Guidelines for Diversity in Curricula

Problematize terminology, language, and basic disciplinary concepts; allow new material to challenge basic concepts and to suggest different ways to approach materials in the course.

Make explicit the epistemological tensions between a focus on community and one on diversity, a focus on the global and a focus on the regional or local, the need to generalize and the mandate to avoid facile generalizations and attend to the particular.

Ask new questions about all material. Do not limit consideration only to gender for women; race/ethnicity for people of color; national-identity for recent immigrants and foreign nationals; sexuality for gays and lesbians; class for working-class people.

Think about destabilizing assumptions of centrality when deciding how to begin your course, make assignments, etc. For example, do not implicitly identify one kind of experience, one culture, one nation, one body of art and literature as normative, as central, relegating others to the margins or to the categories of "variations" and "deviations."

Mark inclusions and exclusions. For example, not "a top priority for women is pay equity at work," but an identification of which women (white middle class women in the U.S.?); not "the family," but an identification of what kind of family, where, such as “heterosexual nuclear families in modern western countries.” Marking usually unmarked categories can remind students that that there are other groups, forms, social contexts with a legitimacy of their own.

Create opportunities in papers and presentations—any work that involves additional reading and research—for students to explore diverse materials beyond the assigned reading for the course.

Consider making a discussion of structures and processes concrete through the use of materials speaking to personal or individual experience (e.g., in films, fiction, autobiography, poetry). Conversely, avoid presenting the stories of individual lives as wholly representative of a culture; contextualize with broader data.

Avoid representing groups or individuals as victims or as exoticized "others.” Use "Empathy and realism, not sympathy and paternalism” (Jan Monk). Balance discussions of oppression with discussions of agency. Avoid taking "culturally challenging practices" like foot-binding, sati, etc. out of context; locate them in the histories and cultures of which they are a part, and draw analogies between them and practices and issues that will (or should) be more familiar to Western students (e.g., radical cosmetic surgeries, the history of like practices and hysterectomy in Victorian England and the U.S.). To critique such practices, cite the words and organizing efforts of activists from the regions in question.