Introduction

The interconnectedness of globalization, a growing middle class, and the expanding number of institutes of higher education is changing the diversity of higher education classrooms across Asia. Youth mobility is increasing along with the approaches to educational access across socio-economic groups throughout the region.Footnote 1 This increase in diversity of all kinds is excellent for teaching and learning. We know that diverse working groups are more productive, creative, and innovative.Footnote 2 We know that ideas generated by diverse groups are of higher qualityFootnote 3 and that the quality of critical analysis and decision-making is higher in groups exposed to “minority” viewpoints.Footnote 4

Higher education institutions need to shift to make room for more ideas and more types of people in the classroom in order to remain relevant and impactful. This requires that higher education change physical, curricular, and pedagogical approaches and allow for strategic leadership around diversity and inclusion. The goal is explicitly to harness diversity and inclusion efforts in order to deliver the competencies for lifelong learning and critical thinking. The exclusive transfer of content knowledge is no longer a sufficient form of higher education. Asking the learner to remember and understand the subject material is not enough; it is only the beginning. The challenge is that change in higher education is rare, slow, and costly. Strategic academic leadership is essential to the change process.

If institutions of higher education do not more thoughtfully integrate the diversity of ideas and learners entering their classrooms, then those institutions risk no longer properly preparing their graduates for success in a globally interconnected world. The workplace involves multimedia tools to engage with materials; the workplace demands creative and innovative problem solving; and the workplace requires cognitive adaptation to new projects and problems. To give these competencies to undergraduate students in Asia, we need to go beyond tests, we need to go beyond disciplinary courses, and we need to engage the students’ prior knowledge in new ways. Much has been written on this already. Robert Aoun in Robot Proof explains that a good liberal education will develop numeracy, entrepreneurialism, and creativity in its graduates if they are to be properly prepared for the future of work.Footnote 5 In Higher Education in the Era of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, I detail the ways in which automation changes what students need to know, particularly within the South East Asian context.Footnote 6

Traditional liberal arts education is being practiced in many parts of Asia with more frequency in the twenty-first century. An emphasis on critical thinking and problem-solving drives the curriculum in these settings and habits of mind that integrate mathematics with philosophy and the social and physical sciences are pursued by all students. This academic curriculum is typically buttressed with deliberate experiential learning and takes place within a residential setting. Graduates of these programs are distinct from those with technical or professional degrees. Majors can include history, anthropology, or creative writing for example. For the purposes of this chapter, this type of education is referred to as liberal international education because parts of the liberal arts approach are being adopted, with a few examples of it being practiced in full deliberate fashion, such as Yale-NUS College in Singapore or NYU Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates.

As noted elsewhere in this edited volume, in Asia, learners’ diversity extends well beyond nationality, religious affiliation, and ethnicity. As such, inclusive pedagogy in Asian liberal international higher education campuses takes on many different dimensions. There is diversity across physical, psychological and cogitative traits; diverse socio-economic backgrounds, diverse value systems, traditions and emerging identities, and diverse expectations around grading and assessment. The learners and the instructors come from different educational backgrounds—IB, A-Levels, PSLE, UK-System, Australian systems, home school, private school, public school, first-generation, polytechnics/Community Colleges, etc. In global universities with diverse student bodies, many students are studying in a language for the first time. Many of the students enrolled in these institutions are polylingual multimodal learners who acquire and share ideas differently from each other.

In hybrid universities, the international composition of the faculty also magnifies the importance of being thoughtful about diversity and inclusion in the curriculum and classroom. A large proportion of faculty in international education in Asia are not from the countries where they are working. Faculty may have very different ethnic and linguistic traits from their students. With different cultural backgrounds comes very different attitudes and approaches to authority in the classroom, appropriate communication styles, and faculty responsibility for student mental health. For all these elements of diversity, there are corresponding policies and pedagogies of inclusion emerging as best practice in the Asian context. This curated volume, for the first time, sheds light on the unique circumstances and best practices of diversity and inclusion in the Asian liberal arts context.

