Beginning Your Residency: Practical Tips from an Anti-Bias Perspective

Written by Anti Bias Work Group

 Wherever you are in the residency year, ACPE’s anti-bias working group would like to offer a few invitations. Consider using what you know will work but also consider using what you wonder about, what you’re less confident will work but might enrich your practice toward integrating anti-bias pedagogies. 

  1. Welcome everyone. One part perspectival and one part actual, develop a way to welcome every new person in your residency. Make space to inquire about the aspects and characteristics of their lives that are often unheard, unattended to, and uninvited in the context of your program. You might use student feedback to develop this awareness. What have your former students expressed as experiences of bias? How can those expressions help you welcome incoming residents? The idea is to call for those aspects of the new residents’ existence in a welcoming and affirming way, to host what would be treated in a biased manner from the beginning.  
  2. Explain what you mean by bias when you use the word. Model articulating your own path toward, around, and away from bias. You, like everyone else, relate to bias and you do so uniquely. Imagine the power of discussing your relationship with this word in the resident’s ears. You may relate around ability more than around race. You may relate to sexism or gender bias more easily than you do language. Start with your use, your experience, your effort. When you say “bias,” it means? When you imagine bias in the curricular work, they can expect? You may have done this and if you have, you know that every articulation feels clumsy, unfair, important, ridiculous, and necessary. 
  3. Listen to the explanations of your residents and what they mean by bias. Beginning your program is about beginning with your new students, right? Attend to the compassionate process of inviting from them what may take less present energy, what may require a developing strength, and what may pull attention they don’t quite have. They may be exhausted. They may be depleted—and from the beginning—when it comes to all-things-bias. Respect that. Listen to what they do say. Accept what they do offer with open hands and kindness for the gift that is given. You’re uniquely suited for this!
  4. Privilege the hardest definition of bias, the one that will stretch you as an educator. Whatever your relationship with bias as you begin, accept the work of doing more than you’ve done. One way to do this is by esteeming the next hardest definition of bias, the one just out of reach. It will help you grow during this year and assist you in your stretching. It will inevitably nurture growth as a part of your residents’ work and experience.
  5. Commit to integrating just responses in your curriculum by integrating anti-bias materials. Where you’ve put off adding that good idea from a workshop or an insight from a curriculum resource room, place it in your syllabus this year. Start with one addition for the first unit. Add two for the second unit and three for the third unit. 
  6. Set times to process experiences of bias. The fullness of a residency year means educators and students will have access to a beautiful range of learning possibilities. That range is a rewarding part of a residency. At the same time, when there’s much to learn, some of us may prioritize the obvious areas of skill growth and, consciously or not, turn away from the other less obvious or more gratifying areas of soul growth. I can imagine residents looking forward to skills and competencies, checklists, and submitted assignments. I hope our residents are interested in that. But I also hope for soul growth, for the growth that’s harder and that may be more difficult to track. Nurturing a mindset, heart, and soul for justice comes to mind here. It is and isn’t a skill matter. It is a soul matter. Work to reflect upon this intentionally so that it isn’t crowded by other important topics. Give it its own space.