There is much discussion about the importance of representation in the world of media, and its role in supporting equality and diversity. Exploring how it can help us as practitioners in the classroom in reducing bullying, reduce the impact of gender inequality and promote harmony and acceptance within our school communities can have a huge impact on the attendance and attainment of all our students.
Inequality restricts outcomes. For example, the ethnicity, gender, disability and sexuality pay gaps, create social inequality and vulnerability. LGBT+ students are more likely to experience mental health difficulties or self-harm due to bullying and stigma in school settings. Specific groups of SEND and Neurodivergent students are less likely to be in sustained and secure employment due to a failure of society in ensuring accessible employment. Understanding how to embrace and harness the power of diversity and inclusion can remove these barriers.
Focusing on diversity is often the first step to a more equitable society for all, but to achieve sustainable and successful outcomes we have to move beyond the simple acceptance and creation of diversity within our workplaces and schools, to authentic representation. Without this, we cannot fully challenge unconscious bias and gender stereotypes or achieve social justice. Acknowledging diversity and creating a classroom environment where all genders, sexualities, ethnicities, neurotypes are accepted and respected in their existence is only the start of a truly inclusive classroom.
It creates safe spaces, but not always safe communities. It begins to examine social differences, but it doesn’t always challenge underlying cultural or societal stereotypes (and may actually just push them underground) and diversity alone, will not always improve outcomes for under-represented groups. It is however, a very important step on the journey to true equity and inclusion.
The next step towards true inclusion, is to improve visibility of diversity. Displaying pride flags, including a wider range of genders or sexualities within resources, ensuring visual images are inclusive of a range of diverse communities, ethnicities and disabilities, ensuring schemes of work include source material from diverse voices or communities, allows students to feel seen by others and normalises diversity, whilst introducing them to a range of diverse perspectives.
Authentic representation
But if we really want to break those misconceptions and barriers to social justice, and those internal stigmas that prevent students from achieving their full potential, we must move towards authentic representation of diversity. Visibility for visibility’s sake can be problematic. Diversity and Visibility are often accused of being ‘woke’ or ‘tick-box’ exercises when it is done poorly and as educators, we need to avoid well-meaning ‘misrepresentation’ or cultural misappropriation. This can be navigated by ensuring that we represent the lived experiences of diverse voices rather than our assumptions of their experiences. However authentic representation helps us avoid tokenism, breaks down stereotypes and develop true societal inclusion of diversity. Authentic representation also helps break boundaries and remove glass ceilings of self-belief for those with protected characteristics.
If a disabled student never sees a disabled person like them being successful in adult life, they may never believe that is a world that is open to them. If an LGBT+ student, never sees an authentic representation of an LGBT+ person in leadership or an LGBT+ family, they may never move beyond the effects of the stigma and stereotypes that they face in society and the media. Conversely, if a student never experiences any connection with people from different cultures or communities, they may continue to hold damaging stereotypical views into adulthood. Representation impacts everyone within a community and teaches students to value diversity not just accept it, and this is the point where equality and inclusion becomes truly impactful.
Authentic representation should be critically evaluated, sustainable, have collective impact and show those that are being represented as valued, significant and a worthwhile part of all successful communities; people who have every right to belong and achieve in whatever they want. In short, all our students need to see people like them, being a typical part of society and being successful in areas in which they themselves hope to be successful such as attending university, leading a business, being in leadership and management, if we want to raise their aspirations and outcomes. It’s not enough to just increase the presence of marginalised groups in our schools. They need to see people like them, that they can relate to, achieving in society authentically to believe that they can do the same.
We must ask ourselves several critical questions when ensuring our classrooms and curricula include authentic representation:
what do we need to be visible?
why do we want it to be visible?
why do my students need it to be visible?
what do I need to understand as an educator to ensure that this is an authentic experience for my students?
Only then can we start to harness the full power of representation for our students.
