Engaging Diversity in First-Year College Classrooms
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Engaging Diversity in First-Year College Classrooms Amy Lee & Rhiannon Williams & Rusudan Kilaberia
Published online: 12 August 2011 # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2011
Abstract The increasing calls for diversity research signal a need to explore strategies through which we attempt to interact with and respond to diversity intentionally in courses and curricula. This case study of a first-year inquiry course in a college of education fills a gap in the literature by documenting and analyzing instances of educators actively working with multiple dimensions of diversity in the classroom so as to support students’ development of diversity-related competencies. The guiding research question for this study was to explore what curricular and/or pedagogical activities students in a first-year experience course identified as facilitating their engagement with diversity in an intentional, purposeful manner. Key words Diversity . Pedagogy . Higher education classrooms
Amy Lee received her Ph.D. from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and is currently an an associate professor and department chair of the Department of Postsecondary Teaching and Learning at the University of Minnesota. She can be contacted at Department of Postsecondary Teaching and Learning, University of Minnesota, 206E Burton Hall, 178 Pillsbury Dr. SE Minneapolis, MN 55455. E-Mail: [email protected]. Rhiannon Williams received her Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota. She is a Research Associate in the Department of Postsecondary Teaching and Learning, University of Minnesota. Rusudan Kilaberia received her MSW from the University of Minnesota and is currently a Ph.D. student in the School of Social Work at the University of Minnesota. A. Lee (*) : R. Williams Department of Postsecondary Teaching and Learning, University of Minnesota, 206E Burton Hall, 178 Pillsbury Dr. SE, Minneapolis, MN 55455, USA e-mail: [email protected] R. Kilaberia School of Social Work, University of Minnesota, 105 Peters Hall 1404 Gortner Avenue, Saint Paul, MN 55108, USA
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Innov High Educ (2012) 37:199–213
I did not just like the presentations, but I also like the idea of what this assignment brought out. These stories I heard from everyone gave me a whack on the side of my head; I suddenly realized we are all having different lives, and we are all experiencing different things. Who we are now is from what experiences we have gone through; what I was hearing from them made a change in my life because I listened to all their stories and experience that made me have different points of view in things.—Mairen With these words Mairen described a critical-learning moment in her first-year experience course. Her reflection illustrates the potential for courses simultaneously to develop students’ disciplinary knowledge and skills and to provide purposeful opportunities for interaction. As Mairen noted, the assignment provided an opportunity to “listen” to other students’ stories about their experiences and enabled her to consider “different points of view. . .” Mairen’s
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