Teachers endure too many workshops on diversity without doing enough diversity work.
Many of us react to diversity-themed faculty meetings with some version of, “We do this way too much,” or “We don’t do this nearly enough.”
I’m in the “We don’t do this enough” camp. We don’t regularly discuss issues of equity and privilege at school. We don’t challenge the structures giving rise to them. We don’t learn better ways of addressing microaggressions, integrating multiple perspectives into our curricula, analyzing our assignments for bias, or communicating authentically with diverse colleagues, students, and parents.
But I also think “We do this too much” — not because the topics are unimportant but because the workshops leave much to be desired. They’re introductory, cursory, and repetitive. Over the years, I’ve been asked on at least seven occasions to rank-order the importance of my “Big 8” social identifiers (ability, age, class, ethnicity, gender, race, religion, and sexual orientation). One time, we made pictures out of construction paper, with each color representing a particular identifier and the amount of each color showing how salient that identifier was to us. Another time, we chose our three most important identifiers, took stickers that corresponded to each one, found colleagues who had the same three stickers we had, and shared stories. And another time, we had to guess which three identifiers a partner had chosen as most important. I’ve done Big 8 posters, pie charts, and card sorts.
Undoubtedly, our intersecting identities affect how we relate to students and colleagues, but we never discuss these implications, let alone act upon them. Instead, we read the same articles, see the same diagrams, do variations of the same exercises, and have pretty much the same conversations. This so-called professional “development” doesn’t develop us. There’s never enough time to process the material, let alone figure out how it applies to an 8th-grade algebra class. New teachers feel confused and veterans feel frustrated if not insulted. How do we do enough of the work without doing too much of the same work?
We read the same articles, see the same diagrams, do variations of the same exercises, and have pretty much the same conversations.
We can never finish building multicultural competence, fostering inclusion, or acting for social justice. These are ongoing values. But we can set specific goals that serve these values. For example, let’s say a school values ensuring that all students have equal opportunities to succeed, and parent-teacher conferences are coming up. The faculty reads Beverly Daniel Tatum’s article “Cultivating the Trust of Black Parents” (2008), analyzes case studies based on parent-teacher interactions at the school, and role-plays conferences. After conferences, the principal sends a survey to parents asking how the interactions felt. The principal already has two different plans for a follow-up workshop, depending on survey results. Either way, teachers aren’t done working for equity, but the workshop has a valued, observable, and measurable outcome.
Good diversity workshops head into risky territory. Only by exploring issues of identity, power, and privilege in our own lives can we become equipped to deal with these issues in our classrooms. Participants need to feel safe. One way to create safety is to ask teachers to form professional learning communities around topics of their own choosing, and once the group has developed trust and solidarity through shared learning experiences, they’ll be ready to introduce challenging multicultural and antibias content into their discussions.
Though there’s no endpoint to diversity work, there should be an end result of a diversity workshop. What should teachers and staff members understand and be able to do? What will they see and hear in hallways and classrooms if this workshop is a success? What resources are best? How will teachers share new understandings and questions? If the goal is met, what happens next? And after that? Who’s ensuring the work continues?
The “We do this way too much” people and the “We don’t do this nearly enough” people both want the same thing: a professional development process that moves toward a clearly defined outcome in the service of a more just and inclusive school.
Reference
Tatum, B.D. (2008). Cultivating the trust of black parents. In M. Pollack (Ed.), Everyday antiracism: Getting real about race in school (pp. 311-313). New York, NY: New Press.
CITATION: Porosoff, L. (2014). BACKTALK: PD Diversity: Too much and not enough. Phi Delta Kappan, 96 (2), 80.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Lauren Porosoff
Lauren Porosoff is a former teacher and now an author and consultant. She is the lead author of Teach Meaningful, Two-for-One Teaching, and EMPOWER Your Students.
