“Diversity is a fact. Equity is a choice. Inclusion is an action. Belonging is an outcome.”
Arthur Chan
(a four-term contingency: diversity as a setting event; equity as an establishing operation; inclusion as a behavior; belonging as a consequence)
Today, “DEI” (all caps iteration) has become a political football, demonized, ironically, not to heal, but to exacerbate conflict between groups of mutually reinforcing individuals (aka ‘bubbles’ or ‘tribes’ … verbal communities in behaviorspeak). Othering is the collateral damage. That’s not what I’m here to talk about. Variety, fairness, and belonging, of course, are synonymous with diversity, equity, and inclusion. I’m here to reclaim lower case ‘d’ diversity, ‘e’ equity, and ‘i’ inclusion in service to applied behavior analysis with ‘belonging’ as the manifestation.
Diversity is a fact:
To behavior analysts, variety is not just the spice of life. It is the whole package: protein, carbohydrates, vitamins, and minerals as well. One basic tenet of a behavioral world view is that all humans are individuals, and that knowledge of each human’s distinct individuality is necessary to design the support we provide. We call that process case formulation… In common parlance, asking and answering at least the four questions… Who is the learner (big topic)? What will we do to help? How will we do it? How will we determine success? The first question drives the others.
Small d diversity takes us straight to the ‘who’. Every human comes with a distinct biological footprint that forms a foundation for development, albeit with some similarities to others. Let’s cut past all the jokes and serious notions about how many kinds of people there are in the world. At birth, there is one ‘kind’ of person (homo sapiens) and, by current estimates, there are 8,100,000,000 ‘kinds’ of people in the world. That’s where the diversity begins. Beyond the biology one is born with, and the culture one is born into, it doesn’t stop there. Learning begins right away (the good, the bad, the beautiful, and the ugly), and with it, function of behavior. After genetic determinism from inside the skin comes environmental determinism from outside the skin … ontogeny. This is a reality entirely at the whim of the fickle finger of fate.
So, after birth, who you are is defined by what you do and, by extension, what has happened to you contextually. What you do is what you have learned, the repertoires you have acquired, response by response. Some of those repertoires confer greater personal agency, and some stand in the way (strengths and challenges). Some of the learned challenges are formidable treatment challenges … the result of trauma histories and/or the result of long reinforcement histories of having one’s needs met via behaviors that are adaptive for the learner in the short term, but maladaptive in the long term. All inform our case formulations and subsequent supports. It is this acknowledgement of and appreciation for diversity that is reflected in our inquiry method of choice… single case design ~ the seeking of evidence of efficacy for individual after individual. I posit this as the embodiment of true person centered planning.
Equity is a choice:
Our mission is to improve quality of life for individuals with disabilities, which brings us to equity, both organizational and individual. From the provider end, does the organization provide commensurate resources and opportunities to all stakeholders? Perception of workplace equity increases everyone’s motivation to work productively with each other to produce consistent quality behavioral support.
For the individual learner, our mission is to level the playing field through mastery of increased agency (aka ‘skin in the game’). A measure of equity in any context is the extent to which a learner can contribute to the physical and social milieu and receive benefit in return (fairness in action). We do this by teaching with a focus on cusp skills…. skills that open opportunities for greater learning (access to reinforcement). For example, learning to attend to others and events for increasing duration enables all sorts of progressive teaching/learning opportunities from the simple to the complex. Learning to say words (in any modality) increases one’s impact on one’s milieu and the more words one can say with correspondence, the greater the impact. Learning lots of words with correspondence opens the door to the world of rule governed behavior. The more equity we can help learners master, the greater will be their success in inclusion with others.
Inclusion is an action:
We have been struggling to fine tune what inclusion means and how we do it since the deinstitutionalization movement of the 1970s and 80s. It has taken us fifty years of trial and error since the first passing of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) and the subsequent passing of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). Human beings with disabilities who require significant levels of support were largely excluded from public life before then. Hopefully, we are inching closer to meaningful inclusion. How are we doing? I have a few thoughts.
As humans, the ability to label and categorize (things, beings, events, processes, etc.) has given us enormous evolutionary advantage. It also sometimes gets in the way. When we preemptively categorize solutions without sufficient caution, we run the risk of homogenizing, the antithesis of the individual diversity that informs meaningful inclusion. Case in point … prioritization of proximal placement as the criterion for successful ‘inclusion’ for all children with disabilities has led to the unintended consequence, for children with needs for intensive support, of series of failures before needs are met. Complex social/verbal environments are punishing for children who do not yet have the agency to navigate them. ‘Yet’ is the criterion adverb for behavior analysts.
IDEA requires that students with disabilities be educated with non-disabled peers to the maximum extent appropriate and removed to separate classes or schools only when the severity of the disability prevents satisfactory learning even with extra supports. The key word here is ‘appropriate’. How should we define that for the individual? When we began the trial and error quest for equity and inclusion fifty years ago, operating with generous assumptions was a welcome switch from operating with pejorative assumptions. Generous assumptions, while taking sometimes us to good places, can also lead us down non-productive rabbit holes. In the interim, we have learned a lot about assessing repertoires, functions of behaviors, and personal preferences; enough to suggest that we should eschew assumption altogether and approach each child and situation with open minded inquiry. That will better help us reach ‘appropriate’ while avoiding collateral damage. Rather than a categorical location, a genuine ‘least restrictive environment’ is the environment in which the learner can be the most successful. Current educational practice all too often takes the learner there last. Let’s do a better job of going there first.
Belonging is an outcome:
And so, we arrive at the fourth term in the contingency … the point of the exercise. Along with the IDEA mandate for ‘free and appropriate education’ for individuals with disabilities, came a behavioral framework for learners to achieve progressive agency as a cusp for belonging: the individualized education plan (IEP). It’s the same process as described above as case formulation: who, what to do, what comes first, what comes next, how, criteria for success, when, and sometimes where. It is a powerful tool, when used effectively, less so when rolled out as another mandated box to check. Effective use, as a behavior to increase, is a work in progress.
Fifty years ago, we ended barbaric practices of segregation of the disabled and embarked upon restitution. This was a new and relatively untested cultural problem solving behavior. The other preceding models to build equity targeted women’s rights, sequelae to the ending of chattel slavery, other constraints historically imposed upon black, indigenous, and people of color, and LGBTQ rights. None of these efforts have been an overnight success. Progress for all endeavors has been incremental. The sum has been behavior change, but we have frequently stalled and sometimes have taken a step backwards. Martin Luther King Jr. reminded us that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice”. That’s the hope.
There are significant temporal constraints on planning for the future. Skinner (1982) pointed out that we cannot know the future by acquaintance (i.e., direct experience), only by description. It is the learning history afforded by acquaintance (experience of similar efforts that have been reinforced by success or abated by punishment) that gives us the only tools we have for enacting ‘belonging’ as culture wide behavior change. The quest for humanity and dignity as basic human rights occupies a very small percentage of human evolution. Until very recent human history, almost all societies were autocratic and dispensed privilege with prejudice. Arguably, we need to accrue some more relevant experiential success to fine tune our mastery of cultural behavior change. We’re not living in a perfect world … (yet!).
PS: Regarding ‘diversity is a fact’: beyond behavior analysis, appreciation of diversity is a mainstay of systems theory and the defining element of the web of life (aka biology). We are in good company.
Skinner, B. F. (1982). Why are we not acting to save the world? American Psychological Association, Washington, DC Reprinted in: BF Skinner (1987). Upon further reflection (pp. 114).