Inclusive Course Content

Inclusive and Representative Course Materials 

A democratic hallmark of the multicultural education movement has been to call attention to the reality that schools in the United States serve a highly diverse range of peoples and groups, each with their own evolving forms of cultural knowledge and tradition, and so socially just forms of education should be responsive to this diversity and seek always to find ways to ensure it is included and represented as much as possible in syllabi and curricula. 

If the students we teach hail from different economic class statuses and have diverse racial or ethnic backgrounds, if they maintain a wide array of gender identities, sexual orientations, or have varied religious faiths, if they possess an amalgam of many different forms of intelligence and abilities, and possess primary literacy skills in various languages, then the organization of classroom learning must work continually to honor that diversity in responsive ways. 

To do so not only helps to maximize minoritized students’ sense of belonging and success through their educational coursework, but it can also assist courses (and their instructors) by drawing upon these differences as available knowledge assets within the learning community, thereby helping to challenge stereotypes and reduce implicit biases amongst class members through the promotion of multiple perspectives. This has the additional benefit for students that they can learn to find educational value in and through their representative differences and so become better prepared for the cultural variability of the ever-evolving heterogeneity of the global world.