EQUITY IN PRAXIS
I center my educational approach in the praxis of cultural competence –a complex skillset for shifting frames of reference to see one’s own point of view alongside others’. cultural competence functions best across firm yet adaptable boundaries around identities, beliefs, and practices. I begin each course by orienting students to three important frameworks necessary for cultural competence.
- Camera lens analogy for first-order/close-up lens and second-order/zoom-out lens.
- Distinguish toxic bias from natural bias in terms of flexibility and adaptability, guiding students to identify and anchor within their own natural biases.
- Rename our subject “religio-culture” –a holistic, transdisciplinary, and integrative framework—defined through the anthropological definition of cosmology: Who and what is in the world; where does humanity fit into this world, and how should humans interact with/relate to all these other “parts” of the world?” This connects my courses beyond anthropology and history, to encompass economics, politics, psychology, even architecture and engineering!
EQUITY OF REPRESENTATION
Organizing my survey courses geo-chronologically, ex: opening with Diné (Navajo), A:shiwi (Pueblo Zuni) and Yoruba indigenous knowledge systems, my classes decenter European and Abrahamic traditions and epistemologies, foregrounding indigenous religio-cultural epistemologies in both their pre-historical and contemporary living contexts. Starting here affords a rich exploration of the hyphen in religio-culture: the inseparability of our worldviews from all levels of culture. Videos and news reports of contemporary legal conflicts between settler-state governments and indigenous communities, illustrate the roots of these conflicts in contrasting worldviews and knowledge systems embedded in politics and economics.
Including photos of course material’s author-scholars holds me accountable to diversity in course content. A diversity of academic & lay practitioners to speak to students for themselves via YouTube and PBS videos. I invite guest speakers whose personal identities re shared with or adjacent to the communities wherein they conduct research. These practices showcase/role model scholars with minority identities in a range of academic fields. Additionally, by showcasing diasporas, syncretic, and hybrid religio-cultural processes as core course concepts, students engage with the dynamics of cultural exchange, expansion, appropriation, and identity.
EQUITY IN INSTRUCTION
Instructional equity requires the awareness and adaptability of student-centered education because inequity does not follow the tidy labeled boxes of color, gender, origins, economics, and religions. When factoring in invisible diversities like un|identified neurodiversities or trauma histories— the majority of students carry varied combinations of needs, privileges, and implicit knowledge gaps. Thus, I need to simultaneously affirm student’s self-worth while bridging their unique need-privilege profile of disadvantages. I continually grow my “tool-box” for meeting students’ needs. Grounded in the educational principal that strategies designed for challenged learners benefit everyone, I design hard and soft academic skills development into course resources and build flexibilities into assignments:
- practice instructional transparency by explaining my pedagogy;
- actively seek and adapt student feedback into instruction mid-course; and
- advocate instructor communication and assertiveness as academic survival strategies.
- provide resources for critical skills development for collegiate reading and writing strategies
- Instruct students in how to apply my assessment rubrics to model papers
- demonstrate in-class how to use citation management software in word processing;
- replace quizzes with multimodality concept mapping;
- advocate audio text readers and talk-to-text apps for drafting essays;
- whenever possible I show videos with subtitles;
- and have no in-person, on-the-spot written assessments; and
- up to a fourth of formative assignments are optional, inserting flexibility into the workload;
- reaching out to students whose attendance or work performance signal struggle, requires persistence since many students (not limited to students of color, international students, or veterans) believe that seeking accommodations signals inadequacy or weakness.