What does it mean to successfully engage diversity, equity, and inclusion in a classroom or institutional setting in a way that is transformative? This panel invites critical engagement from psychology, religion, and pedagogical perspectives in relation to both the value and limits of DEI paradigms for rectifying power imbalances and other issues in pedagogical spaces. What does transformative pedagogy in relation to DEI concerns look like? How might DEI paradigms contribute to equitable and inclusive change or does the focus on DEI let institutions and/or faculty off the hook for deeper work on decolonizing the academy?
This paper argues that progress ought to be considered a key term in the study of religion and memory through an examination of institutional practices of the memorialization of slavery sweeping across our colleges and universities. These efforts, while necessary, are ultimately insufficient in confronting material and epistemological legacies of slavery. I address the moral incompleteness of these projects, which ultimately serve an institutional and national narrative of progress. Remembering for the sake of progress not only undermines historical narratives of violence and tragedy and further marginalizes archival absences, as Saidiya Hartman makes clear; memory-making devoted to progress—and the architectural projects and DEI initiatives it inspires—fails to meaningfully address the demands of local descendant communities and student activists and confront the realities of anti-Black racism endemic to the academy.
A paradox lies at the heart of German theological education. Students of theology in Germany are overwhelmingly white, native speakers of German, and members of either a mainline Protestant or the Roman-Catholic church. But after graduation, they will teach the subject “religion” in public schools, many of them full-time. Pupils there come from a wide variety of ethnic backgrounds, adhere to many faiths (or none), and often bring with them experiences of discrimination that their teachers have never had to endure. What does a successful, transformative engagement with diversity, equity, and inclusion in a course of study look like under these circumstances? What can educators hope to achieve regarding societal power imbalances? To answer these questions, presentation draws on the notion of a “post-migrant society”, a sociological concept prominently advanced by Iranian-German scholar Naika Foroutan, which has recently found its way into the debate on inclusive pedagogy in Germany.
DEI paradigms contribute to equitable and inclusive change to the extent they decenter pedagogical authority and foster the co-creation of knowledge. DEI paradigms do not decenter the power of knowledge holders by default. They can, and often do, instead reify “status quo” power structures. However, DEI paradigms can also work to decolonize the power of knowledge in the classroom. DEI models have been developed toward that end, and yet even so, traction for liberatory change is difficult to obtain. This paper presents the claim that societal and group level trauma patterns can stagnate DEI work and accordingly that attention to trauma healing on the organizational level opens a way forward. In applying trauma theory to DEI paradigms, this paper advances the claim that organizational trauma healing is necessary for DEI to be transformative in the classroom.