UU Inclusive Teaching Toolbox


Diversity in learning materials

In a class on pedagogy, the teacher uses Powerpoint slides to depict different examples of how students learn and interact in the classroom. The pictures are cartoons, but the one for the student who is distracted in class and unengaging is represented as a person of colour while all the others are not.  

In a criminal law course, the class discusses a hypothetical case of theft where one person, with an Arabic sounding name steals something from a person with a Dutch sounding name. A student in the class with an Arabic background feels very uncomfortable doing the assignment and discussing it in class.  

Do you see yourself represented in the learning materials that you use in class? Are there people of your class, sex, or religion that you can identify with in the case studies? For many students from minority groups, they are used to never seeing themselves represented in any of the examples given or in the authors assigned to read in class. . This lack of diversity in university learning materials is problematic for several reasons. First, only/mainly assigning literature written by male Western authors who researched Western subjects, can give the impression that such research is superior and marginalizes the perspectives and knowledge of other authors. Second, students who do not see themselves represented in the pictures and examples used in class can come to feel inferior. A meta-analysis by Bowman (2001) has shown that when the curriculum is made more diverse there is an increase in (civic) engagement by university students . In the future, UU students are likely to work in a diverse society that requires the knowledge and skills to do so. For instance, intercultural competences are an indispensable skill for, ie, lawyers, nurses, and politicians . In this section, we provide tools to help you improve the diversity and inclusivity of the literature, examples, and visuals within a university course.  

 Tools

This section presents three tools for improving diversity in learning materials. The first tool helps teachers to scan their course’s assigned literature. The second and third tools help teachers to assess if different aspects of diversity are (well) presented in their learning material, and to identify any stereotypical cases/examples and provide examples for improvement. These tools are an adaptation of the ‘Literature Scan’ developed by Kathrine van den Bogert, Elke Linders and Nicole Sanches from the department of Cultural Anthropology, Utrecht University. The original tool can be found here

Additional Resources

https://learningenglish.voanews.com/a/how-to-identify-gender-inequality-in-teaching-materials/3996027.html

https://sites.lsa.umich.edu/inclusive-teaching-sandbox/wp-content/uploads/sites/853/2021/02/An-Introduction-to-Content-Warnings-and-Trigger-Warnings-Draft.pdf

https://youtu.be/HttFlDRuLek (Video about uncovering stereotypes in classroom materials) 

https://www.sadker.org/curricularbias.html