DEI Understanding: Enhancing Learning for Every Student

DEI by Matthew Bamberg

Diversity, Equity and Inclusion DEI is studying protests and so much more. 

In days past, I looked forward to playing the harp of all people being created equal. I meandered around the classroom, giving each student equal consideration to their talents. To be sure, each student was an individual in my mind — a heart and soul worthy of respect. In my desk-to-desk wondering, I was well aware of their cultural background, as the history of each of them was considered when planning, administering, and assessing lessons.

From the signing of the Declaration of Independence by a group of Caucasian men with long white hair to the enunciations of Martin Luther King Jr.’s carefully recited speeches, I lamented the freedom, individuality, pomp, and circumstance of peaceful power shifts, and the paradox of resistance and division from social media. Celebrations of a nation of one, where each culture served up recipes of food, dance, and smiles, along with the painful shouts of fighting for their rights.

Segregation’s torment of separation by race — free states and slave ones and the glory of a nation coming together after 9–11, the country has attempted to move forward by recognizing equality and striving to fulfill its founding promise that all are created equal.

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) have followed my educational career since the 1980s. I began implementing it when teaching in public elementary schools in Oakland and Daly City, California, then moved on to university students in the early 2000s, integrating common sense learning methods. From the pathos of resistance to taking action, DEI is unique to each subject discipline.

Integrating critical thinking, including aspects of DEI that involve it, into specific subject disciplines has shown that it can’t be taught in isolation. For example, essential sciences topics with integrated DEI topics can enhance skills and academic achievement. Research shows that, while critical thinking can be taught, it can’t be taught on its own — at least not effectively.

“Daniel Willingham, cognitive scientist, writes that attempts to teach general thinking abilities through logical and spatial puzzles as parts of courses added to the curriculum are generally unsuccessful. These skills don’t ‘transfer’ to thinking in other domains, but generally remain tied to the logic games where they’re learned.” (Bouygues, 2022)

The Pew Research Center, for instance, can provide data to determine how different socioeconomic groups experience adverse health effects from air pollution. Critically thinking about housing data leads students to examine how living near highways impacts specific populations’ health.

Students learn through association and reinforcement while analyzing real-world housing statistics. “Operant and classical conditioning provide a behavioral understanding of the learning process” (Sharma & Gupta, 2024). Discovering issues of inequality leads students to think critically about ideas for creating housing that can lessen the effects of air pollution on health.

Unique views of individual and societal identities incite conflicts formed by random parameters of human differences in physical traits and mental attitudes. The decisions to create the best world possible for new generations are in the hands of educators and politicians who are in a tug-of-war of values.

The black-and-white nature of decision-making shows the frowns of extremes, pitting right vs. left, Democrat vs. Republican, and liberal vs. conservative with constant movement away from shades of gray that create compromise and consensus, which is the formula for moderation. The conflict resulting from DEI is from the swing from black to white without consideration of any form of compromise.

Education is filled with pivotal extremes and accusations that sweep public outrage. Terms and acronyms used by the left agitate the other side, who twist and turn them into tarantulas, invading an uneasy curriculum that few can agree on. The diversity of the United States is unique in its mixed salad bowl of race, culture, languages, and values. Acceptance of any other description of the United States should cause worry.

Educators must shuffle to the needs of students, each one an individual with a set of circumstances varying wildly from one another. American culture’s understanding of each other becomes vague in a nation of citizens whose points of view form omnidirectional divergence between a calculation of right and wrong.

Like an atomic bomb, the concept of our nation from its present point to its future direction is in the hands of nature’s cyclical circumstances’ reactions to the billions of humans living on the planet, some so technologically adept that their power to change the world risks the resistance of all the rest in a never-ending clash between the millions and the few.

I’m puzzled when I think that after almost 40 years of being a part of the practice as a professional educator, which tucked me in a world of research to improve methods of reaching students for maximum engagement. A teacher who deposits information to students during reading and arithmetic instruction rarely achieves positive results in the classroom.

Paulo Freire (1970), a Brazilian educator who was superintendent of Sao Paulo schools, drew an analogy of instruction that functioned like a bank. Teachers deposit information and facts to students. Students are saving accounts that “bank” the key elements of the lesson. Since students memorize, they will not know how to use what’s memorized in real-life applications of integrated subjects. The process leads to oppression because little critical thinking is involved, creating less emphasis on problem-solving in math and fewer real-life applications of information received from readings.

Additionally, some universities have rewritten their curriculum by updating the DEI topics to focus less on wokeness and more on questioning the information presented through reputable research. In my years, I have seen the university curriculum change from covering white privilege and anti-racist education a few years back to students developing Socratic (probing) questions to probe information for more meaning in the relationships to their real lives and for evaluating it by researching its implications for the future.

With global warming at our backs, no one escapes, yet seemingly, it follows DEI into a secret hiding place beyond ridiculous.

Implementing Social Emotional Learning (SEL), a facet of DEI that instructs participants in mediation and consensus when students work in cooperative groups. For example, to increase academic rigor in a STEM subject, student groups research and discuss who, what, when, where, and how uniting professions to work cooperatively can help solve problems such as reducing property damage before a hurricane. Since this type of scaffolding of STEM subjects concerns itself with DEI because of the SEL component, it’s unclear what will happen to the program soon because Trump initiated a freeze on DEI programs only to rescind it not long afterward.

Whether or not the Department of Education is defunded affects all the programs it hosts, including STEM, SEL, and ELD education. Reuters said, “U.S. President Donald Trump's administration will take steps to defund the federal Education Department.” The millions spent on these programs ensure that a wide diversity of people are served with scaffolds that prepare them to acquire and learn English and experience American culture infused with education about how it interacts with their heritage culture.

The challenge is that if these programs are eliminated from the Department of Education, they’ll have to be moved to other federal agencies or the states.

This leaves us with one question: How will local and state communities afford the high cost of ensuring an equal education for all?

References

Bouygues, H. L. (2022). How to teach critical thinking in K-12. Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/helenleebouygues/2020/11/20/how-to-teach-critical-thinking-in-k-12/?sh=3dc5e7a94760

Freire, P. (1993). Pedagogy of the oppressed (D. Macedo, Introduction). The Continuum International Publishing Group Inc. (Original work published 1970). https://envs.ucsc.edu/internships/internship-readings/freire-pedagogy-of-the-oppressed.pdf

National Science Foundation. (2020). Diversity and inclusion in STEM education: Moving forward. National Science Foundation. https://www.nsf.gov/diversity-inclusion

Sharma, N. P., & Gupta, V. (2024). Human behavior in a social environment. In StatPearls [Internet]. StatPearls Publishing. Available from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK574501/

Originally published at https://medium.com/the-political-prism/fear-of-dei-d019250b216e

 

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