PLEASE CREATE FOUR SUBSTANTIAL PARAGRAPHS FOR EACH PEER

DISCUSSION DIVERSITY PEERS

PLEASE CREATE FOUR SUBSTANTIAL PARAGRAPHS FOR EACH PEER.

For your response posts, address the following:

1. How might your vision of your future be expanded by your peers’ insights about their changing awareness of diversity?

Remember, this assignment is graded on the quality of your initial post and at least two response posts to your classmates. If you refer to any sources, be sure to include attribution (or citation) to the resource.

PEER 1

Erica

The ways in which my definition of diversity has changed has been how diversity can be experienced from your sex and race at the same time. It can affect how you get healthcare, your employment, and how the world perceives you doing simple everyday tasks. I have also learned how diversity is seen through different lenses. I did my paper on the number of missing and murdered indigenous women and viewed it from a social lens, but there is a historical lens going back to colonization. There is the humanitarian lens from how their culture and life on reservations cause the issue as well.  Shifting awareness of diversity affects my future by making me a better employee by incorporating diversity at my jobs. It allows becoming an advocate when I see something that isn’t fair. I can teach my coworkers about the quizzes to show them if they are being explicitly or implicity biased.  I hope this class has strengthened my role in society and allows me to better educate my children about diversity as well.

PEER 2

Lori

This has been a very interesting course and a nice, thought provoking class to conclude my degree with. I’m not sure that my definition of diversity has changed over this course. I do believe that my understanding of my role in perpetuating stereotypes or bringing awareness to diversity has shifted. I also think that this course has brought to light more of the intricacies in diversity that I was not aware of before, such as intersectionality and the differences between explicit and implicit bias. This course has helped me better understand such nuances when discussing diversity, and to be become more aware, inquisitive, and investigative about the layers at play in day-to-day situations that I would not have previously defined as a diverse experience.

I hope that these shifts in diversity awareness enable me to be a better teacher. Currently, I hope to be a better teacher for my children and educate them about the diverse world around them, the layers that make up their communities, as well as the benefits from a diverse understanding of people, places, culture, etc. In the future, in my career, I hope to be a park ranger of some sort, working with kids to help them learn about and love the outdoors. In this position, I hope to continue to educate about the power and complexities of diversity. There are parallels between the benefits to biodiversity in the environment that I can use as an example.

MODULE OVERVIEW

Congratulations, you made it to Module Eight! You certainly deserve to take a moment to celebrate your success, dedication, and accomplishments. The past few weeks have challenged you to think about many big, important questions within diversity.

The skills you have learned all lend themselves to critical analysis of any current concept or social construction you might encounter. The core of our analysis has been understanding the ways diversity has been central to expanding our ideas of the possible. Within that, it is recognizing that including people different from us is what creates new ideas, new ways of doing things, and more insights into the work that we do.

As you complete this course, we offer one more way to think about diversity. In the larger societal conversation, achieving diversity in a particular context often hints at the idea that things will then be fine or even perfect. If a group can just find the right balance of people to include, peace and happiness by all will be achieved. This hints at a vision of utopia. A utopia is an idealized society or social system often imagined as a future solution for a current breakdown or complication within a given social system. It is a fine thing to wish for, but not one that necessarily reflects the deeper meaning of diversity. In truth, diversity means having differences and the tension involved in those differences, but also having the space for those differences to be heard and understood. This is something that gets lost in discussions about diversity: If diversity is the goal, then differences will create opportunities for new and different ideas to emerge—but that may not be a simple process.

The more ideal way to think about diversity with utopic intentions is to consider Frederic Jameson’s idea of the “utopian leap” (2008, pp. 632–634). When social constructs become too rigid and growth has felt impossible, a “utopian leap” occurs. Such leaps are the unpredictable human imagination at work, creating newly imagined ways to explore and address a seemingly unchangeable issue. In this sense, utopia is an imagined new way of thinking, being, or living that is often developed with the imagination first, and then attempted as an ideal construction. Although the constructions are never as perfect as the idea, they often result in new possibilities previously unimagined. These new possibilities allow people to break out of the social constructs that may have previously limited their opportunities or the ways that society could imagine their place.

A great example of this is the Afro-Futurist movement, which reconsiders what it means to radically rethink what the future can look like. Nichelle Nichols and Whoopi Goldberg both played characters in Star Trek and Star Trek: The Next Generation. They both have said that part of their desire to play their roles was to make sure that when U.S. culture created visions of the future, particularly those hundreds of years from now, that there would be Black people present. Their examples, along with such films as Black Panther (2018) and works by Nnedi Okorafor and N. K. Jemisin, have played important roles in inspiring Black people to imagine and create new visions for how they engage and advocate for equity and justice.

As you wrap up this course, take some time to reflect on how diversity changes your life. How can you apply information from this course to your relationships, work, or academics? How might you use what you learned to promote social change? How might you use what you learned in your day-to-day life, such as when watching the news, scrolling through social media, or engaging in conversation?

We hope you have a deeper understanding of cultural diversity and how awareness, inclusion, and dialogue about diversity contributes to society. We also hope you have developed a set of skills that you can use to critically examine the wide array of topics in diversity you encounter daily. Finally, we hope that you will be inspired by the knowledge and skills you have gained in this course.

Southern New Hampshire University’s faculty and staff congratulate you on making it through this course and taking a large step toward completing your goals. Celebrate this accomplishment and keep moving forward!