aspects were often interwoven in the student's experience. In particular, the interview schedule included few core questions about students' individual characteristics - elements of their learning identity, a variety of teaching experiences either interwoven or not with learning experiences, and the relevant emotions. Given the dialogic style of interviewing, almost any single specific question was followed by a number of probing questions that enabled the interviewer to gain deep understanding of students' experiences; negotiate, with the students, to produce a shared meaning; and facilitate any attempt for meaning making. The questions involved the small-group psychology classes the students had attended so far at degree level. These were optional psychology classes. Students reported experiences of teaching and learning in relation to different tutors who delivered these small-group classes. No data were collected from the tutors. It should be pointed out that ethics approval was not required at the time this study was conducted as per the applicable institutional and national guidelines and regulations. Written informed consent was obtained from all participants.

Data Analysis

Unlike the phenomenographic analysis of interviews, the transcripts were considered in relation to the pre-existing constructs shown in the theoretical framework. Repeated reading of the transcripts identified extracts that contained the essence of the meaning of the main constructs, related to both learning and teaching, that were then related to each other to explore the inter-relationships between them.

Findings

The interviews had shown that students could recognize the three approaches to teaching shown in Figure 1 and describe their reactions to them. The findings are briefly summarized in Table 1 to provide an initial indication of responses found in the analyses.

Table 1. Outline findings indicating the perceptions of teaching of highly successful final-year students, differing in their learning intentions.

We found three distinguishable groups of students in terms of learning characteristics, mainly on the basis of approaches to learning, level of intended understanding, and conceptions of knowledge but also on evidence of a learning identity. The perceptions of teaching were related to the three distinctive approaches. The relationships between student characteristics and perceptions of teaching were then examined within the three groups of students making use of the whole transcript for each student. Summaries of these analyses are provided in the following sections to justify the three student groups and their tendencies toward differing reactions to the contrasting approaches to teaching. Each section is illustrated by short extracts from the transcripts.

Characteristics of the Three Groups of Students Identified

Group 1 Deep Learners Seeking a Wider and Deeper Academic Understanding

All of the students in GROUP 1 reported a clear learner identity as active learners and were meaning oriented, seeking to reach a broad, independent understanding of the world around them, which could then be used to address important issues affecting people and the world. They also showed a strong relativistic conception of knowledge.

Group 2 Deep Learners Seeking an Individual Understanding of Concepts and Theories

Students in GROUP 2 appear more pragmatic deep learners, as the aim to develop personal understanding seems to exist alongside a concern about being successful in the exams. They do, however, seem to have a clear awareness of the relativity of knowledge

Group 3 Less Enthusiastic Learners Content With Meeting Assessment Requirements

Students in GROUP 3 studied in order to understand the main concepts. They lacked the confidence to try to reach a personal understanding, worrying that being "off track" would lead to failure in the exams. There was little evidence of a relativistic conception of knowledge.

Perceptions of Approaches to Teaching and Influences on Learning

These analyses were directed toward the initial research question: "How do students with differing learning characteristics perceive contrasting approaches to teaching?" The perceptions that each of three groups of students with contrasting learning characteristics had the three perceived ways of teaching, identified in Figure 1 and Table 1.

1. Didactic teaching designed to provide sufficient concepts and theories to cover the syllabus and preparing the students for the exam.

2. Explanatory teaching that focuses on establishing the meaning of the main concepts and theories and emphasizing conceptual development.

3. Dialogical teaching to offer a "meeting of minds" and freedom to explore academic understandings, both collaboratively and individually.

The first two categories correspond to the last two categories identified by Prosser et al. (2007), mentioned earlier, but our previous study had suggested a broadening of the most advanced category, acknowledging the importance of learning relationships in approaches to teaching, to open up the possibility of a "meeting of minds."

Didactic Teaching

All three categories of teaching were perceived as being student-focused ( Prosser and Trigwell, 1999) to varying degrees. In didactic teaching, however, the teacher was found to be taking more responsibility for the student's learning than in the other two categories.

Group 1 Deep Learners Seeking a Wider and Deeper Academic Understanding

This group appeared immune to what they perceived as rather negative teaching experiences. They reported dissatisfaction, but also tolerance, in their reactions to this approach to teaching. They explained how their strong commitment to the development of personal understanding allowed them to engage actively with the ideas encountered without being unduly influenced by the teaching method. This was markedly different to how students in the other groups described their reactions.

