What compels us as teaching faculty to rethink our curriculum content and teaching/learning practices to better reflect diversity and promote equity?

For the Faculty of Environmental Studies (FES), the opportunity came as we were revisioning undergraduate curriculum in 2000-2002. It is rare that we take the time to step back and ask the bigger questions about what we teach, how, why and for whom. Curriculum review shakes up the normally ossified structures of our programs and courses, and allows us to reconsider our raison d'etre. Part of this process, we decided, was to re-imagine who we are, students and teachers, and what we are about in terms of diversity and equity, and how we engage equity issues in our course content and practices.

In 2002-2003, FES launched a Curriculum Diversity/Equity Project with a series of six workshops. This York pilot project was supported by the Centre for the Support of Teaching, along with the Centre for Human Rights and Equity and the Equity Committee of the York University Faculty Association, as well as specific cosponsors for each workshop.

The workshops provided fora for critical examination of curriculum around six key areas of equity: disabilities, sexual and gender diversity, Aboriginal ways of knowing, class and poverty, race and ethnicity, and gender. From October 2002 to March 2003, twenty-five to fifty students and faculty met monthly for three hours to hear panels focus on one equity area, to discuss our new areas of concentration in terms of these areas, and to propose new directions in FES policy and practice.

The stated objectives of the workshop series were to educate ourselves, to create a more inclusive community, to develop curriculum guidelines and to propose policy changes. One of the most important outcomes was that the workshops broke silences around equity issues that are often not discussed and created a space for ongoing debate and discussion.

"One of the things that drew me to FES was this kind of discussion. I've been hoping for this in more of my classes, but I've felt like there is a lot of very superficial touching on some of these issues, but not a lot of deeper analysis. It's something I really want to have more of." - Charles Levkoe, Graduate Program in Environmental Studies

An interlocking analysis of power

The Curriculum Diversity/Equity Project represents one response to York's mission statement:

York University is part of Toronto: we are dynamic, metropolitan, and multicultural. York University is part of Canada: we encourage bilingual study, we value tolerance and diversity. York University is open to the world: we explore global concerns.

We add the word "equity" because "diversity" initiatives do not always address the power relations implicit in teaching and learning contexts, and because we believe equity-seeking groups should direct the kind of curriculum transformation we advocate.

In fact, both diversity and equity are loaded terms, and need to be deconstructed even as they are engaged. The Curriculum Diversity/Equity Project thus promotes the exploration of equity areas, but also challenges the categories themselves as socially constructed and limiting. In particular, we want to guard against a fixing of these categories, all of which are fluid and contested, as well as any treatment of them in isolation from one another. Even as we may focus on a particular equity area, we encourage an analysis which considers their interrelationships. An interlocking analysis of power, or intersectionality, promotes a more complex examination of the ways in which these aspects of identity constantly shift and mutually shape each other.

While we explicitly addressed six select areas of equity, there are many others which we could have taken and should take into account. Religion, for example, is central to personal identity and social conflict in these times; another equity area concerns the relationship between nations of the socalled "south" and "north." Finally, in the Faculty of Environmental Studies where this project originated, we challenge the way in which human/non-human relationships have been constructed and question humancentric views, proposing more biocentric perspectives.

Any group undertaking an equity initiative should name their own issues of power, identifying which aspects and relationships most shape their experience of teaching and learning in their own context.

From 'perfect stranger' to 'creating a new imaginary'

One of the biggest challenges of diversity and equity work is acknowledging our own locations within positions of privilege and oppression, and recognizing that we are all implicated in relationships of power based on these different dimensions of equity. One panellist offered the metaphor of the "perfect stranger" in suggesting that many proclaim innocence or disconnection if they are not part of a marginalized group:

"There's a way in which this position as perfect stranger allows a kind of innocence and a kind of not being responsible, because that's out there. And I am perfect stranger, therefore I don't need to worry about it or I can't do it; therefore, I don't have a responsibility to do it...

But we're not perfect strangers to one another...because in fact we do have a relationship. If we want to contribute to a new and better relationship, we need to recognize ourselves in relationship to that history and in relationship to each other." - Susan Dion, Faculty of Education

We also attempted to integrate a critical analysis with a creative exploration of alternative ways of thinking and acting, or as one resource person described it, creating a new imaginary.

"I don't see anything of my life ever being reflected anywhere. I deal with Eurocentrism as an everyday reality. I deal with heteronormativity as an everyday reality, because my being lesbian, a dyke, a homosexual is not reflected anywhere either...

How does that get addressed? How do we construct a new imaginary and a new grammar that can address the (York University) mission statement? Because that's what we're asking everyone to do. We're asking everyone to imagine something different from heteronormativity and something different from Eurocentrism - and that requires not just reading differently or writing against the grain but actively imagining against the grain." - Sharmini Fernando, Graduate Program in Environmental Studies

Our goal in transforming curriculum is to move from "perfect stranger" to a position where we are ready, with others, to work at "creating a new imaginary." We begin this process through dialogue, through opening ourselves up to new curriculum ideas and pedagogical practices.

"What I'm trying to emphasize is dialogue. How will we talk with each other? And that's a big issue. It's not just here. This is like a microcosm of society: how will we talk to each other out there? It seems to me that the key thing is that everybody has to bring themselves, their selves, to the situation. If you just bring the book to the situation, it really constrains what happens. So, for me, the question is how can I create an environment, a space in which people will feel that they can really bring their self into the material that we're dealing with." - Ron Sheese Centre for the Support of Teaching

One of the outcomes of our collective examination of FES curriculum was a set of guidelines for use by teaching faculty in re-designing (individually and collectively) curriculum in general and in courses in particular to better respond to diversity and equity concerns (see page 3). Another outcome was the development of a video resource kit (see page 4). Further, an index of human resources at York that address issues of diversity and equity were developed (see insert), along with a bibliography of readings in the six equity areas (available on cst web site).