April 2, 2013

Rethinking Diversity in Education

Apr. 2, 2013 at 07:30 AM | By Marlysa Connolly | Comment Count

Earlier this year I had the privilege of attending College Board’s Midwest Regional Forum in Chicago. The forum was exceptional, covering an expansive array of presentations with a central theme of collaboration. But the golden egg of the event had to be the keynote address delivered by Scott Page, Leonid Hurwicz Collegiate professor at the University of Michigan – Ann Arbor and director at the Center for the Study of Complex Systems.

Scott Page’s work is fascinating. He has dedicated his varied career of mathematical models and behavioral research to help societies better understand the “myriad of roles diversity plays in complex systems.” As such, it should be no surprise that in a room full of educators his keynote discussed diversity in education. But Scott didn’t address diversity in the usual sense – diversity helps enrich the educational experience. He encouraged us to “rethink” diversity and study its facility to shape the evolution of learning.

Trade-off

According to Scott, we have been defining the effects of diversity in the wrong way, triggering a “trade-off” that is linear and often misguided:

If a population chooses diversity, they will have to sacrifice excellence. If a population chooses excellence, they will have to sacrifice diversity.

Here’s a video of a similar presentation hosted by the University of Virginia.

A toolbox of skills, the new model

Scott suggests that a new model is needed. This new model of rethinking diversity requires us to recognize the complexity of the interactions between each part within a system. What does this mean exactly? We need to toss out our linear model of thinking about diversity as ones identity and start thinking about it as ones collective skillset - skillsets include perspective, experience, heuristics, narratives, etc. By doing this, diversity and excellence can survive together but only if excellence is built “on a pillar of diversity.”

This is a simple concept of variation. Larger populations typically mean greater variation. Greater variation among populations increases a population’s chance for adaptation/evolution and survival. To put this same model in relation to diversity: more diversity in a population yields more variation, thus, greater potential for learning, creativity, inventiveness, and problem solving.

To help illustrate this, Scott spoke about an eye-opening experiment he conducted on problem solving. Scott and his associates examined the ability to solve complex problems by organizing a pre-selected population into two groups: the alpha group (control) and the diverse group (variable).

The alpha group consisted of like-minded individuals with similar backgrounds, skills, and very high I.Q. levels. The diverse group consisted of individuals of varying backgrounds, skills, and I.Q. levels. Scott, as many of us would, anticipated that the alpha group would consistently outperform the diverse group when solving difficult problems. Wrong. Scott’s experiment found that the diverse group almost always outperformed the alphas. Why? Because the diverse group brings together a collection of diverse tools that, when used together, not only solve the problem but also do it quicker, often inventing new methods of unraveling solutions.

*Disclaimer: This is not to say that the diverse group did not encounter obstacles. If they did, it was typically a result of competition or a lack of trust in the group or a particular individual/s.

To dig a little deeper, one hypothesis for why the alphas were not successful is because they each were so similar that they oftentimes were unable to work collaboratively or think differently about creating ways to approach the problem.

In closing, Scott challenged the audience to really think about how we encourage students and our peers to welcome openness of diversity. One way he recommended is to leverage working in diverse groups in and out of the classroom and workplace. “It’s not like we don’t want complexity but to make sense of it, we need diversity. The very best groups, the outliers, are always diverse,” said Scott.