Group 2 Deep Learners Seeking an Individual Understanding of Concepts and Theories

Students in this group appeared to be generally dissatisfied by this teaching approach, with some regression in their learning approaches. They were disappointed by the rather closed approach to the subject with students not being allowed to challenge the ideas presented. The teaching also failed to stimulate their interest or get them engaged with learning, sufficiently to come to grips with the subject. There was no evidence of a learning relationship between teacher and student that could encourage independent learning.

Group 3 Less Enthusiastic Learners Content With Meeting Assessment Requirements

All the students in this group were satisfied with tutors who explained the content sufficiently well for their learning intentions, with their focus being simply to succeed in the course. These experiences appeared related to a continuing dualistic conception of knowledge, with little expectation of becoming involved with the subject matter independently.

Explanatory Teaching

This category is similar to the highest one described by Prosser and Trigwell (1999). Teachers tend to see learning from the student's perspective and encourage personal understandings of the subject matter, but without forming a strong learning relationship with the students.

Group 1 Deep Learners Seeking a Wider and Deeper Academic Understanding

These students reported satisfaction with tutors who valued their own patterns of thinking. They tried to get close to such tutors in presenting their thoughts and get in touch with their own personal way of approaching the discipline that enabled them to experience a meeting of minds to which students themselves felt they had a seminal contribution. They felt valued and respected when the particular teaching experiences met the students' need to demonstrate their own understanding and share thinking patterns, and yet missed a sense of "passion" in the teaching.

Group 2 Deep Learners Seeking an Individual Understanding of Concepts and Theories

These students appeared satisfied by the teaching delivered, as it enabled them to reach an independent form of understanding. The tutor's concern about their learning, and readiness to be available, supported their ability to reach understandings of their own.

Group 3 Less Enthusiastic Learners Content With Meeting Assessment Requirements

These students reported satisfaction with teaching for understanding by taking the tutor's perspective as an understanding to hold on to. They respected tutor's personality and knowledge, creating a positive emotional experience supporting the students' faltering steps toward understanding of the tutor's perspective, but they lacked the confidence to interact with tutors and aimed at reaching a level of understanding sufficient to succeed in the exams.

Dialogical Teaching

This category not only contains elements of the sixth approach to teaching identified by Prosser et al. (2007) but also expands its defining features substantially, by introducing the idea of a "meeting of minds" in the learning relationship. The analysis of this category was directed toward our second research question: "What are the perceived characteristics of teaching that specifically encourage a 'meeting of minds'?" The clearest evidence came from students who were seeking the most advanced forms of personal understanding (Group 1) and is described in detail in the next section.

Group 1 Deep Learners Seeking a Wider and Deeper Academic Understanding

All of the students in this group reported themselves to be excited by enthusiastic, empathetic teaching that appeared significantly to promote the relational nature involved in developing "expanding awareness" as part of their understanding. The main additional aspects of this approach to teaching were found to involve tolerance of ambiguity, authenticity, empathy, being available, and creating thinking space, which will now be described in turn. These students also provided some of the best explanations of how, specifically, the supportive context provided, and the interaction with the teacher's ideas, enabled them to reconsider their previous understandings and build something more personally satisfying.

Tolerance of Ambiguity

This characteristic can be seen in a tutor's receptivity to any pattern of thinking presented by a student in response to a specific issue. Such an experience seems to validate students' own understanding, as it comes from an expert who herself appears to be struggling with ideas and different perspectives within the disciplinary norms. Students perceived teachers' response as eagerness to engage with their perspective - it involves mutuality: students felt respected and respectful.

Authenticity

Teachers sharing with students their own personal experiences of meaning making and their way of living appeared to present what students sensed to be their " true self. " Students experienced, vicariously, the ambiguity and uncertainty underlying the tutor's personal process of becoming an expert in the discipline, which allowed them to feel confident when having similar feelings. The tutor's eagerness to share personal experiences with students created feelings of trust, value, and reciprocity, which enhanced students' confidence in struggling with disciplinary forms of understanding.

Empathy

This characteristic could be seen in students' reflections on the shared meaning making. A tutor's passion for their discipline was perceived to go hand in hand with her concern and eagerness to get students contributing to the flow of meaning making that contributed to their intellectual development. They provided clear explanations of the multiple facets of an issue that enabled students to join in a classroom discussion during which the tutor was seen to be drawing from all aspects of the discipline know-how, justifying their own perspective and showing their love of the subject. Reciprocity in respect of emotion and cognitive activities was underlying such experiences.

Being Available and Providing "Thinking Space"

Students appreciated the time that tutors spent with them, particularly in break time when tutors provided opportunities for them to express their thoughts and to "appropriate" meanings within the disciplinary discourse. Such experiences appeared to validate their thinking and enhanced confidence. Tutors were perceived as supporting students to make the most of teaching in terms of their engagement with the disciplinary discourse and providing opportunities in class for students to contribute their own patterns of thinking for general discussion.

