Diversity Statement.

Raised in a mountain community amid a national forest, I was the third-born child of two working-class parents. In a small town where everyone looked like me, sounded like me, and carried the same privilege as I did, my rural upbringing was not conducive to interactions with racially, culturally, ethnically, or linguistically diverse populations. It wasn’t until I was 17-years old and employed at a metropolitan YMCA residential camp that I began developing awareness of the many facets of diversity and inclusion and their diametric counterparts, marginalization and exclusion. At the time, I did not know that this exposure to working with diverse peoples would be instrumental in shaping my worldview and values. More than a decade-and-a-half later, I embarked on my ongoing journey and my lifework—working with educators to create curriculum, instruction, and assessment that is permeable to students’ lived experiences, literacies, and ways of knowing.

As an educator who primarily taught elementary education and early childhood special education in schools districts spanning the east and west coasts, I began to recognize the inequities and systemic barriers to education that further perpetuate the marginalization of women, immigrants, people of color, and those from historically underserved backgrounds. Realizing that students bring their literacies, knowledges, and lived experiences to school with them each day, I sought to find out why teachers routinely rejected these and instead preferred “schooled” knowledges.

Relying on my expertise in literacy, culture, and language education, I began to research ways that educators can open their curriculum, instruction, and assessment to the students sitting before them. During my research, I coined the term “permeable read-aloud” to refer to classroom read-alouds that reflect students’ life-worlds, who they are inside and outside of the classroom, their languaging, life-worlds, and the local neighborhoods where they live. Permeable read-alouds recognize students for who they are, not just what they know. It means that children – their ways of living, knowing, being, doing, and identifying – are not bracketed-off and separated from the curriculum. Instead, the curriculum is open and accessible; students are free to pass in and through it, to permeate it, to soak into it.     

Since then, the concept of permeable read-alouds has become the focal point of the undergraduate and graduate reading/literacy courses that I teach at the university level. Likewise, it has become a topic for professional development sessions that I facilitate for practicing teachers, instructional assistants, and employees in local and regional school districts. This is essential work, as it helps to provide the knowledge necessary to empower practicing and pre-service teacher candidates to disrupt what is – and work toward what should be.

The 2020-21 academic year, wrought with the fears, insecurities, worries, and stresses of the global COVID-19 pandemic, hit the university where I am employed in unpredictable ways. The university experienced multiple incidents of hate-based speech, threats of violence against people of color, and the odious condemnation of the LGBTQ community. After several months of hate and division, police involvement, investigations by handwriting experts, student withdrawals, and fears of the faculty, the final act was arson - an attempt to burn down a dorm during a cold winter night.  

With spring approaching, we looked for hope and new opportunity.

Aware of my research and reputation in the field of social justice, equity, and inclusion, the university provost asked if I would be interested in creating an online training that all faculty, staff, and employees would be required to complete. Per the provost’s request, the training needed to address the recent issues of hate that proliferated our country and those that had infiltrated our university; it would need to be informative, thought-provoking, cause participants to interrogate their own biases and beliefs, and disrupt many of the stereotypes that are deeply ingrained in our culture.  

Tasked with this honor and responsibility, I collaborated with colleagues at other institutions and national/international research partners who are well-known in their fields. We narrowed the topics to include: (a) creating a supportive classroom climate; (b) anti-racist pedagogy; (c) showing pride in LGBTQ+ students; (d) social justice and inclusive pedagogy in online teaching and learning; (e) learning from student voices; and (f) from equity talk to equity walk.  Many sub-topics were included in each, bringing nuanced concepts to the surface. Upon conclusion of the training, participants were requested to submit one new goal for the upcoming academic year(s).

After delving into the university’s existing SMART goal process, it became clear that with some revision, it could be effectively used for this training. As a result, I revised the goal acronym and introduced the term “SMARTR Goal.” The addition of the “R” indicated the need for goals to “reflect social justice, equity, and inclusive pedagogy.” The university provost and the director of human resources reviewed and approved the use of SMARTR goals. As a result, we currently have 125 faculty members who have submitted SMARTR goals for the upcoming academic year. The most common goals center around (a) decolonizing syllabi; (b) using gender-neutral pronouns and students’ preferred names; (c) acknowledging inequities within the discipline and decentering whiteness in course content; (d) elevating student voices so that a full range of ideas, approaches, and perspectives are valued and recognized; and (e) creating assessments that enable students to demonstrate different knowledges and ways of knowing.  

Since developing the social justice, equity, and inclusion (SJEI) training, I have reflected on the process and content and considered my learnings. The most remarkable of which came from reading my coworkers' SMARTR goals. Their goals reiterated the notion that becoming an SJEI-focused educator is not a linear process; instead, it is recursive. Everyone is at a different point in their journey – moving forward, (re)negotiating, (re)situating, (re)generating new ideas, and (re)affirming purpose. It was evident that the desire for perfection cannot be the enemy of good. Our students can’t wait for us to find the perfect solution, perfect syllabus, or the perfect conversation starter; we have just to get started and be willing to learn as we go.

In the upcoming academic year, I plan to involve my students in the decolonization of my syllabi and to include them in critical analysis of my classroom materials. In addition, I plan to begin a new research study that investigates pre-service teacher candidates’ perceptions of student diversity within the context of “whose literacies matter?” and how early instruction in sociocultural perspectives on literacy and critical literacy can effect change in perceptions.

Looking to the future in a broader sense, I hope that I will be known as an anti-racist educator – one who identifies and challenges societies’ inequities in policies, practices, and behaviors – one who works with communities, educators, legislators, and policymakers to create new protocols that mean equity and justice for all people.

In conclusion, I am committed to pursuing efforts to enhance diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging and to continuing to work to dismantle barriers to the recruitment, retention, and advancement of students and faculty from historically excluded and underrepresented populations. To create a more expansive pool of thought processes and world views, I believe academia must strive to expand diversity with an increasingly inclusive approach – to serve humanity by welcoming and embracing peoples of different genders, languaging practices, socioeconomic status, ethnicities, national origins, sexual orientations, ages, mental and physical abilities, and cultural identities.