Whether the goal is to launch a new diversity and inclusion effort or improve existing programs, how institutions of higher learning respond is context-specific because the meaning of diversity is different across cultural, political, regulatory, and socio-economic contexts. To date, much of what is written on diversity and inclusion in the higher education classroom pertains to the North American context in particular. While there is value in the research being done in North America, the application of this research to the variety of regulatory, political, and cultural contexts that exist from Japan to Indonesia, is challenging. Institutes of higher learning in Asia benefit from a distinctive dialogue within the literature about how best to address the growing diversity of learners and their specific needs. Theories of change can guide analysis and strategy development for modifications in higher education when appropriately applied to a specific organizational context.Footnote 7

This chapter addresses how higher education leadership may apply theories of intentionally created changes to enact improvements around diversity and inclusion within the higher education context across Asia. The intention is to identify tangible and actionable steps that can be pursued by those with a mandate for strategic leadership to improve access to impactful learning for a diverse set of students, being taught to be a diverse set of classroom instructors. This analysis will apply theories of strategic change leadership to the specific challenges of integrating diversity and inclusion, by analyzing five possible action items and how to go about integrating them into higher education institutions.

Changing Landscape of Higher Education Across Asia

The massification of higher education in Asia is well documented.Footnote 8 This is contributing to the growing diversity of the student body in higher education institutions across Eastern and Southern Asia. The increasing attention on diversity and inclusion is due in part to the fact that more students are attending tertiary education than ever before.

Table 11.1 details the significant increases in enrolments as a percentage of total population for several countries in Asia. South Korea maintains the highest enrolment rates, hovering around 100% for the past three decades, but Singapore also maintains a very high percentage of enrolments of tertiary-age youth with 86% of the population enrolling. China has seen the most significant growth with a 50% increase in enrolments from 1970 to 2017. Since the year 2000 India has increased enrolments from 9.552 to 28.54% (2017); Indonesia has increased from 14.88 to 36.77%; Malaysia has increased from 25.63 to 44.17% enrolment; Thailand has increased from 34.7 to 49.287%, and Vietnam has increased from 9.4 to 28.26% in enrolments for tertiary education. These percentage increases represent millions of new students enrolling in universities across Asia and the globe. Many of them are first-generation students, meaning their parents did not attend a formal tertiary institution. They bring fresh ideas, new understandings of success, and they are almost all technology natives. These shifts alone make the need to adapt our higher education system to be more inclusive of different ways of thinking and different ways of learning an imperative.

Table 11.1 Tertiary enrolment statistics in selected Asian countries
Full size table

The Asian educational context is distinct, and the growing international liberal arts education is a relatively new aspect of this ecosystem. The liberal arts has expanded in Asia with a new wave of hybrid campuses and through innovations to existing programs.Footnote 9 Where existing institutions have adapted, they have done so by are adding humanities to their STEM programs, and interdisciplinary approaches to the professional degrees. Cross-border collaboration between universities is increasingly common in higher education. Globalization has led to new changes in internationalization of higher education in Asia.Footnote 10 While many global hierarchies of knowledge, prestige, and reputation persist, students are still identifying ways to navigate in a trans-nationalized higher education landscape.Footnote 11 This means the student body and the faculty members are more diverse themselves. For example, at Yale-NUS College in Singapore, where each cohort has just 250 students, the four-year institution has representation from over 60 countries. There is diversity in the curriculum as well. At NYU Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates, the common core courses ask student broad questions that foster interdisciplinary understandings of critical issues such as climate change, peace, and global health.

Strategic Leadership for Diversity and Inclusion

In order to properly adapt higher education institutions to the new demands of more inclusive pedagogy, curriculum, and residential life, we need strategic academic leadership. Adrianna Kezar has developed a six-part schematic for addressing theories of change which includes: Scientific management, evolutionary, social cognition, cultural, political, and institutional change.Footnote 12 Which model of change best fits your context depends on the timeframe for change, and why the change is occurring among other things. Kezar provides a full schematic for the characteristics of these six approaches to change, as well as tactics, criticisms, and benefits for the various approaches. There are nine identified characteristics of the six schools that Kezar walks through.

