Course topics
Explore topics from a range of perspectives, lenses, and vantage points (Tuitt, 2009).
Impact: Allows students to gain a deeper understanding of complex topics while showing the value of differing viewpoints and fostering critical thinking skills. Depending on the topics selected, this strategy can foster an appreciation for diverse cultures, identities, ideas, and ways of knowing.
Example: Exploring topics from a range of perspectives, lenses, and vantage points
For example, exploring the topic of Public Health can be done using:
- A race-conscious lens, where students learn to pay attention to race while analyzing problems, searching for solutions, and defining successful policy
- A gender-conscious lens, where students learn to pay attention to gender norms, gender-based discrimination, and gender inequities as social determinants of healthcare outcomes
- A systems-thinking lens, where students learn to understand the complex structures, patterns, and relationships within and across different aspects of public health
Explanation
Approaching a topic from multiple perspectives, lenses, and voices helps to deepen understanding of course content by broadening the field of study. By normalizing and comprehending social diversity, students can learn to see diversity and considerations of equity as the norm and a necessary framework for working in their field. When instructors include these voices in the classroom, it helps to legitimize different perspectives on a topic, including views that value race, gender, and other axes of social difference as important ways of thinking about course content and the discipline as a whole. More than just demonstrating and validating the different paths students can take when working in the field, engaging with multiple and differing perspectives helps students develop their own voices and opinions.
Build topics around authors that represent different approaches.
Impact: Helps students develop critical thinking and reflection skills as they engage with different ways of seeing, thinking, and knowing about a topic. Weighing each author’s work equally in the course also reinforces the validity of different perspectives, preparing students to engage with different ways of being, thinking, and expressing, as well as multiple perspectives, effectively in an increasingly diverse and interconnected world.
References
Tuitt, F. A. (2009). Standing on the outside looking in: Implications for practice. In M. F. Howard-Hamilton, C. L. Morelon-Quanoo, S. D. Johnson, R. Windle-Wagner, & L. Santigue (Eds.), Standing on the outside looking in: Underrepresented students’ experiences in advanced degree programs (pp. 224–256). Sterling, VA: Stylus.
