Engagement Strategies Seek multiple perspectives

The Key to Success with this Strategy

To "seek multiple perspectives" is a challenging strategy, and may be one of the most uncomfortable in culturally-responsive teaching. By its nature it calls into question the narrowness of our teaching and our curriculum, and calls out the bias that all of us bring into our learning environments. The key to success is to look at all aspects of your learning environment when it comes to perspective. Your materials might be biased in one way or another, or otherwise contain a single perspective--typically derived from the most dominant culture. Despite your best efforts, you might, as the lead educator, be best representing only one perspective. And, as was discussed with the student contributions strategy, your students' perspectives might be entirely left out of their learning environment.

There are many places to start when assessing perspective within your course, and there are many areas within which to do more. As with other strategies, being successful involves:

Conversation between you and the students
Thorough/holistic review/assessment of instructional materials and teaching practices
Consistent mechanisms for student feedback

Using this Strategy is Culturally Responsive because...

Multiple perspectives allows for the highlighting and promoting of our collective, multicultural world. By not working to integrate multiple perspectives, difference and individuality is excluded or admonished.

Intentionally embedding curricula with multiple perspectives has shown to generate myriad benefits, including critical thinking, tolerance, and empathy.

Consider the concept of "multiple perspectives." To History faculty, this might mean making room within a lecture to address leadership from across the entire political spectrum. To Art faculty, it might mean coverage of Outsider Artists in addition to those who are mainstream and popularly successful. Intentionally including perspectives can bring into question voices that are regularly present and those that are historically and currently left out within each discipline/context.

When students learn to understand the value of multiple perspectives, it will build their own, individual perspective, and counter the ever-so-present echo chamber in personal and professional environments.

How do I Implement this Strategy?

It is helpful to start the process by learning about your own habits, teaching history, and biases (whether they are implicit, or are conscious preferences). Acknowledging where you are coming from, as the educator and the member of the learning environment with the most power, will lead to identifying where you need to put in the work to bring about change.

There are many implicit bias tests, which may or may not be beneficial if you have not yet learned of the effects of your biases in the classroom. You might find this article helpful to start to learn about where college professors' implicit bias impacts and influences the most.

Once you have started exploring your own perspective, and what is deemed "normal" within your curricula and your activities/assignments, consider where multiple perspectives could start to take shape within your course. The following are a few examples:

Instructional materials (e.g. the textbook and the readings)
Conversations, assignments, and activities for students that could do better to allow for more student personalization and creativity
Test banks and exams that historically have sought out a single, fixed answer

When implementing multiple perspectives, it is important to recognize that immediate, total change is not possible. Implementation should occur over time with reflection and analysis of student feedback.

Here are a few additional readings if you would like to explore these concepts further: