At a recent webinar on the future of grading, Dr. Susan D. Blum spoke passionately about the need for faculty in relative positions of privilege—tenured, White, male, economically secure, etc.—to be public about their experiments in alternative grading schemes. While I’ve said something similar in other contexts, Blum’s forceful insistence that those of us with more academic safety leverage our identities to provide greater safety to our less-secure colleagues got me thinking about how to explain this to colleagues who spend less time thinking about intersectionality and positionality. This piece is my attempt to do just that—to explain why those with more privileged identities and secure faculty roles must be allies in creating more inclusive learning environments.

Reflecting on identities

To do this work requires first spending some time in intentional reflection on the various identities we each possess. One of my favorite tools for doing so is the Social Identity Wheel exercise, which I first encountered in reading Beverly Daniel Tatum’s book, Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? And Other Conversations About Race. In the summer of 2020, along with Dr. Cheryl Hendry of Gallatin College (a two-year college within the Montana State University system), I helped co-facilitate a small group of educators who read Daniel Tatum’s book. The 15 or so faculty who joined this group spanned the globe and committed to weekly meetings to discuss the book, our own experiences with race and racism, and how to integrate what we were learning into our teaching. 

In a scene forever seared into my memory, Daniel Tatum describes an exercise she often begins her classes and workshops with, one in which she asks participants to reflect on their class, social, and ethnic backgrounds in small groups. She recounts, “White participants…often pause before responding. On one such occasion a young White woman quickly described herself as middle-class but seemed stumped as to how to describe herself ethnically. Finally, she said, ‘I’m just normal!’” Daniel Tatum hypothesizes that we notice parts of our identity that distinguish us from others—those that “other people notice, and that reflect back to us,” but not those where we are part of the “dominant or advantaged group.” 

I had an experience early in college that resonated with Daniel Tatum’s words. I grew up in a small town in northern Arkansas, a place with little (visible) diversity of any kind—racial, ethnic, religious, etc. I went to college in Washington, DC, a veritable melting pot with more diversity in a single dorm floor than in my entire county back home. My first college boyfriend was Jewish—a faith tradition I’d heard about, sure, but knew next to nothing about. Suffice it to say, more than once I found myself realizing that the assumptions I made about the people I knew were, at best, incorrect—and often, unwittingly, quite racist.

Exploring social identities

After reading this part of Daniel Tatum’s book, I wanted to experiment with this tool. I found the University of Michigan’s Inclusive Teaching resource site. There, they provide a host of useful tools for educators looking to build more equitable learning spaces, including a guided Social Identity Wheel exercise. I used their resources to guide my own reflections on identity, both in how my identities impact how I do (or do not) feel I fit into the world and, importantly, reflecting on how parts of my identity impact how others see or interact with me. It’s a great structured introduction to what can be quite challenging and even emotional inner work.

What I’ve just described is, essentially, a reflective exercise on intersectionality (What are the layers of my identity?) and positionality (How does my constellation of intersectional identities affect my interactions with others?). Read more about these two concepts here.

My social identity wheel looks like a collection of privileged and historically marginalized identities. I’m White, I’m decidedly middle class, I was born in the United States and speak English as my first language. But I’m also a woman living in culture with strong patriarchal undercurrents (despite unmistakable progress on this in the last 100 years), and I have multiple hidden disabilities that impact how I relate to others. 

Now take all that introspection and reflection, and we’ll do the real work here—adding the third layer of embracing an alternative, progressive paradigm of what an educational space is meant to look like.

To conceptualize this, I offer up the following visuals, with a few caveats:

1. These tables might suggest dichotomies (mainstream vs. marginalized identities, for example), but bear in mind that these are spectra. Very few people will possess an entirely mainstream identity; few also have entirely marginalized identities. 

2. As with any attempt to reduce complex human interactions into a simple model, there are likely exceptions to everything presented below. These visuals are meant to demonstrate probabilities, not the sum total of every person’s experience.

3. Across both visuals below, I encourage you to think about the relative psychological and positional safety of the individuals across these spectra. Notice how they differ depending on the person’s role in education—educator or learner. We’ll think about that a bit later.

