Embodying Diversity: Pedagogies of Transformation

Abstract

I work (without tenure) in a traditional, conservative, high-status, third-level institution, where the vast majority of students hail from upper middle-class families, private schools and privileged backgrounds. That is not to presume, however, that these students have not faced challenges and difficulties in their lives. In recent years there have been efforts to promote diversity within my college and to recruit ‘non-traditional’ students: those from working-class backgrounds, mature students and people with disabilities through a range of access programmes and by monitoring the percentage of minorities within the overall student population. (Non-European Union (EU) students have always been actively recruited on account of the inflated fees they pay.) I have often remarked that I quite literally embody diversity (female, queer, disabled, not of the majority nationality, visibly non-normative (i.e. tattooed and pierced) — to name but a few of the identity markers that could be applied to me). In my work I attempt to operationalise these locations not as rigid oppositional identity positions from which to argue against the normative/privileged Other but, rather, as portals through which to interrogate epistemological, empirical and pedagogical ethics and practices. For me, this is also a movement into embodiment; a holistic and transformative ethos that offers a radical alternative to dualistic notions of diversity in teaching, learning and research.