My journey through Graduate School to earn a Masters of Art in Education. I was on track to become a teacher, but now everything has changed, and I'm on the job hunt with a Bachelor's in Liberal Arts and a Master's in Education with no teaching certificate.

 
Last night we went through an exercize to illustrate how the politics of post-secondary education works, and we used proposals to diversify the curriculum to do it. Watching the role-playing was spooky, but several people (including the instructor) pointed it out to be very accurate. The administrators listen to all sides and basically do what they want anyway while trying to convince each side that they really have won.

What got me thinking, though, was diversity itself. How do we measure diversity? Do we simply say that any population with over 34% "minority" (read 'non-white') is diverse? What if that 34% is all from the same ethnic background. That's not multicultural, that's bi-cultural. How should we measure diversity in the population?

How should we measure diversity in the curriculum? What standards can we use? One of the arguments against diversification came from the science courses. I can see the value of reading a balanced set of works from great writers from all across history and the world, but will Biology or Math really change much?

Being a math person anyway, I know that the subject matter won't change. There is no 'black' way to solve quadratic equations, but different cultures have different 'number senses' and we can certainly point out more biographical details of the scientists and mathematicians that have made a difference. They aren't all white men.
posted by Josh English at 2/17/2004 08:15:00 AM