Cultural Humility as a Path to Equity in Higher Education

Achieving equity in higher education involves more than just closing achievement gaps and mitigating the impact of historic oppression and underrepresentation. In this chapter, the author presents a framework for cultural humility as a pathway to equity for institutions of education, as well as an approach for the professional development of cultural humility practitioners. The cultural humility framework comprises four core principles as well as five transformational skills (i.e., dialogue, inquiry, self-reflection, conflict transformation, and identity negotiation). The chapter concludes with a discussion about how to implement this framework at both the classroom and institutional levels, as well as the implications of such training for achieving greater equity in higher education.

Closing Achievement Gaps: Examining the Roles of School Background and Process

The purpose of this study was to examine the role of school background and school process in closing achievement gaps between White and non-White students in science. To answer the research questions, a series of two-level hierarchical linear models (HLM) was performed on the fourth-grade U.S. portion of the 2015 Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) data. Results indicate that (a) the science achievement gap between White and non-White students is 0.21 standard deviation, holding student and school background constant; (b) the science achievement gap varies across schools; (c) none of the school background variables are associated with the achievement gap in a school; and (d) school emphasis on student academic learning is not only associated with higher school-level science achievement, but also with a narrower science achievement gap between White and non-White students. However, teacher collaboration is not associated with school-level science achievement but is associated with a larger achievement gap. Implications, limitations, and recommendations for further research are discussed.