Microaggressions: Language Matters with Colin Harrison

Teaching for Student Success

In daily life, we seem inundated by negative talk and negative messaging. Open the newspaper, listen to talk radio, don’t even start me on social media! But our classrooms, our classrooms should be a sanctuaries, safe places to have civil, open discourse on contentious and non-contentious issues. Whew! That sounds like a slice of heaven, doesn’t it? Peace.

Even in these ideally safe places, we need to be aware of inappropriate aggressive language that can creep in, that can negatively impact the security of this safe zone, that can negatively impact the performance of students. The aggressive language can be so subtle in some ways, that they have been termed “microaggressions”. These microaggressions that we will talk about may come from anyone in our classrooms, students, the jokester in the back, or faculty. But these microaggressions, these words can influence the experiences, persistence, and performance of students in our courses, particularly our underrepresented, marginalized and historically excluded students.

So, if we are concerned about ensuring that all students feel that they belong in our classrooms, if we are concerned about the success of each and every student, then we need to think about this issue of small aggressions and we must confront them.

In this episode, I welcome Dr. Colin Harrison to talk about his 2018 CBE Life Sciences publication “Language Matters: Considering Microaggressions in Science” co-authored with Dr. Kimberly Tanner.