Looking Through Our Own Barriers to Recognize Our Students' Integrity

Many scholars of ethical teaching recommend that teachers review their own biases and strive to reduce the influence of these biases in their classrooms (e.g., Svinicki & McKeachie, 2010; Davis, 1993; Boysen & Vogel, 2009). Teachers and students perceive fairness as necessary for the credibility of academic disciplines as well as departments and instructors (Keith-Spiegel, Tabachnick, & Allen, 1993; Tabachnick, Keith-Spiegel, & Pope, 1991), and these concerns apply across academic fields (Woody, 2008b). As teachers of psychology, we should strive to eliminate or reduce the influence of our own extracurricular biases as we choose topics, present material, discuss current events, incorporate class examples, and engage in other inherently persuasive teaching activities (Friedrich & Douglass, 1998; Svinicki & McKeachie, 2010; Woody, 2006). Additionally, we should challenge the biases of our students (Boysen & Vogel, 2009; Boyson, Vogel, Cope, & Hubbard, 2009; Wolfe & Spencer, 1996) and seek to perpetuate the disciplinary, university, college, and department goals of increasing our students’ awareness of issues and questions in diversity and multicultural education (see American Psychological Association, 2002, 2003; Halonen et al., 2006). Perhaps most importantly, we should recognize our personal biases, and we should explicitly strive to keep our biases about ethnicity, gender, language, disability, citizenship status (see Thorpe, 2009 for discussion of students’ fears of faculty bias), veteran status, socioeconomic status, political ideology, and religion, among other factors, from affecting our views or treatment of students (see e.g., Babad, Inbar, & Rosenthal 1982; Boysen et al., 2009; Boysen & Vogel, 2009; Sue, Lin, Torino, Capodilupo, & Rivera, 2009; Svinicki & McKeachie, 2010), particularly because even a single incident of bias can influence a student’s university experience (Samuel, 2004). It is possible to recognize and change our own biases, but these changes require substantial motivation and effort (Devine & Monteith, 1999). The biases noted previously have received extensive attention in the literature, and I encourage instructors to evaluate these and other prejudices they may have toward students. Particularly, in addition to the previous list, I encourage teachers of psychology to evaluate the cultural biases and their personal biases toward young adults (Bytheway, 1995) as well as the ways that faculty may treat traditional-aged undergraduate students. The biases related to age and traditional undergraduate students entered my own awareness most saliently when I was a young (i.e., 32) faculty member who, at the time, looked significantly younger than I was. I attended a social reception at a psychological convention, and I had a conversation with a well-known male psychologist. He appeared extremely impressed to learn the name of my