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Teaching Through Microaggressions: Considerations for Faculty

ACCORDING TO THE AMERICAN COUNCIL on Education (2012), diversity in higher education has been shown to enrich educational experiences, promote personal growth, create a healthy society, strengthen communities and the workplace, and enhance America’s economic competitiveness. However, research suggests that diversity is not often readily accepted within the classroom by students driven by their personal perceptions and biases of working with diverse educators. Furthermore, racial ideologies are often projected across campus during communication and actions by students and faculty. Chester Pierce, writing in Education and Urban Society, originally coined the term microaggressions as “subtle, stunning, often automatic, and nonverbal exchanges which are ‘put downs’ of blacks.” Derald Wing Sue explained in the American Psychologist that targeted populations include marginalized groups based on their race/ethnicity, nationality, sexual orientation, gender identity, and religion within the targeted population. Everyday discriminatory microaggressions have been shown by Wong, Eccles, and Sameroff, writing in the Journal of Personality to be enduring and impactful to the mental and physical health of students and faculty. The insidious nature of microaggressions can impact the ability to fully teach and learn, resulting in debilitating side effects. The vitriolic side effects of microaggressions and the changing demographics across campuses in the United States necessities that these issues must be addressed. During the 2019–2020 academic year, we, minoritized women of color, applied and were selected, along with a handful of other faculty members across various career stages and disciplines, to participate in a year-long “Teaching for Inclusion, Equity, and Diversity” (TIDE) faculty fellowship at our predominantly White research-intensive institution. During the fellowship, we met to deepen our understanding of important topics related to student success, connect to theories, explore our lived experiences inside and outside the classroom, and engage in activities designed to explore first-hand a wide variety of instructional approaches related to inclusion, equity, and diversity in college classrooms. Drawing from our collective experiences during our fellowship, there was a strong interest in collaborating on this article after particularly challenging and engaging sessions on microaggressions. We also shared a strong desire and urgency to contribute to the body of literature within higher education and to share what we learned on the topic. Through brainstorming and learning about individual personal stories in the classroom and around the campus in different departments, we developed strategies for faculty to address microaggressions. Using the theoretical framework for microintervention strategies by Sue and coauthors, and learning from our lived experiences,