6 A Special Pedagogical Challenge in DIA Courses

Fink (2013) also suggests that instructors need to ask what the special pedagogical challenge of a course might be, that is, what situation might challenge students and the instructor in their desire to make a course a meaningful learning experience?  In some cases, such a challenge might be the most important situational factor to consider when designing a course. Although any of the situational factors noted above might present challenges for a particular course, one special pedagogical challenge that is relevant for virtually every DIA course, regardless of its specific content or methods, or the particular students or instructor for a given term, concerns the complex emotional experiences that accompany the rigorous inquiry students undertake, and instructors facilitate, when engaging issues of difference, inequality, and agency. Preparing for the emotional work of DIA teaching and learning, therefore, is an essential aspect of DIA course design. This includes anticipating student experiences and our own experiences as instructors.^[1]

To recall, the primary purpose of DIA courses is to engage students in illuminating the unequal distribution of power across different social groups, how this happens, and why it matters. Such inquiry often brings into focus who wins in terms of privileges and benefits, who loses in terms of oppression and harms, and which interests might be vested in perpetuating such inequality whereas others resist it and work for social change. As the different social identities, positions, histories, and experiences – and the role of power in shaping them – come into the spotlight for scrutiny, students will inevitably find themselves “located” in the map of power imbalances, patterns of inequality, and forces of perpetuation or change that emerge.  Indeed, in many DIA courses, students will be asked to reflect explicitly on their own “multiple social identifications and on how those identifications are formed and located in relation to power,” as stipulated by the DIA requirement. Even in courses that do not require such reflective inquiry, it is almost certain that students are engaging in it in some fashion – and this includes their relation to the content and to the instructor’s power as teacher, positioned in the university, community, and society at large, with multiple social identities at play. In and through such reflection students make sense of things and develop meaning and understanding.

Yet as James D. Anderson notes about race, for example, “we tend to acquire meanings about race not out of conscious reflection based on scholarship, but through conventional wisdom that is deeply entrenched in our culture…. We arrive at nothing short of confusion, however, when we are pressed to define race” (Anderson 1994, 87). At a predominantly white institution such as the University of Oregon, many students may come from more or less racially homogenous backgrounds and have little experience interacting with racialized others or considering themselves in racial terms. Indeed, many have learned the “conventional wisdom” of a color-blind perspective in which they believe themselves to be nonracist, inclusive, and well-intentioned in their thoughts and actions. Most have not had to enter situations where they have to think about or discuss racism seriously, let alone “define” race, nor have they had to confront their own racial assumptions and biases. It is also easy enough at a mostly white campus, in a mostly white community and state, for them to avoid encounters that might risk their being “called out” for being wrong, making a mistake, or being exposed for racist behaviors. As a consequence, many white students’ tolerance for racial stress can be quite low, a state of being that Robin DiAngelo calls “white fragility,” in which “even a minimum amount of racial stress becomes intolerable, triggering a range of defensive moves” that “function to reinstate white racial equilibrium” (DiAngelo 2011, 54).  Similar presuppositions and tendencies also often inform many students’ experiences and thinking regarding other salient social identity categories.

When entering into a DIA classroom, however, students are called to engage in “conscious reflection based on scholarship” and based on the different experiences of diverse others, “pressed” to define social categories in new or unfamiliar ways, and encouraged to develop capacities for navigating a social reality that is more complex than previously thought. This process of learning can result in a state of “confusion,” as Anderson puts it, because students may find that their predominant assumptions, beliefs, and understandings about social reality, and their tacit knowledge of how to behave socially, are suddenly called into question.^[2]  The confusion can be amplified as students encounter powerful critiques of power and inequality that implicate the very structures, practices or forms of knowledge that they take for “common sense” or the “way things are.”  The confusion is often mixed with surprise or upsetting feelings, especially among those from more privileged social groups and backgrounds, who typically have not had to think much, if at all, about inequality or how others experience it; rarely if ever considered how power has shaped their experiences and senses of social identity; and not had privileges and benefits they take for granted suddenly highlighted as inequities. As Megan Boler and Michalinos Zembylas note, engaging students in learning about difference, power, and inequality “often means asking students to radically reevaluate their worldviews,” which “requires not only cognitive but emotional labor” (Boler and Zembylas 2003, 111). Not just what students think, but also what they feel, can be challenged seriously in and through the process of DIA learning, resulting in emotional discomfort. To experience learning in this way can thus generate a range of feelings and responses, from confusion and anxiety to upset and anger to empowerment and action (Kumashiro 2002, 74).

