Diversity

In the field of educational psychology, diversity primarily refers to differences across individuals and groups. In order to talk about differences, there is often an assumption about what is normal, typical, or mainstream. Educational psychologists have been interested in understanding human life by identifying universal tendencies. Diversity is important to this task because it is the concept through which hypothesized human universals might be better understood. For example, an interest in diversity helps psychologists understand why there is patterned variance across individuals and groups given particular hypothesized explanations for cognitive development. Steele's important work on stereotype threat has explored how performance (including cognitive tasks) can be influenced by social stereotypes. Because social stereotypes work off of, and reinforce, social expectations for groups of people (by race and gender, for example), diversity is an important theme.

In mainstream educational psychology, it is rare to find the word diversity in the index or in a chapter title. Its position in educational psychology is somewhat indicated by that fact. It is, nonetheless, not a totally invisible concept. Diversity has found its way into educational psychology because researchers are interested in the ways in which society and social forces influence the individual. As such, racial and gender diversity as social forces, for example, have gained the interest of educational psychologists. Moreover, concern for social justice and attempts to understand social phenomena such as violence and prejudice have led educational psychologists to look more closely at social diversity. There are four trajectories in educational psychology in which concepts of diversity have become of vital interest. Each of the five trajectories, described below, implies slightly different emphases in the definition of diversity. They are presented below following a rough historical chronology, but the reader should realize that these conceptions of diversity have influenced and affected each other and can all be seen in contemporary educational psychology.

In the first place, psychologists are interested in developing theories and research explaining and describing human universals. Although educational psychologists tend to be attentive to individual differences and deviations, the idea of ‘human’ was not socially complicated. There were many assumptions of universality left unquestioned in the research designs and theories. For example, Kohlberg initially studied ‘human’ moral development by examining only men, assuming that men and women were the same. Thus, diversity enters the scene of educational psychology as a way of identifying greater complexity in human phenomena by questioning the assumptions of universality. Researchers' capacities to understand human universals and make claims that best represent the population to which they are generalizing are strengthened when those researchers question the universal assumptions at the outset so that those assumptions are not blindly built into research designs and theories.

This change in the field led to including diversity as a potential feature of the research design in educational psychological studies. In this second trajectory, diversity is a broad term covering a range of discrete variables. These variables generally reflect the attitude, [Page 269]scope, and place of diversity within the field of educational psychology. The variables in educational psychology that are most often linked to the concept ‘diversity’ include, for example, race, gender, culture, and sexuality. Categories of diversity entered the research of educational psychologists in this way. A person's social experiences of race, gender, culture, and soon have been found to affect personal psychological phenomena. For example, Clark and Hatfield have reported differences in receptivity to sexual offers among college-age students based on gender. Studies will now typically report the racial and gender characteristics of their subjects even if their findings are meant to generalize more broadly and even if these social categories are not considered variables in the study. This allows the readers of the research to consider the role of diversity in the research design. The term diversity, here, refers to a set of social categories within which one can subdivide people into easily identifiable groups. This has been a very important trajectory in educational psychology because it allows us to explain patterns of difference across humans in order to better understand potential human universals and their deviations as they are relevant for education. The tendency in educational psychology is to explain deviations from human universals as a function of individual differences. As a result of this trajectory, educational psychologists developed interests in topics such as gender identity development, homosexual identity development, and the effects of poverty on development.

...