Twenty-one years ago, Deninne Pritchett, PhD, dropped out of Central Piedmont Community College in Charlotte, North Carolina. For an African American woman raising small children, the idea of getting a doctorate seemed unreachable.
But today, Pritchett is the chair of the psychology department at that same community college. Her success, she said, was partly due to faculty who implemented inclusive practices in the classroom before “inclusivity” was a popular term. Being seen and valued in the college space was what she needed to work toward her potential—a potential, she said, she is still working to realize.
“I am now a PhD holder, and that is a big deal,” Pritchett said. “But that is because someone provided the support and believed in me. They included me and provided a space for exactly what I needed to develop into the person that I am now.”
As an instructor, Pritchett is dedicated to providing that same kind of space for her students: She has earned an American College and University Educators (ACUE) Advanced Certificate for Teaching Effectiveness and is a featured expert in an ACUE course on learner-centered, equitable teaching practices. But diversifying the psychology curriculum and creating inclusive classrooms are not just the work of professors who have been there and seen the importance firsthand; it is now more urgent than ever to break down barriers in the field, build a more diverse psychology workforce, and make psychology a discipline that is relevant to everyone.
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“This is not an issue of just being more inclusive for the sake of our diverse students,” said Irma Corral, PhD, MPH, an assistant dean for diversity and inclusion and a clinical psychologist at East Carolina University. “It’s really an issue of providing accurate and scientifically complete training for all our students.”
A more accurate science
The psychology profession today is less diverse than the population it serves. A 2019 APA Center for Workforce Studies (CWS) report found that 83% of the psychology workforce identified as White, 7% as Hispanic, 4% as Asian, 3% as Black, and 1% as Native American, Alaskan Indian, or Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander. U.S. Census data peg the percentage of Americans who identify as White alone at 60%, as Hispanic at 19%, as Asian at 6%, as Black alone at 13.6%, and as Native American, Alaskan Indian or Native Hawaiian/Pacific Island alone at 1.6% (U.S. Census QuickFacts, 2021opens in new window).
There are hints that the future of psychology will be more diverse. For example, 31% of doctoral degrees in psychology awarded in 2018 went to non-White students, according to APA’s CWS. But there are still many barriers within the field, from lack of precollege exposure to psychology courses for students of color, to cost of postgraduate education, to a dearth of minority role models (see “Psychology’s Diversity Problem,” October 2021 Monitor).
What’s more, skimming over human diversity or relegating non-White, non-Eurocentric experiences to siloed multicultural psychology courses provides a less accurate educational experience to all. Bringing diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging into psychology courses is “a corrective action,” said Jasmine Mena, PhD, a clinical psychologist at Bucknell University.
Making this corrective action starts with introspection, said Alison Koenka, PhD, an educational psychologist at the University of Oklahoma who is coauthoring a book chapter on decolonizing psychology classrooms. (Decolonizing refers to reorienting education toward teaching methods and knowledge that have been marginalized by the dominant culture.) Reflecting on one’s own areas of intersecting identity is important for understanding one’s interactions with the world. For some instructors, spotlighting aspects of identity for their students becomes a powerful way to signal belonging.
“I don’t think any student ever leaves my class without knowing that I’m Puerto Rican,” said Milton Fuentes, PsyD, a clinical psychologist at Montclair State University in New Jersey. “One-third of my students are of Latinx descent, and they need to know that people like them are in front of the classroom.”
Another way to signal belonging can be to highlight issues of diversity and equity in course materials, starting with the syllabus. Inserting identity safety cues—such as representation of minoritized groups or a diversity statement—into the course syllabus improved students’ sense of belonging in an experiment led by Melanie Maimon, PhD, a social psychologist at Rutgers University–New Brunswick (Teaching of Psychology, online ahead of print, 2021opens in new window). A review of such cues in both educational and workplace settings coauthored by Penn State psychologist Mary Kruk, PhD, similarly found them to be successful, especially in environments where the threat of being stereotyped was salient and for people high in stigma consciousness (Translational Issues in Psychological Science, Vol. 7, No. 4, 2021opens in new window).
