Can Learning be Fair?:  Explicit Acknowledgment of Structural Oppression as a Teaching Tool
Speaker: Jessica Cleeves, Center for Science and Mathematics Education, University of Utah

Traditional diversity classes engage students in self-reflection about identity and experience, often around ideas like race, class, gender, ableism, and heteronormativity. These curricula typically explore complex problems deeply, but seldom discuss practical steps toward solutions. This problem-centric focus can leave individual students feeling helpless, overwhelmed, and/or guilty to the point of emotional overload. A creative new approach to impactful instruction about equity situates conversations about access and power within a context of applying inclusive pedagogical practices.

In this talk, Jessica Cleeves describes the Learning Assistant (LA) pedagogy course she developed for the University of Utah's Center for Science and Mathematics Education. The course connects evidence-based best practice for small group facilitation and the individual, institutional, and cultural barriers that motivate the opportunity gap in the first place. LAs delve into issues of academic exclusion, while also learning strategies they can deploy to increase inclusion. This approach helps LAs from backgrounds of privilege move beyond potentially paralyzing feelings of anger, guilt, and shame. Simultaneously, LAs who identify with historically excluded communities are protected from tokenization and invited into advocacy for their students, with whom their identities may or may not align. LAs learn to co-create solutions concurrent with understanding the historical depth, cultural complexity, and structural resistance to making education equitable and inclusive.