Change in higher education is difficult. Strategic leadership within a higher education context, requires a given individual or committee to consider what mandate exists to support diversity and inclusion differently than has been done before within the institution. Much of the work already being done on campuses emanates from the student affairs or residential life offices of a given institution. These branches often provide awareness workshops and run cultural centers of various forms. Engaging with the efforts already underway can be a good place to start. But which school of change and which tactics are deployed depends on the decision-making context of the given institution. In addition, strategic leadership in this context requires key relationships to be leveraged where there is agency to do so. Does a given committee or individual have the agency for providing incentives and rewards for curricular change, physical space change, and pedagogical innovations? These are the questions to ask when addressing which process of change best suits the diversity and inclusion goals being developed and what actions are to be deployed. Practitioners can rely on multiple theories of change and corresponding tactics. In the next section action items that can integrate these change tactics are shared.

Action Items to Adapt Your Institution for Diversity and Inclusion and the Application of Change Tactics

Applying the strategic change model that best fits the distinctive institutional context of a given university is the first step. Once this is done there are several different areas for change highlighted here that can be action items to work toward. There should be a diversity plan and mandate from somewhere within the institutions—often this comes from the student body more than the leadership—to drive change. Asking what the distinctive areas of concern within the institution areFootnote 13 and how will addressing them improve learning is helpful. Below is a collection of some of the areas that can be engaged for strategic academic development of diversity and inclusion in higher education institutions across Asia.

Physical Spaces

Where there is a means and inclination to do so, a mandate to address learning spaces for diversity and inclusion is ideal. As there are hundreds of new universities being built across Asia at the moment,Footnote 14 there is a unique opportunity to take advantage of this boom for diversity and inclusion. Whereas in the west higher education is not expanding, across Asia, the hundreds of new buildings and campuses popping up can be purpose-built for inclusion and impactful learning.

There are many ways to develop inclusive buildings that acknowledge and integrate diversity. The most apparent is to design builds that are accessible to all types of students and their abilities. The buildings should be accessible to the sight-impaired, the hearing impaired, and for those with non-chronic and chronic conditions. They should also include furniture and artwork that is representative of the regional context but also inclusive. This proximity between students and administrators lends itself to an inclusive community environment.

To give student voice to the design and function of the buildings, leaders can allow students to choose the artifacts that decorate the walls. And the design of administrative and student affairs office can be integrated to incorporate the students more literally into the decision-making structures of the institution. In addition, flexible classrooms with movable furniture and tables allow each instructor to devise a learning context that is appropriate to their classroom context. This enables what has traditionally been fixed roles between the instructor and the students to shift, allowing student-to-student learning that is invaluable for sharing a diverse set of perspectives on a given topic.

Which change process and tactics one can apply through strategic leadership for physical spaces depends on your context and timeframe. If the campus is in the design-phase, then there is endless possibility for inclusivity. If you are adapting an existing building or area of the campus, then the tactics will be different. The Evolutionary Method and the Scientific Method apply best to infrastructure given the permanence of building. The difference is in time frame. The evolutionary method is “rational, linear, and purposeful,” and occurs because leaders and the internal environment demand it.Footnote 15 The Evolutionary Method of change occurs because of an external environmental issue.Footnote 16 The timeframe is different, slower. The process of change for the Evolutionary Method involves adaption and is “slow; gradual; [and] un-intentional.”Footnote 17 The adaption of an existing campus to diversity and inclusion needs may follow this change process. Combining the Evolutionary Method with the Political Method of change tactics can also be useful with physical plant adaptions that are costly. As noted above, the Political Method involves creating coalitions and identifying allies and fostering a collective vision of change. This can address the un-intentional aspects of the evolutionary method that could produce suboptimal results for infrastructure.