The key, Mena said, is to make diversity, equity, and inclusion central to the course, not a mere sideline on the syllabus. It is also important to be straightforward about experts’ identities, Fuentes said: “I really encourage folks to not just include diverse scholars on the syllabus but make [their backgrounds] explicit.” Otherwise, he said, students may automatically assume that their reading list is not from a diverse set of scholars.
Diversity can also be woven into coursework in numerous ways, from bringing in research done in different groups of people to highlighting scholars of differing backgrounds and identities.
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People of color were often locked out of psychology as the field was developing, said Alicia Trotman, PhD, an assistant professor of psychology at Sul Ross State University in Alpine, Texas, but this gatekeeping should not be allowed to obscure the psychological advances that racial and ethnic minorities and women made in the field’s early days. Sometimes, teaching these pioneers requires digging into related fields like sociology or African American or Chicano studies, Trotman said. For instance, James Comer, MD, MPH, a Black child psychiatrist at the Yale School of Medicine, is one of the pioneers of social emotional learning. Other pioneers were denied degrees. “We want to let students know that people just like them were part of the development of psychology,” said Tiffany Culver, PhD, as assistant professor of psychology at Schreiner University in Kerrville, Texas.
In collaboration with the Smithsonian Learning Lab, APA has created a virtual exhibit highlighting such pioneers. The “I am Psyched!” multimedia exhibit,opens in new window spotlights women of color in psychology, from historical figures such as Mamie Phipps Clark, whose work was cited in the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision ending segregation in public schools, to psychologists today such as Hortensia Amaro, PhD, a Latina psychologist who develops programs to combat health problems in low-income women of color.
Flexibility and autonomy
Beyond representation, instructors can work to make their classes more welcoming by thinking of their students as partners in learning. This means focusing on building community within the classroom, offering flexibility and autonomy on assignments, and even sharing control over what is taught.
Fuentes builds community by making sure to put people of different identities and backgrounds together in small group discussions. He also brings in undergraduate teaching assistants, often students of color, from previous years’ courses to assist—both providing another example of representation and enabling peer-to-peer mentoring. This year, he plans to administer a survey asking students in his class about their backgrounds and circumstances to better understand the mix of students he has and what challenges they are facing.
Teceta Tormala, PhD, a social psychologist at Palo Alto University in California, creates affinity groups for her students, allowing them to choose an aspect of identity such as race, gender, sexual orientation, or social class. These groups then meet before class to discuss structured questions related to course content. “Students got to have these deep, rich, complicated conversations with folks who shared one identity but didn’t share other identities,” Tormala said. “Students talked about how impactful these were for both self-understanding and in-group understanding, but also for understanding other groups’ experience in the world.”
Many instructors leave some free space on the syllabus and allow students to weigh in on what they most want to cover under the umbrella of human diversity. Mena’s students at Bucknell recently ran with this autonomy, finding readings and creating their own discussions on a topic Mena had not previously delved into: Latinx gender representation in the media. It was a very salient topic for the students, Mena said, and they jumped into the project.
Similarly, Trotman assigns an activity asking students to find something on social media that they can tie to a concept learned in class. In her intro classes, this assignment tends to reveal which students have a knack for thinking like a psychologist, she said. “This is the activity I love the most because that is when I’m able to recruit some of the best students to psychology,” she said.
Students learn from each other, Pritchett said. They also learn when they can tie their own experiences to what’s happening in class. “If you can engage a student by using who they are as part of the learning process, the other students get to see that, which in turn tells them that what they are contributing is valuable,” she said. “They are part of that process.”
Inclusive instructors also offer autonomy over when and how assignments are completed. Flexible deadlines can be a boon, particularly for nontraditional students who might be juggling work and family obligations. Building trust is important, Pritchett said: Students are more likely to succeed and do the work if they feel comfortable asking for help or flexibility from their instructor.
