Creating Space for Gender Equity and Inclusivity in our Pedagogical Practices
From what we teach to how we teach, there are numerous opportunities in our pedagogical approaches to either include or exclude individuals and perspectives, and to either expose and examine bias or else to perpetuate it (knowingly or unknowingly). At each step, we send messages to students and junior researchers entering the field about whose voice and which research matters, at the same time as we set up expectations about what it means to be a valued member of our field. In this talk, Prof. Kirsten Syrett will examine how the language of instruction, the materials we use to communicate concepts and field-specific phenomena, the language we use to outline our policies and practices, and our manner of presentation are all places where we can and should intentionally create space for gender equity and inclusivity in our pedagogical practices.
Kristen Syrett is an Associate Dean in the SAS Office of Undergraduate Education at Rutgers University – New Brunswick and an Associate Professor in the Department of Linguistics and the Rutgers Center for Cognitive Science (RuCCS). Her NSF-funded research on language acquisition and linguistic representation investigates how children acquire word meaning, and her experimental semantics and pragmatics research focuses on how we dynamically assign meaning to words and sentences in a discourse context. She has been recognized for her research, teaching, and mentoring with awards at the University level and in the field of Linguistics. Outside of her research, she is an advocate for gender equity and inclusivity in higher education and the field of Linguistics. She has served as a consultant and has been featured in the media as an expert on diversity, gender, and inclusive language.
This event is organized by Northwestern Buffett's Language Curricula and Gender Equality global working group. Register here.