How to make STEM classrooms more inclusive

This post is a bit of a departure from my usual content. I’m assuming two things about you, the reader:

1. You teach/learn in a STEM classroom
2. You’d like to be more inclusive

If that’s not you, you might want to skip this one. Sorry; I’ll be back to my usual haunts with the next post.

If you’re still with me, you may be wondering what triggered this sudden departure from fun facts about linguistics. The answer is that I recently had an upsetting experience, and it’s been been niggling at me. I’m a member of an online data analysis community that’s geared towards people who program professionally. Generally, it’s very helpful and a great way to find out about new packages and tricks I can apply in my work. The other day, though, someone posted a link to a project designed to sort women by thier physical attractiveness. I commented that it was not really appropriate for a professional environment, and was especially off-putting to the women in the group. I’m not upset that I spoke out, but I’m a little unhappy that I had to. I’m also upset that at least one person thought my criticisms were completely unnecessary. (And, yes, both the person who originally posted the link and the aforementioned commenter are male.)

It got me thinking about inclusiveness in professional spaces, though. Am I really doing all I can to ensure that the field of linguistics is being inclusive? While linguistics as a whole is not horribly skewed male, professional linguists are more likely to be male, especially in computational linguistics. And we are definitely lacking in racial diversity; as the Linguistics Society of America (our main professional organization) puts it:

“The population of ethnic minorities with advanced degrees in linguistics is so low in the U.S. that none of the federal agencies report data for these groups.”

If you’re like me, you see that as a huge problem and you want to know what you can do to help fix it. That’s why I’ve put together this list of concrete strategies you can use in your classroom and interactions with students to be more inclusive, especially towards women. (Since I’m not disabled or a member of an ethnic minority group or I can’t speak to those experiences, but I invite anyone who can and has additional suggestions to either comment below or contact me anonymously.) The suggestions below are drawn from my experience as both a teacher and a student, as well as input from the participants and other facilitators in last year’s Including All Students: Teaching in the Diverse Classroom workshops.

For Teachers: 

• If someone calls you on non-inclusive behavior, acknowledge it, apologize and don’t do it again. I know this seems like an obvious one, but it can be really, really important. For example, a lot of linguistics teaching materials are really geared towards native English speakers. The first quarter I taught I used a problem set in class that required native knowledge of English. When a student (one of several non-native speakers) mentioned it, I was mortified and tempted to just ignore the problem. If I had, though, that student would have felt even more alienated. If someone has the courage to tell you about a problem with your teaching you should acknowledge that, admit your wrong-doing and then make sure it doesn’t happen again.
• Have space for anonymous feedback. That said, it takes a lot of courage to confront an authority figure–especially if you’re already feeling uncomfortable or like you’re not wanted or valued. To combat that, I give my students a way to contact me anonymously (usually through a webform of some kind). While it may seem risky, all the anonymous feedback I have ever received has been relevant and useful.
• Group work. This may seem like an odd thing to have on the list, but I’ve found that group work in the classroom is really valuable, both as an instructor and as a student. I may not feel comfortable speaking up or asking question in front of the class as a whole, but small groups are much less scary. My favorite strategy for group work is to put up a problem or discussion question and then drift from group to group, asking students for thier thoughts and answering questions.
• Structure interactive portions of the class. Sometimes small group work doesn’t work well for your material. It’s still really helpful to provide a structure for students to interact and ask questions, because it lets you ensure that all students are included (it has the additional benefit of keeping everyone awake during those drowsy after-lunch classes). Talbot Taylor, for example, would methodically go around in the classroom in order and ask every single student a question during class. Or you could have every student write a question about the course content to give to you at the end of class that you address at the beginning of the next class. Or, if you have readings, you can assign one or two students to lead the discussion for each reading.
• Don’t tokenize. This is something that one of the workshop participants brought up and I realized that it’s totally something I’ve been guilty of doing (especially if I know one of my students speaks a rare language). If there is only one student of a certain group in your class, don’t ask them to speak for or represent thier group. So if you have one African American student, don’t turn to them every time you discuss AAE. If they volunteer to speak about, great! But it’s not fair to expect them too, and it can make students feel uncomfortable.
• If someone asks you to speak to someone else for them, don’t mention the person who asked you. I know this one is oddly specific, but it’s another thing that came out of the workshop. One student had asked thier advisor to ask another faculty member to stop telling sexist jokes in class. Their advisor did so, but also mentioned that it was the student who’d complained, and the second faculty member then ridiculed the student during the next class. (This wasn’t in linguistics, but still–yikes!) If someone’s asking you to pass something on for them, there’s probably a very good reason why they’re not confronting that person directly.
• Don’t objectify minority students. This one mainly applies to women. Don’t treat women, or women’s bodies, like things. That’s what was so upsetting for me about the machine learning example I brought up at the beginning of the article: the author was literally treating women like objects. Another example comes from geoscience, where a student  tells about their experience at a conference where “lecturers… included… photo[s] of a woman in revealing clothing…. I got the feeling that female bodies were shown not only to illustrate a point, but also because they were thought to be pretty to look at” (Women in the Geosciences: Practical, Positive Practices Toward Parity, Holes et al., P.4).

For Everybody: 

• Actively advocate for minority students. If you’re outside of a minority that you notice is not receiving equal treatment, please speak up about it. For example, if you’re a man and you notice that all the example sentences in a class are about John–a common problem–suggest a sentence with Mei-Ling, or another female name, instead. It’s not fair to ask students who are being discriminated against to be the sole advocates for themselves. We should all be on the lookout for sneaky prejudices.  
• Don’t speak for/over minority students. That said, don’t put words in people’s mouths. If you’re speaking up about something, don’t say something like, “I think x is making Sanelle uncomfortable”. It may very well be making Sanelle uncomfortable, but that’s up for Sanelle to say. Try something like “I’m not sure that’s an appropriate example”, instead.

Those are some of my pointers. What other strategies do you have to help make the classroom more inclusive?