Another example of flexibility that benefits all students has been nixing timed exams, Koenka said. Allowing students to demonstrate what they know without the pressure of a stopwatch gives a better sense of what the class does and does not understand, she said. And the practice may particularly benefit minority students, because a lower-pressure exam experience reduces the stress that comes from feeling like one might fail to measure up, thus confirming stereotypes about one’s group.
Labor-based grading, which emphasizes effort over final product, is another way to encourage students to keep learning in the face of challenges instead of shutting down, said Mena (Teaching of Psychology, 2022opens in new window). In a typical class, a student takes a quiz, gets a grade, and stuffs the paper into the back of a notebook after seeing the score. In a labor-based grading scheme, Mena said, the quiz itself is not worth any points. Instead, the instructor marks wrong answers without explaining why they are wrong. Students then earn points for researching and explaining the correct answers.
“The quiz will allow them to practice their recall and retrieval,” Mena said. “However, [researching and explaining the answers] will force them to return to the work, because doing something once is not sufficient.”
A collaborative effort
As any instructor can attest, updating or overhauling a course is a lot of work. This is particularly true for a diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging update, which requires a lot of reflection and adjustment in response to students’ input.
The amount of support for this work varies by institution, but instructors who have done their own overhauls all urge seeking out resources and collaboration. Institutions should prepare their instructors to moderate difficult discussions that might arise when topics such as discrimination, sexism, racism, and ableism are raised in the classroom, said Karlene Cunningham, PhD, the vice-chair of diversity and inclusion and a clinical psychologist at the East Carolina University Brody School of Medicine who helps run these kinds of trainings for faculty. Untrained instructors sometimes feel anxious about saying the wrong thing, causing them to shy away from tough topics, Cunningham said. “Students can then pick up on that,” she said. “They then shut down and disengage [as well].”
Instructors should get comfortable with the fact that bringing up these topics will not resolve them, Cunningham said. Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) is a continual journey, and much of the reward comes with simply teaching students how to have heavy conversations in a productive way.
Most institutions now have DEI offices that offer resources and workshops for faculty. Organizations such as APA’s Division 2 (Society for the Teaching of Psychology) also maintain libraries of resources on diversifying classrooms. (A document of resources on decolonizing will be available from Division 2 by 2023.) APA Teachers of Psychology in Secondary Schools (TOPSS) is also working to introduce diversity content on a precollege level, with policy documents and virtual courses on integrating DEI into introductory courses.
There is much more work to be done, said Korinthia Nicolai, a doctoral student in psychology advised by Koenka. For example, student teaching assistants and graduate students often lack access to the diversity resources that colleges and universities curate for their faculty. Department-level collaborations are also an unmined vein at many institutions, Mena said. When faculty develop their courses in a vacuum, students may find themselves getting the same information repeatedly—or may miss major topics entirely. Coordinating across the curriculum can help scaffold what students learn about diversity and multiculturalism. Coordination can also be useful for courses taught by multiple faculty, such as introductory psychology, research methods, and statistics.
“We need to work on building community across faculty members and departments,” Mena said. “I think we are too individualized and could gain a great deal of support if we could help one another.”
Ultimately, these efforts can reach beyond psychology. Many nonpsychology majors take psychology courses on their way to careers in other fields. Richard Garries, an undergraduate fine arts student at Virginia Commonwealth University who took a course with Koenka and Nicolai, worked with the pair to write a book chapter on centering inclusion and equity in human development courses. The strategies were important in his student-teaching experience, Garries said, where he incorporated as much choice as possible for his students in a fine arts course. In one lesson geared toward helping students develop their own artistic style, for example, he gave students the leeway to choose which artists they wanted to study.
Offering students that type of deeper understanding of identity and modeling deep conversations is also important for building a less hyperpartisan, culturally fractured future, Tormala said.
“Unless we have this ability to bridge these gaps, I’m sad for where we might be going as a country and as a set of human beings,” she said. “But if we build these skills to understand the foundation of our belief systems, our values, our social location, our understanding of our identity and lived experience, it gives us this broader vantage point for understanding other folks.”
