Anti-racist curriculum development taps into personal investments in knowledge building, commitments to teaching, and areas of expertise. Faculty and instructors’ vested interests can mean that their motivation to examine anti-racism is qualitatively different from approaches that start with them as individuals and/or with institution-level policies. Anti-bias and implicit bias training, promoting the value of diversity and inclusion, and, more recently, work on anti-racist practices, have been a focus of professional development higher education faculty for years now.  Khalid (2021) points out, though, that such approaches often suffer from, “a conspicuous absence of academic departments … [and don’t] allow institutions to harness the knowledge and expertise that their faculty, students, and staff already have on issues of race and inequality” (❡11). Instructors’ disciplines and fields are a promising entry point. In my experience, instructors, administrators, and faculty exhibit heightened interest in and less resistance to change when the focus is on revising what and how we teach.

Anti-racist versus non-racist curriculum

Non-racist curriculum includes attention to racism, but stops short of analyzing why and how racism exists. Anti-racism pays explicit attention to sources of inequities, and challenges curricula that locate sources of inequities in people or communities, misrepresent them, or exclude them altogether. Anti-racist curriculum addresses historical, disciplinary, societal, and institutional practices that create inequity and maintain racism. The approach presented here assumes that:

• Institutional and societal racism exist and can be addressed in our courses, regardless of the content/focus.
• Our disciplines are also affected by and imbued with racism, and implicated in structural racism; further, we can use the tools, practices, and discourses of our disciplines/fields to confront sources of inequities, and wield them to enact anti-racist practices.
• We cannot address inequities solely by examining individual biases. We must also address structural, institutional, and disciplinary sources.
• We understand that intersectionality – the effects of societies’ differential valuing of varied dimensions of identity (race/ethnicity, gender, class, ability, nationality, religion, age, etc.) that create discrimination and privilege – is a central feature of anti-racism. 

These tenets serve as the foundation for syllabus evaluation and revision. They also provide a starting point in curriculum, different from more common approaches to diversity training. That difference is a powerful one encompassing core issues in anti-racist education that target meaningful, tangible change.

Why the syllabus?

 Course syllabi as the common focus for anti-racist work provides a hands-on target for larger curriculum revision. Of course, definitions of curriculum in higher education abound. Annala, Linden, and Makinen (2016) offer useful definitions as well as critiques:

[In the] syllabus approach to curriculum, the focus is on the content or body of knowledge that is to be transmitted, or subjects to be taught, or both (Kelly 2009/1977)…The notion of product in the curriculum stems from the work of Ralph Tyler (1949). … (1) defining learning objectives (goals), (2) introducing useful learning experiences (content). (p. 171)

These powerful aspects of curriculum form a backbone and common focus for instructors and students. There are cautions, though: “understanding curriculum as a syllabus is likely to hamper rather than assist curriculum change or development because it tends to proceed in a piecemeal way within subjects, rather than according to any overall rationale” (p. 171). This can lead to ignoring the inherent political and ethical issues that come with course design. Rather than treating the syllabus as THE curriculum, the approach taken here is broader:

in curriculum studies, the moral, political and ideological aims behind the various conceptualisations of curriculum [show that] curriculum cannot be fully understood outside the personal, institutional or societal power relations that reflect a certain historical context. Hence, we can see that the ways … curriculum reflect[s] what kind of knowledge, dispositions, learning conceptions and qualities are valued in [higher education] (Annala, Linden, & Makinen, 2016, p. 171, 172). 

Anti-racist curriculum development critically analyzes “what kind of knowledge, dispositions, learning conceptions, and qualities are valued” as purposefully represented in course syllabi, with anti-racist values and commitments guiding the analysis and revision. The politics of curriculum is treated as a central organizing principle regardless of discipline or field.

I developed this approach as an alternative or complement to academic development approaches such as implicit bias and recognizing microaggressions/microassaults training that have long been relied upon to address DEI (Porter & Rozell, 2022 on diversifying faculty; Hutchins & Kovach, 2019 on NSF-funded grants; Poole et al., 2021 in library sciences). A large body of work highlights limitations and resistance to these approaches. Dobbin and Kalev (2021) report that “two-thirds of colleges and universities have training for faculty according to our 2016 survey of 670 schools. … Yet hundreds of studies dating back to the 1930s suggest that antibias training does not reduce bias, alter behavior or change the workplace. … [and] trainers frequently report hostility and resistance” (p. 48, 50). In my experience of curriculum revision with faculty across disciplines, there is broad application of this work, due in part to the focus on broad or common features of syllabi and curriculum. Concrete action at the level of syllabi can foster changes in attitudes as a consequence of working through particulars of course content. Starting with what course objectives and goals include and ignore, what and who we are asking students to read, and how we assess learning can foster conversations, reflections, and significant shifts in instructors’ thinking and curricular choices.

References

Alter, A. L., Aronson, J., Darley, J. M., Rodriguez, C., & Ruble, D. N. (2010). Rising to the threat: Reducing stereotype threat by reframing the threat as a challenge. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 46(1), 166-171.

Annala, J., Lindén, J., & Mäkinen, M. (2015). Curriculum in higher education research. In Researching higher education (pp. 171-189). Routledge. 

Aronson, J., Fried, C. B., & Good, C. (2002). Reducing the effects of stereotype threat on African American college students by shaping theories of intelligence. Journal of experimental social psychology, 38(2), 113-125.

Banyard, Philip. Controversy and Psychology. Milton: Taylor and Francis, 2022. Web.

Barrett, H. C. (2020). Deciding what to observe: Thoughts for a post-WEIRD generation. Evolution and Human Behavior, 41(5), 445-453.

