Are Chinese students better at math?
Are East Indian students more prone to plagiarize?
Do Korean students speak English better than Chinese students?
As I’ve been reflecting on what we can do to better manage the experience and success of our growing number of international students, and how this all impacts our domestic students, it dawned on me that one of the real problems – a kind of elephant in the room – is the implicit bias that people have. This may come as a surprise to many that read this, but many studies prove this to be the case. What is implicit bias exactly. The Kirwan Institute defines it as “the unconscious attitudes or stereotypes that can influence our decisions” (Kirwan Institute, 2016). This excellent, short video provides more insight into implicit bias in the classroom and the impacts it can have on how we teach and how we assess our non-white students.
I am so convinced that I am not biased and never have been (and certainly don’t want to be) that when I completed the Harvard IAT (Implicit Association Test)* for Skin Tone, and my results suggested that I have a strong natural preference for light-skinned people, I was dumb-founded. This is hard for me to say out loud and even harder for me to believe. I take great pride in my respect and equal treatment of all people but that’s exactly the problem with implicit bias: it’s hidden in your subconscious, you probably don’t even know it exists and it may be opposite from your explicit or outward actions regarding bias.
When you are monitoring students during an exam, do your eyes scan all your students equally or do you tend to focus on certain groups of students, concerned that they are more likely to cheat. In one study, “researchers found that when teachers were primed to look for behavioral problems while watching a classroom video with black and white children (none of whom were misbehaving), teachers gazed much longer at black children than white children, as if anticipating the behavioral problems would come from the black children” (Suttie, 2016).
If you’ve faced offences for a lack of academic integrity with one group of students from a particular country, do you automatically assume you will need to be more careful and cautious with other students from this same country? In advance of the start of this semester, the department I work for invited a member of our international department to come in to our divisional meeting and talk a little about his knowledge of India and Indian students in Canada as he’d travelled there on countless occasions. One of the notions he mentioned was that plagiarism was a far less serious offence in India and that cheating was rampant and acknowledged and encouraged by parents who wanted their children to get top jobs or get into top colleges or universities. My natural response after attending this session was to exercise more caution with my Indian students given these important revelations. Had I just inadvertently formed implicit bias? Did the information provided by the guest speaker do anything to help the Indian student to achieve academic success or enhance his or her Canadian education experience or might it have actually hindered it?
If teachers can have implicit bias, then certainly students will. One example of where this can have lasting effects is in multi-cultural group work. Group projects can be difficult at the best of times, but when we encourage our students to form their own culturally-mixed groups, it rarely happens. Birds of a feather stick together. Group projects bring differences in communication, cultural norms, values, and approaches to work and this can make it seem like more work than it needs to be, especially if students are forced to work with strangers from other countries. On the other hand, a study by Umbach and Kuh as cited in Reid and Garson concluded that “student experiences with diversity are positively associated with effective educational outcomes, such as improved intergroup interaction, critical problem solving, and student satisfaction” (2017). In other words, intercultural group work can be a very good thing!
So all this leaves us with a number of questions: what can we do about implicit bias? How can we encourage intercultural group work in our classes. In subsequent blog posts I hope to answer these questions and more. In the meantime, consider visiting the Harvard IAT link below to check on the status of your implicit biases.
We must never forget that our role as teachers and the opportunities this profession presents are quite remarkable. We are often the first regular and ongoing contact a student who is new to this country will have and how we manage this relationship can have a huge impact on how this student transitions to his or her life and whether we widen the cultural divide they experience or help build bridges to cross it.
*More information about this test and many other forms of implicit bias as well as the research being conducted by Project Implicit can be found by clicking here.
References:
Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity (2016). Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KBZPHE1oPJo
Reid, R. & Garson, K. (2017). Rethinking Multicultural Group Work as Intercultural Learning. Journal of Studies in International Education 21(3) pp.195-212. DOI: 10.1177/1028315316662981
Suttie, J. (2016). Four Ways Teachers Can Reduce Implicit Bias. Retrieved https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/four_ways_teachers_can_reduce_implicit_bias
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