When you look at these charts together, you see the extent to which structural oppression is deeply embedded in our systems of education. In particular, notice that the bottom right corners of these two visuals demonstrate that empowering students comes at the greatest risk for those who would have most benefited from empowering educational structures. These visuals should also make clear the power of progressive pedagogical practices—and why they are so often described as liberatory practices. They liberate students. At the same time, though, they endanger the most vulnerable faculty members who choose to embrace them without adequate support. Institutions abhor change; educational systems maintain the status quo by subjecting those who dare critique the systems to far greater scrutiny.

This is why the part about having adequate support is vital to the conversation—and why Blum’s passionate argument is one worth repeating over and over with our colleagues. Indeed, in so much of the literature on dismantling systems of oppression in education, we emphasize that majority-group-identified persons must lead. Bettina Love writes about this powerfully in her book, We Want to Do More Than Survive: “We cannot have conversations about racism without talking about Whiteness. White folx cannot be co-conspirators until they deal with the emotionality of being White.” Others echo this, such as Moore et al. (2017), who write that “White women are in the driver’s seat in the classroom in America. We don’t have an option here. White women have to do this work.”

These figures make clear why. My Whiteness affords me greater safety in writing this blog post, for example. Too often, though, the legacy of White supremacy causes White people to feel shame or defensiveness or resistance whenever the topic of race comes up—or, indeed, any sort of systematic oppression or privilege. So we shy away from, or actively shun, these difficult and vulnerable conversations. The fear we might feel is entirely rational fear. What if we stumble and phrase something inelegantly, or say something out of ignorance that might cause harm to others? The harm that follows ranges from hurt feelings to being pilloried publicly for our missteps. Rationally, our impulse is to turn away from these conversations, or to outsource them to colleagues of color and play it safe ourselves.

This impulse is entirely rational—it’s known, it’s safe. But the faculty grid (Figure 1) explains why we must simply do it anyway. It’s not as safe for our historically minoritized colleagues to do this work for us. We’ve asked enough of them historically; it’s time for us to show up and lead on this work.

The more you practice doing this work—starting these conversations, thinking about your own intersectional identities and positionality—the easier/more comfortable it will become. It can be especially helpful to find a trusted friend (or circle of friends) to have conversations with greater psychological safety. At my last institution, we created a small anti-racist discussion group. Very often, these monthly meetings would have just a handful of participants and no particular agenda. Faculty, staff, and students were all engaged, across racial, gender, and economic identities. They were some of the most curiosity-driven, thoughtful conversations about race and privilege I’ve ever had.

As I’ve become more comfortable leading and participating in these conversations, I’ve begun prompting my students to engage with the Social Identity Wheel exercise on their own. I do not ask students to disclose the identities that they place on their individual wheels—not to me, and certainly not to their classmates. They do this exercise outside of class, with a video I made to guide them through the activity. All I ask them to share is a general reflection on the overall experience of thinking about their identities and how they shape their interactions with others. 

I want to caution that doing this work requires trust and psychological safety, neither of which we can assume in diverse groups who are not actively and freely choosing to engage in these conversations. In other words, I strongly caution against whipping out the Social Identity Wheel in a faculty meeting or as a first-day-of-class icebreaker. To do so would be to chase others’ intersectional identities to hide in dark corners of the community you’re building. Instead, I recommend using University of Michigan’s Personal Identity Wheel exercise. It allows participants to share components of themselves that are less likely to invite exclusion or reinforce existing structural oppression.

That Personal Identity Wheel is also an excellent in-person activity serving as a prelude to the more vulnerable Social Identity Wheel activity done asynchronously. If you want to use the Social Identity Wheel activity with others synchronously, be sure you have taken the time to establish trust and psychological safety, and ensure every person understands that participation is by invitation and not by demand. 

Dr. Liz Norell is passionate about great teaching and student success. As a political scientist (well, really, a political psychologist), she's motivated to understand how/why we develop the political beliefs we do ... and how to have more productive dialogue across differences. As a faculty member and mentor, she loves brainstorming ways to make classrooms more inclusive, engaging, exciting, relevant, and welcoming spaces for learning. She embraces pedagogies of equity and care, including the full spectrum of ungrading. She would love to talk to you about your teaching. Also check out her interview with Michelle Cottrell-Williams!