12 DIA Education as the Transformative Edge for Promoting Inclusive Excellence

Research indicates that courses designed to be inclusive in terms of content and pedagogy help students achieve important outcomes such as heightened critical thinking, multiple perspective-taking, enhanced academic performance, and complex problem-solving, among others (Quaye and Harper 2007, 34). Research also indicates that students feel more satisfied participating in courses where they learn methods of inquiry that engage and respect cultural differences, provide occasions for them to interact with different cultural perspectives, and challenge them to examine issues of diversity and equity in a critical way (Villalpando 2002). Stephen John Quaye and Shaun Harper suggest that faculty should take such findings seriously and hold themselves accountable by “intentionally incorporate[ing] cultural inclusion into their pedagogy and their courses” (2007, 34). Quaye and Harper take it a step further – and echo the suggestion above regarding critical reflection on situational factors – by challenging faculty to “examine their own assumptions, biases, and knowledge insufficiencies and assume responsibility for learning how to infuse diversity throughout the curriculum” (2007, 38; see also Kishimoto 2018, 542-544).

Implicit to the ideas of teaching more “intentionally,” doing self-reflection work to “examine” oneself, and pursuing institutional change to “infuse” curriculum in a more diverse way, is a call for faculty to develop cultural and equity literacy, so that they are prepared to offer and facilitate opportunities for students to do the same.  Inclusive excellence therefore involves not just exposure to difference and designing for participation by all in existing frameworks and course structures;^[1] more poignantly, it requires development of skills for engaging various forms of difference with understanding and respect, for examining critically the conditions and forces that maintain power imbalances and perpetuate unequal participation among different groups, and for transforming frameworks, contexts, conditions, and forces – changing the distribution of power – in order to achieve equity and genuine inclusion.

Such work is within reach of all instructors at the University of Oregon. UO now recognizes inclusive teaching – meaning that instructors elicit and value all students’ participation and include more varied content as part of their teaching – as a formal standard of quality teaching that guides faculty review.^[2] An emphasis on cultural and equity literacy is also emerging, reflected in the new US: DIA and Global Perspectives (GP) requirements, as well as work to promote anti-oppressive and anti-racist pedagogies.^[3] However, the US: DIA and GP requirements are student-facing and limited to those courses submitted by instructors or units willing to offer and teach them; similarly, the turn to anti-oppressive and anti-racist pedagogies is mostly happening at the individual level.  If Quaye and Harper are correct, that cultural and equity literacy at a deeper level across the curriculum is necessary for inclusive teaching more generally, can DIA courses and DIA instructors play a role in helping others take the next steps of examining their teaching practices more critically and infusing the curriculum with more culturally inclusive content and pedagogy aimed at equity? In the pursuit of inclusive excellent at the University of Oregon, what is the role of DIA education?

DIA education plays an essential and unique role as a transformative edge to promote inclusive teaching and excellence across the board in two significant ways. First, DIA courses demonstrate that exposure to various forms of difference must be combined with development of cultural and equity literacy skills for engaging in such interactions in a more reflective, critical, ethical way that is attentive to the power imbalances involved. Such work entails students to scrutinize their “assumptions, biases, and knowledge insufficiencies” and learn ways to “assume responsibility” for equity and thus interacting with diverse others in more productive, ethical ways – precisely the step Quaye and Harper call faculty to take. The step to cultural and equity literacy is essential for genuine inclusion because, again, as James D. Anderson reminds us about race – and what he says about race applies as well to other important social categories of difference – “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 believe that we know race when we see it…We arrive at nothing short of confusion, however, when we are pressed to define race” (Anderson 1994, 87). Indeed, as Light (2001) demonstrated in a study of Harvard students, “meaningful learning” across differences involves student interaction with diverse peers through which they “interrogate and rethink their assumptions” (Quaye and Harper 2007, 35-36).   In the context of DIA courses, students are often “pressed” to examine and question their understandings and to define social categories in structured, supportive ways, through rigorous scholarship, that helps them work through their “confusion” and develop more nuanced understanding and facility for navigating difference. But if introduced to cultural difference for the sake of exposure or in the absence of adequate structure, support or scholarship to help them be critically reflective, students can simply reproduce the very conventional wisdom – prevailing notions, feelings, behaviors, etc. – that inclusive teaching is attempting to address, with the result being that power imbalances and unequal participation get perpetuated.  Again, exposure to diversity needs to be combined with development of cultural and equity literacy skills for engaging such encounters in a more reflective, critical, ethical way – which is what DIA education is about.

This is not to say that all DIA courses succeed in helping students achieve such literacy, nor that all instructors in non-DIA courses fail to provide adequate structure, support or scholarship; the point is that the learning process inherent to the US: DIA requirement is an exemplar of culturally inclusive pedagogy with a goal of equity. And this is the second way DIA education is essential for the pursuit of inclusive excellence: DIA-focused courses serve as models for other instructors and courses that seek to include more culturally inclusive content and pedagogy. More specifically, as outline in this guide, DIA pedagogy uses modes of inquiry and instructional approaches and moves that other instructors can learn from and take up in their own teaching – something they may not learn or attempt to implement on their own. The claim is not that all courses should be DIA courses; rather, the suggestion is that any instructor can learn from DIA education some of the tools needed to help them take the next step of critical self-reflection, curricular change, and inclusive teaching practices that Quaye and Harper call for.  For example, in any course that includes culturally diverse content, instructors can take a cue from effective DIA teaching practice and include a moment to disclose and model their own work of developing literacy in relation to that content, and then create moments to encourage and support student reflection on their evolving relationships to such content. Many other examples could be cited. What such possibilities illustrate is how DIA education is a critical inclusive excellence incubator, serving as a cutting-edge research space for experimentation with and refinement of approaches for fostering the development of cultural and equity literacy skills. DIA classes are a goldmine archive of strategies, methods, practices, and templates that can be adapted and portable to other class contexts across the university.

To summarize, DIA education is essential for promoting inclusive excellence. Specifically, DIA courses demonstrate the significance of providing opportunities for students to learn important analytical, reflective, and ethical engagement skills for navigating various forms of difference in critical, ethical, and thus productive ways – cultural and equity literacy. They also innovate teaching and learning models that other instructors can use to help students learn cultural and equity literacy skills in a variety of classes across campus – not just DIA courses but any course. In this way, DIA education can help all instructors “assume responsibility” and “infuse the curriculum” with more culturally diverse content and pedagogy, and with more opportunities for students to develop and practice robust literacy skills. This step is necessary to keep cultural and equity literacy and the experiences of underrepresented students from being marginalized as “add-on” components of courses or relegated to a single course that students take, which undermines the aims of diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts (Quaye and Harper 2007, 37). In short, DIA education brings a necessary transformative edge to deepen the meaning, expand the impact, and sustain the momentum of inclusive teaching and inclusive excellence campus wide.