I have always experienced higher education as a place of diversity, but that diversity is often unrecognized and unaccounted for, and I feel implicated in both its celebration and its tacit exclusion. Like many others, I have tried to make a home in the university, and for myself it has often been a welcoming place, but the more embedded I become the more I recognize the urgency of making this home hospitable to everyone who crosses its threshold. The real challenge of diversity, I believe, is not simply fostering respect and inclusion but being able to recognize and accept new, unexpected ways of knowing and learning. That is, the same things that diversity adds to the university—a wealth of new perspectives, languages, emotions, and forms of understanding—also make those who bring this diversity to us subject to experiences of confusion, anger, disappointment, and unacknowledged disadvantage. My goal, then, is to cultivate an ethos of openness and responsiveness to difference and divergence, even when it results in discomfort.
As a teacher, a tutor, and a departmental colleague, I have learned from uncomfortable experiences in which I failed to recognize and affirm such diversity. I still vividly remember the disheartened voice of a tutoring client, a Black man and an older, non-traditional student, when he realized that I wasn’t going to tell him whether the thesis of the paper he was outlining was correct or not. I remember, as well, the shocked anger of a Korean graduate student when I balked at his request for directive grammar editing during a tutoring appointment. And I remember the disappointed confusion of a disabled, wheelchair-using student when I explained to him that I couldn’t give him a better grade on his multimodal composition assignment because his father had shot the video and performed the voice-over. In each case, I was responding according to my received principles of tutoring and teaching—don’t promise an objective evaluation of a writer’s work; be non-directive on style and grammar; make sure the students are completing their own assignments—rather than responding to the person in front of me. Although I still recognize the utility of those principles, I also recognize in hindsight that in each of these experiences I was refusing to admit the imbalance of privilege that structured the encounter: between a white, traditional student and a Black, non-traditional one; between a native English user and a nonnative user; and between an able-bodied teacher, who thought nothing of operating a phone camera and speaking into the microphone, and a disabled student, whose body and voice did not comply to that assumed standard.
In turn, I have developed a more responsive approach to affirming diversity and inclusion in my teaching and my work as a tutor, administrator, and mentor. I have grown to appreciate the possibilities opened up by simply being flexible and listening closely to students who are struggling. Each time, I learn something about what it’s like to enter the university in a marginalized body due to race or disability, to navigate expectations designed for people who speak a different language or come from a different culture. I learned to offer alternative deadlines to students with a night shift job or a challenging mental illness. I learned to simply ask international students individually how they would like me to respond to their language use, and to cherish the shared excitement of talking through the differing nuances of Mandarin and English. And I discovered how important it was for me to come out to my students as a transgender non-binary person, to be clear with them how I wanted to be addressed and make it clear that I would address them how they wanted. I am going to remember the surprise and gratitude in the voice of the student who stayed behind on the first day of class to tell me how happy he was to find another queer person, and a teacher no less, in this unfamiliar (and, for him, overly homogenous) environment. Although I know that higher education is still a strange and unwelcoming place for many people, I am committed to making this a place of inclusion, accessibility, and diversity.
Deanna Tomasin McCormick 