These four aspects help to clarify the overall meaning of a "meeting of minds," through which students shift toward an appropriate way of thinking, drawing on their engagement with the tutors' perspective and their personal attributes. This process leads to a warm tutor-student learning relationship, which enhances students' confidence to struggle with meanings. Clarification of explanations and negotiation of meanings appear to go hand in hand with feelings of concern and support. Experiencing such teaching allows students to think confidently in relation to the tutor's perspective and so support the "expanding" form of understanding.

Group 2 Deep Learners Seeking an Individual Understanding of Concepts and Theories

Like the first group, all these students reported satisfaction with enthusiastic teaching and pointed out how all aspects of students' learning relations to tutors enhanced their confidence in developing personal understanding. However, in contrast to that group, these learning experiences did not help these students to share an already developed individual pattern of thinking or their steps toward understanding. They did, however, provide a starting point for thinking that kept them engaged with learning, helping to move the students' understandings toward "expanding awareness." Again, reciprocity in emotion and cognitive activities can be seen in the responses, implying an experience of a meeting of minds and feeling motivated by the tutor's passion about her subject.

Group 3 Less Enthusiastic Learners Content With Meeting Assessment Requirements

Students in this group seemed to become confused and left behind by passionate teaching, feeling that the tutors were not taking the students' pace of learning into account, but rather enjoying their own ways of thinking about the subject. Confusion was followed by negative feelings and reduced effort in learning, with no evidence of any experience of a meeting of minds.

Discussion

This study addressed the two main aspects indicated by two research questions. The first asked whether there were differences among students in their perceptions of the three distinct approaches to teaching indicated in our theoretical model. The responses from students, with contrasting learning intentions and conceptions, indeed showed systematic differences across the teaching approaches. The second asked about the teaching characteristics that were seen to encourage a "meeting of minds." Students, who were enthusiastic about "dialogical" methods of teaching, saw teachers using those approaches as showing, particularly, tolerance, authenticity, and empathy. Full descriptions of these findings are discussed below.

Students' Reactions to Different Approaches to Teaching

Table 1 summarized the main findings. Deep learners, who were seeking a wider and deeper academic understanding, were excited by dialogical teaching that encouraged a "meeting of minds." They were, however, tolerant of the other forms of teaching, feeling they were well able to develop their own understanding with or without the ideas presented by the teachers. Deep learners looking for an independent understanding, but with a greater focus on exam requirements, were deeply dissatisfied by didactic teaching but satisfied by the "explanatory" and "dialogical" approaches. The dialogical teaching left the less enthusiastic learners who were focusing mainly on the exams, anxious and confused, but they were comfortable with both the other approaches to teaching.

One source of these differing reactions appears to lie in the very different learning identities ( Haggis, 2007) of the students and their intentions and conceptions, as shown in Figure 1. Where there is dissonance between students' learning intentions and a perceived approach to teaching ( Lindblom-Ylänne, 2003), the tension creates negative feelings and confusion, as well as possible disengagement from attendance and studying ( Coertjens et al., 2016; Postareff et al., 2017). In our own study, such dissonance was particularly strong among the less enthusiastic students when faced with teaching designed to promote a "meeting of minds." This approach therefore has its dangers for students whose lower aspirations and knowledge may not allow any effective "meeting of minds" to take place. The dissatisfaction shown with "didactic" teaching by students aiming for their own personal understanding makes sense, as it is likely to discourage them from the ways of thinking they want to follow. This led to some of the strongest expressions of discontent, even anger, among this group of students.

Our findings also reinforce the importance of positive feelings of "consonance" ( Haggis, 2007; Vermunt, 2007), where learning intentions and approach to teaching match each other. Among our students with the deepest learning intentions, teaching for a "meeting of minds" was mentioned enthusiastically, as they enjoyed interacting actively with the academic ideas of the tutor, as they developed their own understanding, testing those ideas out for themselves against their own previous knowledge and experiences. Such students also seemed to be immune from the potentially damaging effects of dissonance, through their confidence in their own ability to understand for themselves.

Perceived Characteristics of Teaching that Encouraged a "Meeting of Minds"

In this study, we have been exploring the perceived characteristics of tutors who encourage a meeting of minds within the specific context of final-year, small-group, social science teaching. Such a context allows teachers to have more freedom in their teaching and to go beyond the level of basic academic understanding to enable some students to participate actively in formulating ideas within their discipline ( Baxter Magolda, 1999; Kreber, 2007). Of course, the nature of the discipline will affect how possible it is for such sharing of ideas to take place.

