I was initially asked to develop an Intro to Cognitive Science course as an upper-level Liberal Studies Option for Degree students (majors) in a public college in Toronto, Canada. With much excitement, I developed the course “Smart Phones, Talking Apes, and Baby Geniuses: An Introduction to Cognitive Science.” The course covers Evolutionary Psychology, Massive Modularity, Language Acquisition, Artificial Intelligence, Ape Language Research, and Theory of Mind mostly in the format of debates with classic articles arguing for and against positions roughly divided into generativist and developmental sides (roughly: nature and nurture). I’ve genuinely enjoyed teaching this course, but a nagging concern has been whittling away at my enjoyment: should this course be more diverse and inclusive?
For about a decade, the debate about diversifying philosophy has shown up in many articles and I have read them nodding enthusiastically. Yes! We need to find those missing women in philosophy and those people of colour and acknowledge that when we say “philosophy” we really mean “Western Philosophy” and our omissions speak volumes. Thinking about my own philosophical education (Classic Western Philosophy), I think about how challenging it is to diversify my syllabus. Teaching an Introduction to Philosophy course surely shouldn’t require me to learn (and immediately teach) brand new subjects. But if we don’t start diversifying our syllabi, our students will be in the same place we are: woefully unprepared to be philosophers (and philosophy professors) today and in the years to come.
Being an underprepared philosopher may sound fairly innocuous (if you assume that philosophers don’t really do anything relevant to society), but it has become increasingly evident that critical thinking, argument construction and deconstruction, and the analysis of persuasive messages (in the media, politics, and pretty much everywhere beyond the academic sphere) have real-world outcomes. And philosophy is not merely a niche curiosity whose content does not have an impact on the lives of real people. When we engage in the activities of studying and practicing philosophy, which is supposed to be about human wisdom, we make an enormous mistake when we limit our scope and omit the diverse ways in which wisdom is articulated and described. Excluding the underrepresented perpetuates the inequality. Thus we are not just making underprepared philosophers; we are making underprepared citizens.
Committed to being more inclusive and diverse, I tossed a question out on social media: any thoughts on making Cognitive Science more inclusive? Doing this has led me to amazing social media communities that seek help and share resources and methods for teaching philosophy. The top response I received (well, the only one) was a suggestion to add more neurodivergent authors and authors with disabilities.
This began my surface-level series of questions about diversifying Cognitive Science:
Is it enough to have diverse authors? Alan Turing was gay; is he a sufficiently diverse author? The Turing test is potentially inclusive (men can pass as women, computers pass as people) but that certainly isn’t his point; that’s a subversive subtext. I would not consider it as inclusive content. I know I need to refresh my author list and that will take some work on my part.
Are counterarguments sufficient as inclusive and/or diverse content? Buller’s response to Buss’s Evolutionary Psychology does talk about homosexuality and cultural differences as challenges to Buss’s theory. This content more explicitly explores ideas of diversity and inclusion. Similarly, counterarguments to the Chomsky/Pinker generativist positions on language acquisition also use neurodivergent language learners and persons with disabilities to challenge their view of language as hard-wired. Neuroplasticity too. It would seem that many of the arguments against hard-wiring, genetic pre-dispositions, and massively modular brains are arguments that force us to acknowledge the diversity of the human experience. That feels a bit better, but I know that is just the start.
How about using examples to diversify and inclusify my content? This is very manageable but it is also cheating. Imagine teaching a course using all of your favourite, old-school readings (so, the same old dead white men we always use) but then spice things up through examples. It looks like diversity, but really, it cheapens diversity and inclusion, and it cheapens philosophy. First, it cheapens the project of inclusion and diversity because it treats diverse authors and examples as problems to philosophy, as things that challenge its validity. That’s not inclusion; that’s demonstrating how varied experiences are problems in this field (a field that makes explaining problems away into a veritable profession) and it tacitly acknowledges that diverse experiences are not included. They are on the outside. Threatening it. That doesn’t mean that diverse counterexamples should not be used. Rather, diverse counterexamples should be part of a bigger picture where diversity is part of the main theories as well. Diverse authors and theories must be part of every level of the course. I am sure that there are people out there doing this (if you are, and you want to share ideas, please help! I would love to be your student!).
