Creating a More Inclusive Learning Environment: Why We Need to Teach Students How to Have Difficult Discussions
At the University of Texas at Austin, the school’s commitment to diversity goes beyond the demographic makeup of the student body. The Center for Skills and Experience Flags works alongside inclusive learning initiatives across campus such as the University Diversity and Inclusion Action Plan and the Faculty Innovation Center to engage students and instructors in a variety of ways. The Cultural Diversity (CD) and Global Cultures (GC) Flags at UT Austin strive to foster learning about cultural groups in a way that encourages students to critically reflect about how they engage in cultural analysis.
The GC and CD Flags also work in tandem to emphasize inclusive teaching by encouraging instructors to use texts created by the cultural groups being studied and by considering the students’ identities. There is no one way to create an inclusive learning environment, but there are many faculty at UT Austin whose thoughtful approaches to making their classrooms inclusive offer useful models. Dr. Gloria González-López, a professor of Sociology, is one of them. She uses innovative teaching methods to teach the Flags in an open and reflective learning environment.
Dr. Gloria González-López is one of the professors at UT leading efforts to recognize and uplift marginalized communities and people. Her course, UGS 302 Sexual Violence Across Mexican Cultures, examines how sexual violence has been constructed within and across patriarchal Mexican cultures. Although this subject area is challenging and potentially upsetting, Dr. González-López teaches students to engage with difficult topics in a healthy and reflective way. She uses discussion techniques from the Difficult Dialogues program, and she uses trauma-informed teaching techniques to teach the course mindfully and responsibly. Trauma-informed teaching is a method of teaching that recognizes that students bring their entire lives into the classroom and that their emotional health is a necessary condition for learning.
First, Dr. González-López creates an educational space that recognizes the emotional health of the students and the instructor. She believes that since “students are not a walking brain that can just download information,” it is important for instructors to give them space to recognize their emotional reactions to often sensitive readings. To help the students address these reactions, she gives them practical rules and habits to help them process the readings in a healthy way. Two of the practices she tells her students to follow are: Don’t read any of the material after 6 pm, and be sure to break up the material to read it at different times. She believes that helping the students emotionally process the material outside the class is critical to their ability to engage in the class.
Before discussing the course material in class, Dr. González-López takes the additional step of having an emotional check-in with the students. The check-in involves going around the room and asking each student how they are doing. Dr. González-López also shares how she is doing with the class. “By inviting the students to be honest, and being honest with them, we can include our entire humanity into the class.” This habit of checking-in before class discussion sets an authentic and open tone for the rest of the class.
This simple process of checking in with the students also helps the student approach the readings and discussion analytically. The check-in allows the students to express their emotional reactions to the readings and recognize it up front so they can then dig deeper into the content. Dr. González-López argues that “honing the emotional reaction to the material helps you become more analytical because it makes you free.” Recognizing their emotions frees the students to discuss the material more analytically and critically reflect on their cultural experiences.
For Dr. González-López, teaching about sexual violence comes from a place of honesty and authenticity. In teaching this subject she is careful to not (re)traumatize the students, or exploit the issue or the suffering of others. She encourages the students to be reflective of sexual violence in their cultures as well. “Intellectual colonization has been used to reproduce stereotypes about the groups that are repressed to begin with and we need to be open to critical thought.” Through her class she hopes that the students learn how to have sensitive discussions on sexual violence because is also a part of American culture. Through learning about the complex issue of sexual violence in Mexican cultures, the students learn to discuss and analyze the complexity of sexual violence in their own.
At the end of every semester, Dr. González-López has each of the students make a written commitment to do one thing to be a part of social change or justice in their community. When students tell her, “Professor Gloria, we are going to have a revolution,” she responds that it should begin with “re-evolution: it is about transformation… By transforming themselves, they transform the world. If each of us can do something, we can start with the microlevel. Within my immediate community, family, and circle.” The students’ written commitments hang on the wall next to her office door as a daily reminder to her of the students’ commitment to transformation.
Teaching about a potentially traumatizing topic is an understandably intimidating idea for many instructors, but, as Dr. González-López demonstrates, using trauma-informed teaching methods prioritizes the students’ emotional health, gives them skills to discuss difficult topics with sensitivity, and prepares them to take on challenges and complex problems in the future.
If you would like to know more about the Flags program at UT Austin, you can find this information here.
If you are a professor at UT, you can find resources to help teach the Global Cultures or Cultural Diversity Flags here. We also provide resources and ideas to help you teach each of the other Flags here
By Abby Attia, Graduate Assistant at the Center for Skills and Experience Flags at the University of Texas at Austin
