Being “impartial” and how it has the opposite effect

This week’s readings and podcasts kept reminding me of that phrase you might hear someone say “I don’t see race; I treat everyone the same.” The idea of being impartial when applied to teaching students does seem great. All students are taught the same, they learn the same, and they are all given the same opportunity to achieve. Unfortunately, this is only an ideal case. Going back to Dr. Brandy Faulkner’s discussion of the null curriculum, by treating all students the same and ignoring their social identities (race, gender, sexual orientation, etc. and their intersections), we ignore what make each student unique, ignore the experiences the students have, and ignore how these experiences affect the way the students learn. In STEM fields, this mode of thought seems especially prevalent, as the material is viewed as being right or wrong with little grey area. Therefore, it is viewed as an area of education that can be taught the same regardless of the student’s identity, when that is not the case.

One concept I try to keep in mind for my teaching philosophy is that every student has their own “funds of knowledge,” or experiences, abilities, and past learned information that a student draws from in order to dissect, comprehend, and learn new material. I have typically seen this term applied towards English-language-learner students (I think I first read it in Vélez-Ibáñez and Greenberg, 1993), but I think it can be applied to any social identity or experience a student has. In terms of applying it towards teaching, it boils down to trying to get to know your students and what experiences they have had. This can be tricky, as not every identity is extremely salient/visible, you don’t want to just outright ask what struggles a student has had, and as mentioned int he Heinemann podcast, it shouldn’t be the responsibility of those of a marginalized identity to educate the masses. But I’ve found simple conversations with students before classes start or when they come to office hours can provide at least some insight. If one student talks about how they have been traveling home to work at the farm all the time, I can work a similar example into the labor management module of the class. Or if there are non-binary students in the class, including characters with gender neutral names and pronouns in case studies might provide some more engagement.

By being impartial and ignoring what funds of knowledge our students have, we will not be engaging them as well as we could and they won’t be learning as well as they could be. One concept that I’ve found appealing is the exact opposite: Multi-partiality. Instead of treating all of the students the same, an educator is partial to the multiple differences in their student population. In doing so, they can create more engagement in the classroom and build a stronger bond between the teacher and students. In larger classrooms, this can be very difficult, as we aren’t going to know everything about every student in a 400 person lecture. But small things that aren’t as specific but demonstrate you are inclusive of the diversity in the student community can go a long way. This could be including your pronouns on the syllabus, using examples from history that aren’t just white men, or providing time and resources to students in class to work on assignments to reduce socio-economic biases that are prevalent in the collegiate community. It’s probably unlikely we’ll be able to include every identity of every student and their intersection, but the effort to be inclusive will go farther than the effort of trying to be impartial.