As you may have guessed, I am not an expert on creating a more diverse and inclusive philosophical place. I am on this journey. I am not even confident that I am very far.
Here is where things took a sharp turn. I was asked to co-develop a course on contemporary Indigeneity under the guidance of an amazing team at my college. And I was given a lot of support that was different from any kind of professional development support I had received in the past: I was given opportunities to engage in decolonizing and Indigenizing practices that forced me to confront my position of privilege and start real work to dismantle some of the systems that perpetuate inequality. These supports included in-person discussions on Indigenizing and decolonizing practices and numerous resources that would enrich our understanding and curricula. The discussions and development work have since been collated into the open resource, SKODEN.
Teaching a course that deals with our colonial legacy and how that impacts contemporary and historical Indigenous experiences has been an obvious place to stretch my skills and challenge my methods of teaching, assessment, and engaging with my students. I have taken risks, taken advice from colleagues and even Elders, and these opportunities have significantly changed how I even conceive of a course. For example, I have significantly reduced academic integrity violations on a fairly traditional take-home assignment attached to a class film by introducing a space for shared knowledge that belongs to the class. The shared knowledge portion (where they need to answer fairly direct questions about the film) is worth an insignificant percentage (2%) and it is a shared knowledge space where they contribute to the group knowledge. In this space, students are generous (sharing far more than they need to), honest (very few academic integrity violations emerge from this portion of the assignment), and they become group owners of this set of facts; they can use the shared knowledge to answer the personal reflection attached to the assignment. The knowledge belongs to all of them—they created it together—and it is theirs to use.
This assignment structure came from thoughtful discussions that emerges in an Indigenous professional development opportunity available to faculty, staff, and administrators at my school, and it is an example of how the continuous process of decolonizing my practices has led me to question the ownership of knowledge, the notion of competitiveness and individualism that runs rampant in Academia, and how these practices continue to serve Academia and not our students. This is to say that I am now on a fairly different path than I was when I was beginning to wonder how I might diversify and inclusify my Intro to Cognitive Sciences course.
For example, a new question has emerged: must cognitive science be exclusively cognitive? Are we sufficiently covering the topic by focusing on the cognitive? How do other (corporeal, emotional, spiritual…) parts of ourselves fit in? Making them reducible to the cognitive is unhelpful (and wrong) and I think that excluding them as irrelevant (unverifiable? unfalsifiable?) is not the solution either. What might an Indigenous cognitive science stance look like? A non-Western stance? And are these outliers (taught in week 14 when all the “real material” has already been covered) or are we obligated to rethink our cognitive sciences framework? I am inclined to the latter view, and I am just beginning to imagine what that could be.
I feel fairly confident that there are amazing philosophers and fellow cognitive scientists already doing work in this field (again, email me! I want to be your student!), but even as we consider the classic areas of study in cognitive science (linguistics, psychology, computer science, philosophy, and neuroscience), we can start by asking some key questions. How do we decolonize linguistics? How do we challenge ableist frameworks in psychology and neuroscience? How can computer science be more context-dependent? Are there other areas of philosophy that should be included in cognitive science? How might we retain the essence of cognitive science while diversifying and inclusifying it? I know cognitive science is worth saving, and its interdisciplinary nature means that diversity and inclusion are possible.
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Shereen Hassanein
Dr. Shereen Hassanein is currently the Acting Chair of the School of Arts and Science at Seneca College in Toronto, Canada. Seneca’s campuses are on the territories of the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation and we are guests on this land. Her dissertation challenged generativist arguments for language acquisition, focusing on atypical language acquisition and neurodivergent learners to explore the rich, complicated reality of how we learn language. Currently, she has been engaging in the challenging and necessary work of decolonizing her own teaching practices and curriculum while supporting several Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion projects within her School. Her pronouns are she/her/hers.
