• A good sense of your own (social) position and your role as a lecturer can help make you more self-aware of your (power) relationships with others. This can improve your didactic communication. You can learn about ways to reflect on your position at the Margherita von Brentano Center's training programs in intersectional teaching. These programs help you reflect both your position within a certain social group as well as your position as a professional in your role as a lecturer.

• Discrimination and discriminatory behavior can be changed (“undoing difference”) toward the end of achieving gender- and diversity-conscious interactions. Many hierarchical interactions are perpetuated through day-to-day behavior. This also occurs during teaching, for example, either due to unconscious distinctions that lead to treating male and female students unequally, or also to deliberately racist remarks. An important prerequisite for change is your desire and willingness to enact it. If interested, you can find out more about the workings and causes of discrimination, stereotypes, and prejudice – including at the university – under the Resources section. The more you know about how you yourself participate in discrimination – even unconsciously – or are personally affected by it, the more readily you can counteract it.
• You might have already encountered resistance when trying to teach in a gender- and diversity-conscious way or to persuade others of this approach. Training programs can help you practice options and strategies for perceiving such types of resistance and handling it with a focus on solutions. A realistic sense of your own didactic strengths and weaknessesand your own skills and abilities will help you gracefully accept criticism and identify the themes where you still have room to grow or would like to seek advice and discussion. The following two questionnaires provide useful feedback about your gender and diversity competency:
  • Online self-evaluation tool from the University of Fribourg (in German or French only)
  • Self-assessment tool from the DiVers project of the University of Cologne and RWTH Aachen University (in German)

• In your teaching, you probably often encounter issues that none of your individual skills enable you to solve because their causes lie outside your domain. This competency with lacking competency and the ability to live with uncertainty, knowledge gaps, and ambiguities makes it easier for you to handle situations for which you have no immediate solution.

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More under: Starter-Kit, Methods, Resources

Literatur:

Czollek, Leah C., und Gudrun Perko. 2008. Eine Formel bleibt eine Formel… Gender- und diversitygerechte Didaktik an Hochschulen: Ein intersektionaler Ansatz. Wien.

Kaschuba, Gerrit. 2004. Von der Wundertüte zum kontrollierten Einsatz? Anregungen zur prozessorientierten Entwicklung von Qualitätskriterien für Gender Trainings. In Geschlechterverhältnisse bewegen: Erfahrungen mit Gender Training, Hrsg. Netzwerk Gender-Training, 117–135. Königstein/Taunus: Helmer.

Mecheril, Paul. 2013. „Kompetenzlosigkeitskompetenz“. Pädagogisches Handeln unter Einwanderungsbedingungen. In Interkulturelle Kompetenz und pädagogische Professionalität, vol. 13, Interkulturelle Studien, Hrsg. Georg Auernheimer, 15–35. Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften.

West, Candace, und Sarah Fenstermaker. 1995. Doing Difference. Gender & Society, 9(1), 8–37.

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