Chief Diversity Officers

The role of Chief Diversity Officer is a relatively new role in higher education leadership, but some schools in Asia are hiring in this area. In nearly all universities this role faces issues of autonomy, but nonetheless, there is important work that can be done to enhance learning and equity on a given campus. A tangible change that can be pursued for an institution is to hire a new strategic change leader in the area of diversity and inclusion. In the United States, the National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education developed a Chief Diversity Officer Standards of Practice; this can be useful as a starting ground for universities attempting to craft job descriptions and keep performance indicators for a new role within their institution.Footnote 18 As Yvette M. Alex-Assensoh noted in June 2018, it is important to level-set expectations, and to be realistic about how much one person can do across a campus on such a broad issue.Footnote 19 Collaboration across units and empowerment in the role are key. With this in mind, it is important that Chief Diversity Officers have regular access to senior leadership across the curriculum and residential life.Footnote 20

The strategic leadership needed to create a Chief Diversity Officer role is one aspect of change that needs to be addressed. A key question to ask is, what are the issues a person in this role could address for the institution and how would it enhance student learning relative to other initiatives and programs? The change approaches most relevant to a change of this nature are the Scientific Method of change and the Political Method of change. This is due in part because of the anticipated outcomes of the change. For the Scientific Method, the outcomes are new structures and organizational principles.Footnote 21 For the Political Method, the outcome is a new organizational ideology. In this case, it would be freshly embracing a fresh or new commitment to diversity and inclusion. As noted above, there are differing tactics to enable this change. Whether you are developing coalitions to support the creation of the role or creating the infrastructure to make it possible (this may be building a new office space or unity house of some sort for example) this is a tangible outcome for those seeking to enhance the visibility and availability of diversity and inclusion efforts on a given campus.

Changing Role of Curriculum Committees and Teaching and Learning Committees

When properly empowered to do so, curriculum committees play an important role within higher education institutions. Typically, versions of this body are mandated to address academic programming within an institution. This includes reviewing course proposals, approving or rejecting program changes and the addition or deletion of programs. Such committees also develop policies that relate to teaching and learning assessment and effectivness. Ideally, committee members have mastery of curriculum procedures and evidence-based best practice training in course design or subject matter.

Strategic leadership on a curriculum committee can be extremely impactful in integrating diversity and inclusion of the teaching and learning in a given institution. At the micro level, course reviews can look to sample reading lists for diversity of authors, regions, and views. They can look to assessment assignments in a course proposal to ensure that there is a variety of ways in which a given student can demonstrate their understanding of the material. At the macro level, curriculum committees can review programs from top to bottom. Does a given program have a diverse set of faculty teaching into it? Does that program have broad regional representation in its courses where that is disciplinarily relevant. Does that program complement the diversity of programs already on offer or is one area being over emphasized relative to a marginalized population? These are the sorts of issues a curriculum committee leader can take up when given the mandate to do so.

Teaching and Learning committees can address issues such as gender bias in student course evaluations and their questions; grading, assessment, and feedback norms; syllabus template policies; and peer observation practices that might emphasize inclusivity in the classroom. They can also weave criteria related to inclusive teaching into teaching recognition awards, tenure and promotion criteria, and bonus structures. Finally, such committees can work closely with academic technology units to explore new software purchases that impact the entire campus. For example, playing a role in the learning management system to ensure that it is user friendly for less digitally literature students, or if such skills are needed, ensuring that the university supplies student support for becoming comfortable with the new software. Or ensure there are funds available to buy ability enabling software for those with visual or learning impairments.

Working from the perspective that change in this area comes from a committee chair, the strategic academic leadership needed is distinctive to a given personality but also the change context. Change can come about through the Social Cognition Method for this purpose. Here the change occurs because of the cognitive dissonance and the appropriateness of the changes being proposed. The needs to facilitate the change through learning and altering the complex paradigm or lens that colleagues on the committee are applying to diversity and inclusion. The change is individual in focus and involves a new frame of mind.Footnote 22 The benefit of this approach is that it emphasizes the individual’s beliefs as barriers that can be addressed by helping them adapt to the change.Footnote 23

The Evolutionary method of change can also be effectively applied to this action area for diversity and inclusion. Here the change outcome is to develop new structures and processes. Although the timeframe is gradual and nonlinear, most of the work done by academic committees is slow. A combination of the Evolutionary Method with the Social Cognition method deployed in a higher education setting would be ideal for using committee work to integrate new structures and policies for diversity and inclusion. For example, developing a check list for necessary characteristics of a syllabus, and developing workshops for faculty to learn how best to design courses for inclusion.

