The following guide for departmental discussion has been curated by the participants in FAN’s Inclusive Leadership roundtable session, Navigating Sensitive Topics in Your Teaching and Research Spaces. If you wish to lead a faculty discussion on this topic, please watching the recording first to anticipate a possible range of trajectories the conversation could take.
STAGE sETTING
How do you do this? Can you give us a sense of how you promote student engagement with controversial topics?
What are the ground rules or norms for healthful discussion in your classrooms?
What are known factors that contribute to promoting openness in conversations?
Follow up: Are there practical tips, such as how you arrange a classroom or how you design discussion groups that contribute to your success in this work?
Can you give us an example of an especially controversial topic you’re taking on in your classes? Share the context and how you’re handling it.
Might your approach have differed if you held a different identity?
How does the sociodemographic or identity composition of your classroom impact your approach?
REFLECTIONS ON IDENTITIES
I wonder if you can share a bit of your personal or professional history and what brings you to this area? What realizations, reckonings, wrestling brought you to this challenge?
How much of this background do you share with your students or bring into the discussion?
Do you introduce your personal views in the classroom? If not, how do you maintain a balance between facilitating amongst the wide variety of views while remaining authentic in how you engage with your students?
The modern classroom is more diverse with respect to identities — seen and unseen -- more than at any other point in most institutions’ history. How do you conduct these conversations in ways that can be heard across the spectrum of these diverse identities and respect the lived experiences of the students, while also maintaining the scholarly integrity of the topic?
Many faculty feel out of their depth in understanding how to navigate these identities. What advice do you have for them?
NAVIGATING SCHOLARSHIP & CIVILITY
Are there circumstances in which it’s inappropriate to discuss potentially controversial topics?
How do you ensure that you don’t cause harm to students with different identities and beliefs?
Do you worry about the potential adverse consequences (what some might call cancellation) when taking on controversial topics in the classroom?
I imagine that in their attempts to engage on controversial topics, students may intentionally or inadvertently microaggress others in the classroom. Have you experienced these situations, and how have you managed them? Do you correct these students? If so, how?
Students seem to have had little practice advancing a position, and articulating a clear rationale for their viewpoint, especially in controversial areas. Has this been your experience? How do you help students to advance positions?
At a time when misinformation is rampant and when there appear to be fewer trusted sources of truth, how do you take on topics where “facts” are disputed?
EFfECTIVE PRACTICES
How do you receive feedback on how successfully you navigate these issues in the classroom?
Do best practices for in-class discussions differ when you’re online or in a hybrid classroom? Do you have experience in fostering dialogue offline, e.g in Sakai fora, blogs, or Slack/Teams?
SMALL GROUP / PAIR-SHARE PROMPTS
What are the most challenging conversations that you are currently navigating? As a {faculty role}, how have you approached the conversations?
What are strategies that you will take from the conversation today to use in your own teaching, mentoring and leadership?
RESPOND & REVISE
Consider this “mini-case” of a faculty member’s approach to establishing a learning environment that is more resilient to differences on sensitive topics.
Professor X teaches a course on health, sexuality, and gender. Once or twice a week throughout the semester, students will work in groups of five or six groups either on long-term work (presentations and papers) and/or debates and exercises.
In the first week of class, the professor ask students to respond to a questionnaire, and then uses the responses to create the small groups. Students are told that they don't have to respond to any individual question or to any of the questions at all. (At least one student will take this option each year, and their nonresponse says something about them, also.) In the case of this course, the questions are:
What is your religious orientation?
What is your political orientation?
Do you have a loved one who is in a polygamous marriage?
Do you have a loved one in an arranged marriage?
Have you spent significant time in/with a marginalized community?
What college year are you?
Would you rather have an invisibility cloak or the ability to fly?
In a typical semester, there are six groups of six students. There are two seniors and one freshman in each, there are 2 people of "minority" religions in each group (Buddhist, Muslim, Hindu, B'hai, etc.), and so on. The professor then reviews and tries to make sure that there are not minorities stuck in a largely majority group. Having grouped students according to their replies to the questionnaire, the students do not necessarily know why they’ve been put together.
Discuss:
What do you think of this approach to balance shared traits (in small groups) with the heterogeneity of the class (as a whole)?
If you were to try this approach for your course topic, you would probably use very different questions. Which would you use? (Note: it is important to not ask questions about ethnicity, race or gender.) How do you think you would group your students based on their responses (and nonresponses)?