Diversity Statement

My philosophy on diversity has been shaped by multiple forces – my experience as a woman at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in the early 1990’s, where I was in the minority and my motives suspect.; my time working with urban youth in Troy, Philadelphia, and Baltimore; my science and environmental education work with Princeton Public Schools, where there is a community of color, many of whom are immigrants, surrounded by wealth and privilege; and lastly, my studies and teaching at Rutgers. Each experience, each stumble, each class discussion has helped build my view now: that we are better individuals, and a better society, when we keep our eyes open to different perspectives and different experiences.

Diversity, of course, comes in many forms – racial, cultural, religious, gender identity, (dis)ability, sexuality, socioeconomic and family statuses – and there is a high degree of intersectionality as well. We encounter all of these in our classroom, whether they are visible or not. It is our job as educators and teacher educators to make space in our classrooms, to create an openness for difference. We must create a culture of inclusion in our classrooms and in our research.

As an educator, I first came face to face with diversity beyond skin color working at the Schuylkill Center for Environmental Education in Philadelphia. I worked training elementary teachers and students in water quality monitoring, first with a visit to the Center property and then in parks near their schools. On their Center visit, students were often scared, sometimes terrified, of the forest in which we walked. To see something that I had enjoyed, that had brought me comfort, through the eyes of children who saw strangeness and danger was a powerful experience to me. This along with finding bullet casings and drug paraphernalia in their parks and hearing from one student that “this is the park where my aunt was killed” made me realize that differences went beyond skin color, to lived experiences. That was the first turning point for me.

My work in Princeton as a naturalist in residence and then as the coordinator for a student-directed science research program in the elementary schools was very rewarding and illuminating. I began to learn about accommodations for learning (dis)abilities, psychological diagnoses, and physical differences. For the first time, I began to work extensively with special education students, most of whom were Latinx and Black, and many were English language learners. This time solidified my beliefs that while not everyone thrives in a classroom, this does not reflect their intelligence. I saw students read independently for the first time on a nature trail. I saw a student who had multiple diagnoses, but was a truly gifted naturalist, seeing patterns and details that I had missed for years. I also saw first-hand the intersection of privilege and wealth with student classification and accommodations.

My course work during my graduate program at Rutgers, and later my own reading, provided me with a framework to better understand these experiences and then translate them into my own instruction. I have taught three different classes at the college level, all for future formal and informal educators. I have had prescribed accommodations for learning disabilities and visual impairment, but I try consistently to go beyond that in making my classroom inclusive. In my Educational Psychology class, I obviously taught about individual and group differences, and wove working with special populations throughout the semester. I also try to make the invisible visible for my students. I am open about being a first-generation student, and about the struggles I have faced along the way that in retrospect were connected with that. I make a conscious effort to find images and videos for my classes that depict people of all different bodies. My syllabus includes campus resources for mental health and learning assistance, and a child-care statement, and we revisit both during the semester. I always ask students (in a confidential survey) for their preferred pronouns and names, which I make sure to use in class. I make space in my assignments for calling on and reflecting upon life experiences.

My research also reflects my engagement with diversity. The contextual view of environmental literacy, because it is situated in social-ecological systems, allows for different ways of knowing, and funds of knowledge. The assessment uses, in part, practice based tasks that examine how educators engage with issues, and addresses environmental justice as an integral part of advanced environmental literacy.

I am not perfect in my diversity efforts. I recognize that I bring a certain amount of privilege to the table. But I have seen the impacts of interpersonal and systemic racism, sexism, and bias on my friends, colleagues, and most importantly my students, so I work to continuously improve my inclusive practices. I look forward to learning about new practices that can improve my teaching and research.