Diversity statement
After earning my Ph.D., I have taught at institutions with significantly diverse student populations. My students have come from a number of different populations (ethnicity, religious practices), but they have also been diverse in ways we don’t often think about: non-traditional students, older students, students with significant work and family commitments, non-neurotypical students. Through my teaching, classroom practices, mentorship, and administrative duties, I have demonstrated my commitment to inclusiveness and success for all my students.
As a professor, I have committed to broadening the range of readings I assign students beyond traditional canon, and to calling attention to issues of inequality. In writing for digital environments courses, I have assigned chapters from Race After the Internet (edited by Lisa Nakamura and Peter Chow-White) to foster discussions about online forms of racism. An early lesson of how the Internet works leads to where the Internet works – who has access to the Internet? Who has the tools to access it? Students need to understand this issue of unequal access when composing digital works. I use multimedia composition assignments as an opportunity to discuss a multiplicity of accessibility issues with students. Files must be efficiently designed for swift download; video projects need captions; podcasts need transcripts; web pages and documents should be designed with accessibility in mind from the start.
Perhaps the most challenging courses in which to bring up issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion are those in business and technical writing. We have long taught (and been taught) that workplace communication demands Correctness – it is one of the Six Cs of business communication, after all – yet, as Peter Elbow reminds us, “Standard Written English is no one’s mother tongue” (author’s emphasis) while Asao B. Inoue compares language “judgements about logic, clarity, organization and conventions” to a “hand grenade.” How does one square a using a weapon of war in a writing classroom with Paul A. J. Beehler’s assertion that not teaching Standard English will ultimately “disadvantage [their students] and visit real-world harm” on them?
It’s a struggle that I personally continue to wrestle with. In my recent attempts to address this I have discussed code-meshing and have reviewed the internal debate in our scholarly community.
When I teach study of rhetoric courses, we don’t just read what rhetoricians have theorized about rhetoric. We spend an equal amount of time reading and analyzing examples of how people have used rhetoric to advocate for their rights, including works by rhetors like Frederick Douglass, Martin Luther King Jr, and Harvey Milk. The Sojourner Truth Project is a starting look at how Truth’s “Ain’t I a woman” speech was mis-transcribed and efforts to correct this inaccuracy.
In first-year composition the literacy narrative assignment lets me assign a broad range of example essays, such as “Let Me Speak” by Domatila de Chungara, “Mother Tongue” by Amy Tan, and “The Library Card” by Richard Wright. “Theme for English B” by Langston Hughes invites students to interrogate the assignment itself.
Editing classes present great opportunities to discuss how language and grammar rules can be inclusive or not, such as the use of “they” as a singular. Some readings and resources I use for this are David Foster Wallace’s “Tense Present: Democracy and Wars over Usage,” and various inclusive writing style guides.
I use multimedia composition assignments as an opportunity to discuss accessibility issues with students. Video projects need captions; podcasts need transcripts; web pages and documents should be designed with accessibility in mind from the start. In turn, I work to make my class accessible in a number of ways while still maintaining academic rigor, such as reducing the number of required textbooks in my courses, and adopting a more flexible due date policy with a built-in grace period.
When working as a Writing Program Administrator, I sought out and hired instructors from a diverse pool of candidates. There’s evidence that students are more successful when instructors are demographically similar to them (“The Effects of Teacher Match on Students’ Academic Perceptions and Attitudes,” Anna Egalite and Brian Kisida). Everyone benefits from a commitment to hiring qualified writing instructors from differing backgrounds. This commitment extends to my students. I have recommended students from different backgrounds to work as writing tutors, and have suggested encourages strong students from various backgrounds when they have mentioned the possibility of attending graduate school.
In the future I plan to continue these practices whenever and wherever possible, and to improve my current practices.