Where the culture is much more hierarchical, this process would run even more smoothly. Implementation would then be the challenge. As noted by Lucy LePeau, “the leaders set the tone for making commitments to diversity, but the actual implementation came from the participants across campus; people already committed to diversity goals enacted the plans.”Footnote 24 Committee leadership needs to follow-up on the implementation of the policies to ensure the vision and implementation align. This involves reaching out to IT departments to ensure the necessary tracking and electronic implementation is done. This also involves reaching out to Human Resources to address tenure and promotion or bonus structures. This involves reaching out the faculty themselves, multiple times a year, on these issues. Here the tactic of developing new policies through committees should be coordinated with academic development units as well. The next section addresses strategic academic leadership for diversity and inclusion in academic development units.

Academic Support Units—Libraries, Writings Centres, and Centers for Teaching and Learning

In universities around the world there is a coming together of libraries, writing centers, and teaching and learning centers. The roles within a given higher education context vary, but regardless of specific context, together these three units support learning and teaching outside of the classroom that is essential to an impactful learning experience. How we research and understand information literacy is a key teaching point for librarians. How we communicate ideas and develop critical thinking skills, while also addressing language barriers, is a key function of writing centers. And how we deliver peer tutoring support, learning accommodations, graduate student teaching training, and faculty development are all key roles of centers for teaching and learning. Together these three units impact each student on campus. Strategic leadership for diversity and inclusion can be effectively guided through these units to buttress classroom curriculum and experiential learning.

Alice Cruz has provided a detailed review of the ways in which libraries embed diversity through staffing, culture, collections, services, and programming.Footnote 25 When addressing the diversity of collections, the library staff can work with faculty and students to not only ensure that the collection includes a variety of voices and perspective, but also that the collection has sources in a many different forms to allow for physical and learning differences that benefit from oral histories, videos, and other multimedia sources.Footnote 26 Programming that aligns with international curriculum and coordinates with the values of various student groups and local issues can be very powerful when done well. Where the legal and regulatory environment permits, there is a leadership opportunity for libraries in creating a display and programming space for discussion with and about underrepresented communities on campus. Librarians can be the strategic leadership needed, or they can work across the academic support units to share diverse viewpoints inside and outside the classroom as a piece of a larger effort.

Centers for teaching and learning play a key role in the development of academics on campus, working with them on course design, pedagogy, and grading and assessment.

The International Journal for Academic Development publishes a rich collection of papers that detail the ways in which academic developers are change agents within their higher education context. These centers can also ensure that they themselves are inviting a broad spectrum of practitioners for their events and programming. The resources and workshops they provide faculty members and instructors can speak directly to diversity and inclusion in the classroom. Indeed, other chapters in this edited volume speak to such tactics directly.

Being Accountable

It is important to develop objective measures of performance and success for diversity and inclusion in order to hold the institution to account for the vision and programs they have put in place.Footnote 27 It is one thing to determine the best way to pursue strategic change, it is another to determine how you will measure the efforts and their results. Strategic academic leadership requires the articulation of what success for inclusion and underrepresented groups on campus would look like in a given context. Additionally, leadership needs to build in accountability mechanisms. Measuring success can be challenging because the changes may not all be tangible. In some contexts, efforts will be around improved tolerance for difference. In others, it is about acceptance of difference. And in some, it is about full integration and community learning around diversity and inclusion. Legal and regulatory laws may not allow explicit acknowledgment of some groups, but the university policies and practices implemented can still benefit everyone’s learning regardless of difference.

It can be challenging to measure the success of initiatives aimed at improving inclusive curriculum, pedagogy, and residential life practices. Patton et al. have document the resistance to change by leadership in the United States over the 60 yearsFootnote 28 and much of what they describe can be applied to experiences in Asia as well. Unfortunately, they find, that in the United States, “the number and focus of articles that analyze specific initiatives is lacking at best.”Footnote 29 They go so far as to conclude that the “lack of research on specific initiatives is potentially supporting institutional resistance towards transformative change.”Footnote 30

Being accountable means funding and valuing research on student learning. Strategic leadership in this space can support highering expertise in this area, or promoting from within. Lacking evidence-based best practice in how to measure the outcomes of diversity and inclusion initiatives on campus also remains a challenge for accountability.