The explanations provided by the students who were seeking a wider and deeper academic understanding provided the best source of evidence to describe the characteristics of teachers who encouraged a "meeting of minds." The analyses established a range of aspects that could be categorized, although the specific extracts provided often overlapped with more than one category. The main categories described teachers who encouraged what we saw as a "meeting of minds," as having tolerance of ambiguity, which involves openness to students' ideas, authenticity in showing feelings and sharing experiences, and above all empathy showing a warm regard for students and expressing consideration for their views. But these teachers were also ready to be available during and after class to discuss academic topics, and students' other concerns, and in class provided "thinking spaces" where students could reflect on and discuss new ideas that had been introduced.

Some of the students explained how the feelings expressed by the teacher affected them as learners. For example: The more passion I experience from the tutors, the more interested I become in the issue at hand, and the more meanings I explore. Teaching through a meeting of minds can be described as relational teaching, involving both mutuality and reciprocity, building bridges between the teachers, the students, and the subject. Students' experience of "thinking in relation" involves the power of affect (care for students and passion for the subject), which can be utilized in encouraging "expanding awareness" in students' understanding; experiences allow students more readily to make their own contribution to knowledge and to work within their professions.

Students' perceptions of such characteristics correspond to many of academics had noted in outstanding teachers, namely "recognizing the student perspective," "creating a learning ethos," and "conveying feelings and arousing interest" ( Ballantyne et al., 1997). Drawing on the work of Wubbels and Brekelmans (2005), Fraser et al. (2010) found that students, in general, preferred teaching based on emotional proximity - directing, helping, supporting, and understanding ( Fraser et al., 2010). What our research has described is the different ways in which students with contrasting learning intentions react to teaching which has this range of characteristics. We have to be aware that these differing reactions imply that teaching has, as far as possible, to be congenial and helpful for students of differing levels of previous knowledge, ability, and intentions. This is difficult to achieve, but such teaching has been carried out, described as a multipli-inclusive approach, in which material or set-work of differing levels of sophistication is provided within the same course ( Entwistle and Walker, 2002). In our study, some students' difficulty to benefit from dialogic teaching seems to involve their individual characteristics; the difficulty can be seen to get overcome by a student-teacher relationship that allows an experience of a meeting of minds (emotional-cognitive teaching experiences) to take place. The four elements underlying the student-tutor relationship in the context of dialogic teaching, suggested in the present study, can be seen to allow emotional proximity that comes along with a multi-inclusive approach; students get involved in different levels of sophistication after having safely repeatedly undergone shared experiences of developing understandings.

The teaching experience involving a "meeting of minds" sheds light on Kreber's (2007) suggestion for the need to provide students with a learning experience that is worthwhile and promotes their learning and development and a dialogue that centers on "ideas that matter." It also supports previous studies indicating that friendliness and freedom enhance learning outcomes ( Wubbels and Brekelmans, 2005; Fraser et al., 2010). Moreover, this teaching approach helps us to appreciate how students became better able to "shift" toward a disciplinarily appropriate way of thinking having safely "internalized" shared experiences of developing understandings. Students seem to move from mutual regulation in meaning making to a safe independent exploration of understandings, with the consequent development of "expanding awareness" in understanding. These aspects help us to make sense of previous findings that "thinking in relation" enables students to come to terms with alternative thinking paths in manageable "doses," involving the exploration of both similarities and differences within a learning relationship where students feel valued and respected ( Karagiannopoulou and Entwistle, 2013).

A caution, however, comes from the research of Wubbels and other researchers ( Wubbels and Brekelmans, 2005; Fraser et al., 2010), which described personality characteristics that are favorably or unfavorably perceived by students. To the extent that such personality characteristics are stable, this suggests that teachers may well differ markedly in the extent to which they are ready, for example, to accept the sharing of ideas with students. However, teaching necessarily involves adopting a professional role, and also being adaptable, so this may not be a complicating factor.

Besides, it should be pointed out that the explanatory teaching seems to promote learning and be beneficial for any group of students. However, the dialogic teaching is suggested as one of the higher quality to the extent it promotes expansive awareness ( Entwistle, 2018). The exploration of understanding that tutors share with students has been at the forefront of the development of personal understanding in higher education; it leads to a broader understanding of the discipline as a whole and a readiness to reinterpret it within new contexts and to establish a personal relationship with the phenomena being understood.

"Meeting of Minds" As a Category of Teaching Approach?

