Abstract
The authors we choose to highlight in our syllabi are the voices that get amplified. From English to Economics, even the most progressive professors continue to assign mostly white, mostly male authors and those get passed down to our students (and the next generation of professors), creating a legacy of unrepresentative reading lists. Our purpose is to diversify our syllabi! The Syllabi Count Project is inspired by the VIDA Count program from the publishing world and offers a tool for professors to privately audit their own syllabi, delivering a clear assessment of the range (and lack) of diversity in source material. This can be scaled to audit a class, department, program, or school. Since 2010, the VIDA Count has broken down “40 literary journals and well-respected periodicals, tallying genre, book reviewers, books reviewed, and journalistic bylines to offer an accurate assessment of the publishing world” by manually graphing gender breakdowns. In a course titled “Emerging Trends in Publishing: Diversity & Technology” my students developed their own “counts” using gender, race, ability, and sexual orientation as plot-points. I completed the same assignment using a 15-year span of my own syllabi; directly after graduation, I parroted what I’d learned in my grad classes and my reading list was almost all white. In recent years I’ve made concerted efforts to diversify my syllabi, but even with these efforts the count showed where I was still failing. I will develop a scaleable method to “count” syllabi and track diversity in classroom reading.
Presenters
Kelly Mc MastersAssistant Professor of English and Director of Publishing Studies, English, Hofstra University, New York, United States
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
Gender, Equality, Diversity, Syllabi, Syllabus, Books, Authors, Technology, Graph
