Diversity Competency for Teachers

How to Successfully Integrate Student Diversity Into Teaching

As a teacher, you are faced with an ever more heterogeneous and diverse student body. Good teaching, therefore, increasingly requires diversity competencies. This article highlights various aspects of student diversity and shows how teachers can integrate them into their university teaching, thus enabling them to improve the learning process. Based on the three diversity principles developed at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), the paper proposes strategies for planning and implementing a course, for developing methods and for connecting to the students’ worlds via linguistic, visual, or content-related means. Orientation towards the needs of the students, the reflection of unconscious thought patterns and the avoidance of decision-making bias by means of standardization, feedback loops and transparency are identified as basic principles of good diversity-oriented teaching...