ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that teaching about diversity in technical communication classrooms contributes to the development of active citizens. It analyzes the recordings using three of the nine categories from Nelson-Laird's theory: foundational perspectives, content, and pedagogy. These categories can arguably be three of the hardest parts of engaging diversity, teaching advocacy, and promoting inclusive practices because they establish connections between the personal, the professional, ways that encourage community engagement in thoughtful and productive ways. Professors need flexibility when thinking through and engaging diversity as they make crucial decisions about how to enter important, often sensitive conversations. Student responses contributed to the conversation by providing a counter to professor feedback, showing the nuances of discussion about diversity, as well as the different and often similar conceptions of diversity. Before engaging what the professor deemed as the core of the methods course, the content must contain some discussion or reading about the function of racism in society.