Cabrera, N. L. (2019). Critical race theory v. deficit models. Equity and Excellence in Education, 52(1), 47-54.

Crenshaw, K. W. (2006). Intersectionality, identity politics and violence against women of color. Kvinder, kön & forskning, (2-3).

Curry, M. J., & Lillis, T. (Eds.). (2017). Global academic publishing: policies, perspectives and pedagogies. Multilingual Matters.

Dobbin, F., & Kalev, A. (2018). Why doesn’t diversity training work? The challenge for industry and academia. Anthropology Now, 10(2), 48-55.

Esson, J. (2020). “The why and the white”: racism and curriculum reform in British geography. Area, 52(4), 708-715.

Fernandes, A., Khan, L.H., & Civil, M. (2017). A closer look at bilingual students’ use of multimodality in the context of an area comparison problem from a large-scale assessment

Educational studies in mathematics, 95(3), 263-282.

Flores, A. W., Bechtel, K., & Lowenkamp, C. T. (2016). False positives, false negatives, and false analyses: a rejoinder to “Machine Bias: there’s Software Used Across the Country to Predict Future Criminals. And It’s Biased Against Blacks.” Federal Probation, 80(2), 38–46.

Flores, N., & Rosa, J. (2015). Undoing appropriateness: raciolinguistic ideologies and language diversity in education. Harvard Educational Review, 85, 149-171.

Foster, S. & Kinuthia, W. (2003). Deaf persons of Asian American, Hispanic American, and African American backgrounds: a study of intraindividual diversity and identity. Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education, 8(3), 271-290.

González, N., Moll, L. C., & Amanti, C. (Eds.). (2006). Funds of knowledge: Theorizing practices in households, communities, and classrooms. Routledge.

Gray, R. (2021). Multimodality in the classroom presentation genre: Findings from a study of Turkish psychology undergraduate talks. System (Linköping), 99, 02522

Greene, D., & Oesterreich, H. A. (2012). White profs at Hispanic-Serving Institutions: Radical revolutionaries or complicit colonists?. Journal of Latinos and Education, 11(3), 168-174.

Guzmán-Valenzuela, C., & Gómez, C. (2019). Advancing a knowledge ecology: changing patterns of higher education studies in Latin America. Higher Education, 77(1), 115-133.

Hanafin, J., Shevlin, M., Kenny, M., & Neela, E. M. (2007). Including young people with disabilities: assessment challenges in higher education. Higher education, 54(3), 435-448.

Hutchins, H. M., & Kovach, J. V. (2019). ADVANCING women academic faculty in STEM careers: The role of critical HRD in supporting diversity and inclusion. Advances in Developing Human Resources, 21(1), 72-91.

 Inoue, A.B. (2019). Labor-based grading contracts : building equity and inclusion in the compassionate writing classroom. University of Colorado Press, Boulder, CO.

Iruka, I. U., Lewis, M. L., Lozada, F. T., Bocknek, E. L., & Brophy‐Herb, H. E. (2021). Call to action: centering blackness and disrupting systemic racism in infant mental health research and academic publishing. Infant Mental Health Journal, 42(6), 745-748.

Kelly, A. V. 2009. The Curriculum: theory and practice (6th edn). London: Sage (original work published 1977).

Kendi, I. X. (2019). How to be an antiracist. One world.

Khalid, A. (2021). How students are furthering academe’s corporatization: By insisting on bureaucratic solutions to diversity problems, they are empowering administrations at the expense of the faculty. The Chronicle of Higher Education, Retrieved from https://www.proquest.com/trade-journals/how-students-are-furthering-academes/docview/2639988218/se-2

Kishimoto, K. (2018). Anti-racist pedagogy: From faculty’s self-reflection to organizing within and beyond the classroom. Race Ethnicity and Education, 21(4), 540-554.

Klotz, S., & Whithaus, C. (2021). Contract grading as anti-racist praxis in the community college context. Empowering the Community College First-Year Composition Teacher: Pedagogies and Policies, 62.

Leathwood, C. (2005). Assessment policy and practice in higher education: Purpose, standards and equity. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 30(3), 307-324.

McArthur, J. (2016). Assessment for social justice: the role of assessment in achieving social justice. Assessment and Evaluation in Higher Education, 41(7), 967-981. https://doi.org/10.1080/02602938.2015.1053429

McDermott, M.A., & Hand, B. (2013). The impact of embedding multiple modes of representation within writing tasks on high school students’ chemistry understanding. Instructional science, 41(1), 217-246.

McGee, G. W. (2021). Closing the achievement gap: Lessons from Illinois’ Golden Spike high-poverty high-performing schools. In Closing the achievement gap (pp. 97-125). Routledge.

Mertkan, S., Arsan, N., Inal Cavlan, G., & Onurkan Aliusta, G. (2017). Diversity and equality in academic publishing: The case of educational leadership. Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education, 47(1), 46-61.

Progress in Reading and LIteracy (2022). Participating countries. https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/pirls/countries.asp

Poole, A. H., Agosto, D., Greenberg, J., Lin, X., & Yan, E. (2021). Where do we stand? Diversity, equity, inclusion, and social justice in North American library and information science education. Journal of Education for Library and Information Science, 62(3), 258-286.

Porter, T., & Rozell, M. J. (2022). A better way to increase faculty diversity: Institutions must go beyond vying for the same small group of minority scholars. The Chronicle of Higher Education, Retrieved from https://www.proquest.com/trade-journals/better-way-increase-faculty-diversity/docview/2641048641/se-2