It’s easier to ignore diversity in schools
Diversity has been on my mind a lot this month. I’ve been planning for it in my administrative role, trying to diversify the students that know about our excellent Information School as our campus slowly shifts to direct-to-major admissions. I’ve been writing about one my colleague’s unfortunate views on diversity in computer science. And I’ve been teaching 20 south Seattle high school students through UW’s Upward Bound program, all of whom will be the first in their family to attend college, most of whom are recent immigrants, and many of whom are youth of color in a sea of white. Designing for diversity in school takes work. But it’s meaningful work that can shape and empower future generations in ways no other institution can.
And yet, while diversity is an unavoidable fact of nature, schools are pretty good at ignoring it. That’s not to say that we do so willfully—it’s just so much easier to act as if diversity doesn’t exist. Noticing difference, acknowledging it, and designing for it is harder than pretending that students are all the same.
Let’s begin with teachers. What’s easier: pretending that all of your students are the same or understanding and teaching for their different prior knowledge, values, motivations, and out of school experiences? Ignorance is easier. Acknowledging difference means noticing difference, measuring difference, differentiating instruction, personalizing learning materials, and finding ways to teach knowledge and skills that account for all of these differences. When most teaching jobs are already full of work when student uniformity is assumed, finding time for all of this is hard. Is easier to pretend that difference isn’t here.
For schools, colleges, and universities, is it easier to design for diversity or ignore it? Ignoring it, obviously. Designing a school for diversity requires supporting many languages, acknowledging many cultures, working through conflict that arises from cultural differences, and trying to please a more vast range of values around education. It might require finding more diverse teachers, paying for interpreters, and reducing class sizes to make time to work with diversity. None of these are easy problems for administrators, especially on top of an already challenging, under-resourced job. It’s easier to pretend that conflict isn’t happening, that students don’t need this support, and that difference isn’t a factor in your school’s effectiveness.
We might imagine that learning materials like textbooks, lectures, and other media could do better. But learning materials are even worse at acknowledging diversity than teachers and school administrators because they’re static. A textbook can’t adapt to who a learner is, what they know, or what they care about in the way a teacher can.
Perhaps this is why people (like me) are so excited about software-based learning technology: perhaps software’s ability to gather data, model a student, and personalize based on that model is better? Not so much, at least not yet. Software embodies the values and constraints of the people who create it, and so if software developers ignore diversity, the software will too. That, and designing software for diversity either means writing more code to accommodate variation or, in some hypothetical future in which we machine learn learning technologies through data, finding more data that reflects that diversity. Worse yet, because software is at it’s heart logic, code can’t help but abstract away variation, operating under an assumption of context-free uniformity. I remain optimistic about overcoming some of these limitations of computing as a medium, but even if we succeed, it will still only be one part of a broader system ignoring diversity.
Even students themselves struggle to acknowledge their own diversity. When they notice how they’re different from their peers, they often blame themselves for those differences. Embracing their differences and advocating for themselves by demanding schools support them is scary, sometimes stigmatizing. That kind of activism may only make those differences stand out more. Most adolescents want to fit in or disappear, not stand out.
While most forces in education conspire to mask diversity, it is nevertheless there. Pretending it is not only does harm. It weakens our teaching, which weakens student learning. Ignoring difference dehumanizes the students we teach, eroding their already vulnerable, developing identities. And if these aren’t bad enough, ignoring diversity only embraces the worst of American history and culture, subverting our highest ideals of equal protection under the law. It is our national, legal, ethical, and patriotic duty to find ways to embrace and design for diversity in schools.
How? In my experience, it’s not about doing more work, but different work. When I think about designing for diversity in learning, it feels less like doing additional preparation, and more like preparing for teaching differently. For example, I’ve been preparing a lot of lectures for a 150 student course lately. Designing for diversity in that class doesn’t mean making a lecture and then planning for all of the outlier students who it won’t reach. It means designing a lecture that works for anyone, regardless of their interests, abilities, motivations, or level of sleep. I know I can’t reach everyone practically, but I can attempt to, and in doing so, my instruction will be more universal than it was otherwise.
I won’t pretend this isn’t some extra work. At the very least, it’s extra work to reconsider how I do instructional design, and learn new strategies for teaching. After some learning, however, I bet that many of the tricks I’ll learn won’t be any more work than my previous strategies. In some cases, it might even be less work, because I won’t be able to assume as much, and therefore, I won’t be able to prepare as much. Instead, I’ll be responding to the students in the room and how they’re reacting to what I’ve prepared.
