By Catia Malaquias
When asked if they are biased or prejudiced against a minority group, people will generally respond that they are not – most feel that they can consciously counter any prejudice that they have – or may have had. They trust in their capacity to present an unbiased or unprejudiced disposition to others – whether to people of different gender, different racial or religious background, different sexuality or to people with disability.
Most school principals, teachers and education assistants – like the majority of society – believe that they discharge their professional responsibilities without prejudice – treating all students equally and without discrimination.
However, over the last 20 years there has been increased recognition that prejudice and bias operate at an explicit, conscious and controllable level and at a residual, implicit, subconscious and spontaneous or uncontrollable level. In the last 10 years there has been significant growth in research on the effects of implicit bias and prejudice in education outcomes.
Research suggests that people can control their speech to avoid conscious prejudice. For example, a teacher can pleasantly greet each student on entry to the classroom in a relatively consistent and equal manner. However, implicit or unconscious bias and prejudice is by definition not consciously controllable – and manifests itself in body language and spontaneous behaviours – particularly when an individual is fatigued or under stress. For example, research suggests that implicit bias and prejudice is revealed in behaviours like avoiding eye contact, lower duration of eye contact, less smiling and genuine warmth, less tolerance, more punitive and disciplinary sanctioning and generally reduced willingness to interact with the relevant minority.
A student – including a student with disability – with often greater awareness and sensitivity to social exclusion is more likely to pick up on the exclusionary cues and inconsistent behaviour of implicit bias and prejudice. In addition, regular class members are also likely to pick up subtle and not so subtle behavioural cues from school staff that demonstrate the side-lining and devaluation of their minority group peers.
Studies have demonstrated that implicit and unconscious bias and prejudice operate to reduce academic and social outcomes by reducing teachers’ expectations for learning potential and at the same time trust in the teacher (due to less consistent messaging) and general belonging in “minority peers” – in fact they operate to increase exclusion and suspension from schooling – which in turn are strong predictors of long-term social and economic exclusion – including of crime and incarceration (see for example “Understanding Implicit Bias”, American Federation of Teachers).
On the other hand, some studies have even suggested that implicit bias or prejudice against a minority student group may actually operate to empower the majority student group – to increase their confidence and expectations – to increase the allocation of professional attention in their favour – and ultimately to improve their academic and social outcomes.
In essence, subconscious or implicit prejudice may have a compounding effect on the outcomes for the relevant minority student group. Implicit bias and prejudice is a major barrier to the realisation of the right to inclusive education on a full and equal basis. Interestingly, when studies have controlled for conscious bias (measured by teacher self-reporting) and unconscious bias (measured by “implicit association tests”) the implicit measure of unconscious bias was found to explain different achievement gap sizes across the classroom as a function of differing teacher expectations between the majority and minority groups (see: “The Implicit Prejudiced Attitudes of Teachers: Relations to Teacher Expectations and the Ethnic Achievement Gap”.)
Implicit bias and prejudice is something that all members of society carry depending upon their own life experience – being formed from as early as 3 years of age from the family environment and exposure to media stereotypes. Unconscious bias is said to be essentially automatic as a brain process – it is said to be an environmental and societal process rather than the product of an individual’s conscious choices. In fact, even people with disability and family members sometimes demonstrate strong implicit bias against disability.
Although it is clear that implicit bias and prejudice is not easily changed by anti-bias “reprogramming” training or otherwise undone, being aware that one’s behaviour is predisposed to spontaneous and uncontrolled display of prejudice – particularly when fatigued or under stress – reduces the likelihood and severity of demonstration. In essence, people can “interrupt themselves” and “catch themselves”. It also demonstrates the importance of countering stereotypes in the early developmental years of children.
Changing school culture to a more inclusive culture – to a culture more welcoming of students with disability – involves both modifying conscious cultural prejudice and increasing awareness of unconscious or implicit cultural bias and prejudice in school staff and the broader school community.
There are a number of websites that offer “implicit association tests” designed to reveal the presence and degree of an individual’s implicit prejudice towards particular social concepts and minority groups, including people with disability. See for example:
- Project Implicit (Harvard University)
- Teaching Tolerance (Southern Poverty Law Centre)
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