Using language to teach diversity Amalia Arvaniti Department Linguistics UCSD My active involvement with teaching diversity has been in part a result of my experience at UCSD. I joined the UCSD faculty ten years ago and it soon became apparent to me that despite the evident demographic diversity in the student, staff and faculty population, there was generally less tolerance for diversity than I would have anticipated, and even less awareness of its effects. As an example, I mention here the comments found in CAPEs (the teaching evaluations of UCSD). CAPE rudimentary statistics and student comments used to be published in annual volumes that as a newly arrived faculty member I decided to peruse. I was shocked to see plenty of comments about instructors with “accents as thick as a telephone directory.” Comments like these reflected a lack of sensitivity on the part of the students, a considerable number of whom are themselves likely to speak with distinct accents or have immediate family who do (http://www.ucsd.edu/explore/about/facts.html). Equally telling is the lack of awareness – both then and now – on the part of faculty and administrators relying on CAPEs to asses an instructor’s competence of the negative impact that a foreign accent can have on the impression a person makes overall and on an instructor’s evaluations in particular, even though such effects are well documented (e.g. Rubin & Smith, 1990; Lippi-Green, 1997; Jiang Bresnahan et al. 2002). 1 In order to address these issues in the classroom, in the past few years I have adopted several strategies, the aim of which has been to maximize the coverage of diversity. My overall goal is not to confine discussion of diversity to specific topics with which diversity issues are obviously related, but rather, to seize additional opportunities to address diversity in the classroom. Obviously, some classes naturally lend themselves to such discussions; e.g. diversity is an inevitable topic when teaching classes that deal with gender or societal norms of language use. However, it is not difficult or contrived to incorporate discussions of diversity in courses that are traditionally seen as unrelated to diversity, a view that applies to many of the courses in my field, linguistics, but to many others as well, since most issues have a political dimension that does involve diversity in some way. For example, in classes on formal linguistics, it is always assumed that “language” refers to some standard version of the language under discussion, such as “General American English” (which is based largely on Mid-western varieties). Since most of the UCSD students do not speak General American English, I always discuss the ways in which their varieties may differ from it, as well are the origins of such variability in terms of geographical location, gender, class, education and sexuality. In addition, if one wishes to incorporate diversity in the classroom, it is not necessary to limit the discussion of diversity to the narrowly defined class topic. For example, in my 1 I am using the word diversity in a broad sense to encompass not only groups of officially designated underrepresented minorities but anyone who does not belong to the majority in some way. This broader definition, which is within the spirit of the conference, certainly includes the many immigrants and foreign visitors who work and study at UCSD. These groups deserve some of our attention, since they are usually ignored in discussions of diversity and their experiences with discrimination are generally less visible. I would further argue that a non-inclusive view of diversity can lead to effective self-censorship of intolerance but does not address the real issue; it simply refocuses the lurking prejudice to groups one feels it is safe to discriminate against.