The readings and assignments in this class have really opened my eyes and made me think about diversity and inclusion in ways I never have before. One area that has stuck out to me is the area of diversity in education. To break it down even further, I am interested in the bias against different races, ethnicities and genders in school. Are there biases that have a strong correlation on academic performance and outcomes? What really sparked me to ask this question was finding out about implicit theories of knowledge and the idea that administrators and educators can have a predetermination on whether you will be successful or not based on what race or culture you belong to.
This question is important to me on a personal level because once I am done with my schooling I plan to become a teacher either in middle school or high school (in social studies), so this idea of how teachers may look at and treat their students before having an honest chance to evaluate their skills, strengths and weaknesses is something that I plan to look into and learn as much as I can about.
My career outside of this school project has dealt with diversity in the sense that I have been around many cultures in jobs I have had in the past, and while my coworkers would more often than not tend to stick to their own kind of people and shy away from helping (or working with) people who have a different ethnic background than them, I’ve always found it easy and natural to do the opposite of that. Now that I plan to go into a different profession in my later years, getting into teaching, it is going to be interesting to find out how people who are already established in this field feel about their students- are they generally fair or exhibit their implicit bias?
In conducting this research, the bulk of my work comes from finding scholarly articles and book chapters that have been written by educators, sociologists, psychologists and administrators in the education system. Seeing what people who are in this field come up with will be important to seeing where the goal posts are in this argument of how diversity effects academic performance, and I have chose to solely rely on this kind of testimony because of the “inside look” at what these authors are contributing.