The department of special education, rehabilitation and counseling hosted a cross-cultural student dialogue in hopes of gathering feedback on both the current state of cultural awareness in classrooms at Auburn and how to introduce it into the curriculum.
The event was held on Monday, March 27 at the Cross-Cultural Center for Excellence.
Attendees were prompted with questions about social justice, cultural diversity and class curricula, discussing them in smaller groups before introducing their ideas to the entire audience.
Felix Huang, first-year graduate student in community planning, said professors may be nervous about bringing multiculturalism in the classroom for fear of showing cultural biases.
Huang said professors may also have a hard time finding ways to logically apply these concepts to their areas of expertise.
“It’s going to be very difficult for [professors] to just actively encourage it, especially if it’s a science or something,” Huang said, “not only because of incorporating topics like that but also because of perception of possible bias they may have.”
Adeola Fayemi, manager of diversity and inclusion, said many professors put their research first and teaching second.
“One thing I have heard is about the research focus of most professors, the focus will be on research and not teaching and [they] think about cultural diversity issues as extraneous to the subject matter,” Fayemi said. “One thing I’ve done [in my training] is to create a safe zone before the class starts, so they know that this is a safe place that helps people feel more comfortable.”
Marilyn Cornish, one of the program’s lead coordinators, said the goal of the project was to gather and apply student feedback.
Cornish said the program will be followed up with dialogues aimed more at faculty.
“We’ve been having conversations among faculty, among others about the extent to which we are or are not addressing culture and social justice issues in the classroom and through some of those conversations we’ve realized a lot of it is faculty either not knowing how or not being comfortable or having specific worries about what’s going to happen,” Cornish said. “We thought it would be important to have people come in, talk about these issues and hopefully break down some of those barriers.”
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