1 Equity, Diversity, Inclusion (EDI)
In the 2020s, educational institutions have widely adopted Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) as a core philosophy, value system, and service mandate. In addition to the scope of work outlined in the previous section, there is a growing expectation that instructional practices will serve to implement a general EDI approach. The previous section stated that instructors have considerable choice and freedom in how they conduct class business. This remains true. But what is changing in the current environment is that outcomes for students are weighing more heavily in the calculus of instructional success. Less and less, is a claim to be teaching well sustainable if the students are not learning well. Moreover, through EDI lenses, student learning outcomes are going to get disaggregated by race, gender, age, handicapping condition, and just about any other demographic category. An instructional program cannot work just for this race or that gender or only for students with a certain socio-economic or cultural background. Programs with such disparate outcomes will fail to meet the ever more explicit EDI requirements of schools both public and private. So freedom for the instructor, yes. But with a growing list of implicit and explicit obligations to meet a wide horizon of student learning needs. The challenge of making EDI specific, actionable, workable, functional, and demonstrable is a key motivation for why this guide exists. This is a systems document for systems thinkers. Love for common humanity and a passion for social justice does not translate directly into effective instructional practices for IT. Conversely, in today’s world, no IT instructional practice (regardless of technical wizardry) will be considered effective if it excludes major portions of humanity or offends against social justice. Like it or, IT education, like all education, is only getting more framed by social, political, and cultural conderations. This guide is looking to strike a balance between technical capability on the one hand, and social and cultural diversity on the other.
Adopting an IT mentality for the task at hand (see the previous Overview section on this), it appears we need a data dictionary. What, operationally, are we expressing with the component terms of EDI? Let’s break these terms down one at a time.
- Equity – in some sense treating students equally. Providing equal access.
- Diversity – respecting differences of race, gender, culture, language, socio-economic status, age, physical condition, life situation.
- Inclusion – letting people in. Not keeping people out.
The last one, Inclusion, is very central to understanding the EDI dimension of IT instruction. What, exactly, are students to be included in? Society in general contains a variety of component sub-systems (families, communities, neighborhoods, businesses, clubs, political parties, religions, voluntary associations, etc.). All of these are bounded. For ea