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Specialized Skills

To shed light on the development of gender and diversity issues, teach your students about the academic history of your field and its interdisciplinary relationships with other fields. You often need a reflective relationship with your own field’s culture to avoid excluding people and to invite change – even in your own teaching. Deliberately seek out questions in your field with relevance to Gender and Diversity Studies, such as criticism of science, debates over research methods and ethics, and feminist and/or post-colonial critiques. You can find some related materials under Course Content.

  • Especially at the start of their programs, students often know only a few names of major figures in their subject. Impart more diverse knowledge about significant contributors to your field, women as well as men, about their lives and contributions to the discipline’s history – taking an international view and freeing yourself from the established canon. More under Discipline-Specific Entry Points.
  • In all academic fields there is research specific to the discipline and specialized Women’s and Gender Studies and diversity-related debates. Familiarize yourself with the research findings from Women’s and Gender Studies and Intersectionality and Diversity Studies, both in your own discipline and beyond. This will make it easier for you to relate those findings to your own research areas and draw dynamic links to your teaching.
  • When cultivating gender- and diversity-conscious communication, you will benefit from basic knowledge about the workings and origins of prejudice and stereotypes and about structural and individual discrimination.Knowing the impact of social inequalities on organizations such as a university makes it easier to avoid reproducing certain mechanisms of exclusion. Here are some resources that can help you with this:
  • In uncertain situations it can be helpful to refer to legal frameworks. Under Resources, you can find materials about German and international universities, legal frameworks, policies for gender equity, funding support, guidelines, and programs that are potentially relevant to students with differing needs, including those relevant to gender and diversity.
  • People personally unaffected by these issues are often unfamiliar with the facts and figures about economic inequality, gender, heteronormativity, racism, ableism, migration, anti-Semitism, and other social inequalities (that may relate to a field, university or job market). However, knowledge about these relationships helps you organize your teaching to be more inclusive. Such statistics, including about discrimination, for example about the studying and working conditions of students and colleagues who don’t have German passports and/or experience discrimination and/or disability in everyday life, are available in the Social Survey conducted by the Deutsches Studentenwerk and from the Federal Anti-Discrimination Agency  and the Berlin State Office for Equal Treatment and Against Discrimination. You can also refer to materials about individual, collective, and structural strategies against discrimination compiled by academics, interest groups, and associations, including:

Version April 2017. Unless otherwise stated, this content is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International licence.