Developing tactics for how best to be accountable within an institution is nonetheless important. The various change theories developed by Kezar provide some guidance on ways forward. In the context of accountability for diversity and inclusion programs and initiatives, no one change school addresses the systemic alterations necessary. Strategic academic development that involves holding faculty, staff, and students accountable for diversity and inclusion in classroom, curriculum, and residential life requires cognitive, cultural, and scientific management change. And such changes are likely to proceed slowly over time, which requires the tactics of the Evolutionary methods as well. Accountability is systemic and no theory of change school will sufficiently address the many types of change needed for this final step to take place.

Conclusion

This chapter has highlighted the changing diversity within higher education institutions across Asia and provided suggestions for how to identify the best avenues for strategic leadership around diversity and inclusion. With Kezar showcasing different mechanisms and approaches institutional leadership and change, the article also provides a summary of actionable strategic changes within an institution. A review of five possible actions that can be taken for strategic academic leadership are shared. These are the development of: (1) new physical spaces on a given campus; (2) the hiring of a chief diversity officer; (3) the changing role of curriculum committees and teaching and learning committees; (4) Engagement with academic support Units—libraries, writings centers, centers for teaching and learning; (5) and developing policies and mechanism for accountability around diversity and inclusion.

This chapter has spoken to a broader perspective on diversity and inclusion than the other chapters of this book, bringing together the ways in which the ideas in this book can be enacted in different higher education contexts. Collectively, this edited volume illuminates the many ways in which being cognizant of students’ diverse experiences and backgrounds and designing curricula and courses with that diversity in mind, faculty can maximize student learning. Students will look to faculty and staff for leadership—intellectual and moral—in difficult and uncomfortable situations. The more we know about our students and their educational background the better we can anticipate challenges that will arise and respond in ways that achieve deep learning and avoid harm. This book provides practical advice on how to manage these issues within higher education across Asia.

Summary of the Volume

The contributors here have addressed a dearth in the literature about the learner in Asia and academic leaders who are new to teaching in the Asian context. As the higher education industry expands across Asia, the issues of diversity and inclusion in pedagogy, curriculum, and institution have come to the fore with new intensity.

The first part of this book, Part I: Pedagogy for Inclusion, provides insights into the classroom techniques available for improving every students’ learning in a given classroom. A particular benefit of the book is that it speaks to the varied learning contexts across Asia but within international education settings. This first section speaks to the nuts and bolts of teaching in the Asia context—pedagogy for inclusion, diversifying curricular design, preparing culturally fair rubrics for assessment, exploring the pedagogy of service-learning to address socio-economic difference, and decolonizing the curriculum in the Asian context. An important demographic trend distinctive to Asia in some ways is the aging population, combined with the shifts in employment caused by the automation economy, which means integrating adult learners into our classrooms is also very important. The discussion of diversity and how best to leverage it for impactful learning are relatively new in the literature for the higher education in Asia context. Whether you are interested in learning more about your own implicit bias and how grading can be done more fairly, or you are interested in learning about confusion heritage and its potential influence on learners, these chapters offer distinctive insights for learning and teaching in the region.

The second part of the book, Part II: Liberal Arts Curricula in Asia Through the Diversity and Inclusion Lens, offers insights in ways of change for international liberal education in Asia. Diversifying the curriculum, service-learning that can help address socio-economic difference, and the support for multilingual writers through the development of writer’s centers. Together these three chapters represent key areas in which diversity and inclusion are playing out in higher education institutions across Asia.

In the third part, Part III: Supporting Historically Marginalized Populations, the authors review to different groups that have not yet been fully integrated into the higher education classroom in some countries within Asia, namely the LBGTQ+ community of learners, and in some contexts women and girls. There are varying cultural norms and legal precedents influencing the inclusion of both groups. Regardless of the higher education context, as educators, and strategic academic leaders, there are ways we can ensure they have an equal learning opportunity. These chapters seek to shed light on the current status of these groups and how we can engage them in the classroom for deeper learning for all.