DIA instructors face another aspect of this challenge, which concerns the learning process and emotional experiences of students in their courses whose social identities and life experiences are marginalized socially, including in educational settings. These students also experience some of the same emotional challenges noted above, although they can also experience certain impacts unique to their social situation, which makes a DIA course potentially extra validating or extra marginalizing. On the one hand, DIA learning might marginalize these students further if care is not taken to engage them as members of the learning community rather than as exemplars of certain social identity categories or representatives of entire social groups. This can happen if other students or instructors turn the spotlight of scrutiny onto these individual students, objectifying them as if they are “embedded experts” and expecting them to share unique insights that “teach” others in the class. This “spotlight effect” (Crosby, King, and Savitsky, 2014) is heightened in classrooms where a particular student might be the only person with a particular social identity – an experience of “onlyness,” as Shaun Harper (2013) puts it. Such moves can be the result of well-meaning intentions or a desire to learn directly from someone who has potentially experienced the underside of inequality, but it reduces students to be tokens of types, not full participating members of the learning community who get to choose how and when they’ll contribute. Students can be marginalized in other ways, too, for example by being ignored as if they weren’t there or having their contributions go unacknowledged or any strong emotions they exhibit being dismissed as “whining” or unfounded. This can happen when other students are fearful of causing upset or engaging in ways that might result in being “called out” for a mistake, as noted above; it is better, they might surmise, to avoid interaction with an “other” who might issue a challenge, thus they reduce the other to invisibility. Some students marginalized in this fashion may experience a heightened sense of powerlessness or choose to withdrawal (Kernahan 2019, 57-58).  Or students may be targeted and subjected to veiled or explicit threats, as other students’ temperatures rise and possibly get directed their way in aggressive fashion. These are only a few examples of situations or behaviors that can provoke strong emotions in students whose presence is being objectified, made invisible, or threatened. In effect, they are being reduced to very specific aspects of their identity, as if these are their essential characteristics.  Such possibilities are not unique to DIA courses – they also occur in a variety of learning contexts across the university. Still, the nature of the content and modes of inquiry in DIA courses can increase the potential to undermine the learning process of students whose social identities and experiences are regularly marginalized in society.

On the other hand, DIA learning has a heightened potential to empower students as learners by valorizing their otherwise marginalized experiences as valuable sources of knowledge worth developing. Indeed, the DIA course may center and affirm marginalized identities and align the course to provide a structure of assignments – or opportunity to propose alternative assignments or different content to study – through which such knowledge can ground the pursuit of rigorous intellectual work, which the instructor in turn can support and guide. This can allow these students to engage issues of significant concern for them at a deeper level. In some circumstances, they may be able to establish lasting connections with the instructor or discipline, with the work done in the DIA course being a significant touchstone that animates their aspirations for future study or professional practice. In another vein, these students can contribute critical insights as part of lively class discussions, challenging their peers to consider other perspectives and new ideas, and perhaps even changing how their peers think. To participate as part of a critical discourse community as an agent of knowledge production and transformation can be quite affirming.

In short, for many students, a DIA course can be challenging because it involves a mix of cognitive and emotional work of a complex kind that students may not have experienced previously in their learning. Moreover, at issue in this work is their understanding of who they are, their place in the world, and their uneven relationships with others, which raises the stakes. For some students, notably those who regularly experience marginality, DIA courses can present additional cognitive and emotional labor that can undermine their learning. But this labor can be validating if it valorizes their social identities and experiences as valuable sources of knowledge that they can use to ground inquiry and important intellectual projects, or if such labor has them electing to make significant class contributions that enhance everyone’s learning.

For instructors, then, it is crucial to invite all students into the work of the course in a way that is transparent and honest about the cognitive and emotional rigors involved in DIA learning; about the likely inevitability of discomfort that comes with examination and reflection on difference, inequality, and agency; and about the potential promises and pitfalls of learning and practicing cultural and equity literacy skills. In so doing, instructors can reiterate the purpose of the DIA course requirement, noting that challenges, discomfort, stumbling blocks, etc. encountered along the way of learning are not signs that an instructor is out to chastise students’ prevailing notions or evidence of an agenda to “convert” students to a particular perspective. Rather, such moments are indicators that the class has arrived in the thick of things, in the fraught territory through which they can engage in the hard work of developing their capacities for critical analysis and reflection, for ethical engagement, and thus for engaging with power in more skilled ways.  Such forthright invitation can signal clearly to students that they will not be let off the hook of DIA learning, but neither will they be left to flounder while doing so.  Being up front can begin to establish and cultivate trust, especially if it is coupled with a preview of how the learning opportunities in the course interconnect and inform each other, and of how they are grounded in a structure of support and care.