Earlier, we raised the possibility that the idea of a "meeting of minds" might represent an additional category for the range of teaching approaches described by Prosser et al. (2007) and Prosser and Trigwell (2014), but it would be presumptuous to such a new category on the basis of a small-scale study in a single institution. Rather, we feel that it adds to the sixth category, mentioned earlier, by extending its defining characteristics which described such teaching as developing relationships between teachers' and students' world views and seeing them as open to change ( Prosser et al., 2007. The sense of openness in teaching to allow ideas to be discussed in mutual interplay between teachers and students seems to be a good way of characterizing this sixth category of approach.

Conclusions

The present study suggested three main perceptions of different types of teaching for students with different learning identities: (1) Didactic: explaining concepts and providing sufficient concepts and theories to cover the syllabus, (2) Explanatory: encouraging and supporting students' understanding, and (3) Dialogic: providing a "meeting of minds" and freedom to explore understandings. The first two follow the set of categories of approaches to teaching presented in the relevant literature and are further developed to an enriched version of the sixth approach to teaching ( Prosser et al., 2007) taking account of experiences of "meeting of minds." This third category suggests a students' experience of "thinking in relation" that promotes understanding in the context of emotional-cognitive teaching experiences. Students describe teachers in this category as having special qualities - tolerating ambiguity, showing authenticity and empathy, providing opportunities for discussion in breaks, and offering thinking spaces within class through which students feel free to follow their own lines of enquiry within the expected disciplinary discourse.

Caveats

The main caveats involve the design and context of the study. It deliberately chose a group of successful final year students in order to focus on the nature of the "meeting of minds" found in the previous exploratory study, so it is impossible to generalize to a wider range of achievement. Moreover, the students were being taught in relatively small groups within which tutors had the opportunity to get to know the students individually, and they were being taught in a subject area - social science - in which personal experience could be drawn on and feelings were more openly involved. The teaching contexts in other subject areas have yet to be explored. Although the small sample and the qualitative data can be seen as important limitations of the study, the qualitative findings of the present study could inform a short subscale of approaches to teaching in order to provide quantitative data, which could confirm the present findings and allow the exploration of associations between "expansive awareness" and teaching in terms of a "meeting of minds."

Implications and Suggestions for Future Research

The findings of the present study seem to be in line with authenticity in scholarship of learning and teaching. Professional training that prioritizes the vital connection between teachers, students, and the subject could be benefited by the idea of "meeting of minds" as a teaching practice. The study could inform recent trends of scholars of teaching and learning in terms of "what matters" and students' authentic motivation. The failure of an effective "meeting of minds" to take place in the third group demands a sophisticated conception of university teaching and learning, which may come only after considerable reflective experience of university teaching. The idea of a multipli-inclusive approach, which caters for students with a range of learning intentions and interests, by providing material or set-work of differing levels of sophistication within the same course, would seem to suggest another line of research to follow.

Future research might focus on the exploration of aspects of relational learning suggested by the present study. All these are in line with the development of bridges between teachers, students, and the subject. It would be important to discover the extent to which is found in other subject areas and what form it might take in those disciplines. Moreover, the primacy of emotions and the quality of student-teacher relationships underlying students' learning should be further explored in the context of a "meeting of minds" in order to shed light on other subject areas and groups of students. The findings described here suggest that the idea of a meeting of minds represents a new construct that is open to further theorizing and conceptualization, leading toward the development of more powerful explanations of the influences of teaching on learning at university ( Hagenauer and Volet, 2014), the development of "expansive awareness" ( Entwistle, 2018). Moreover, it seems to be in line with the "open" discussion on the scholarship of teaching and learning ( Kreber, 2007).

Author Contributions

EK contributed to the theoretical framework of the article and carried out and analyzed the interviews. Also, she developed the first draft of the discussion. NE developed the full version of the introduction and the heuristic model and contributed a great deal to the summary table and the final analysis of the interviews. Also, he "refraimed," to some extent, the final version of the discussion.

Conflict of Interest Statement

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

The reviewer GP declared a shared affiliation, though no other collaboration, with one of the authors EK to the handling Editor.

References

Hagenauer, G., and Volet, S. (2014). Teacher-student relationship at university: an important yet under-researched field. Oxf. Rev. Educ. 40, 370-388. doi: 10.1080/03054985.2014.921613

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Students' Learning Characteristics, Perceptions of Small-Group University Teaching, and Understanding Through a "Meeting of Minds"

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Previous research has described some of the main characteristics of university teachers who teach in different ways, using a variety of methods and conceptions. What is generally missing from previous research is the impact of contrasting teaching approaches on students with different learning characteristics.