How to spot bias in your own teaching – and what to do about it

Bias in higher education rarely announces itself, but this hidden problem is within a lecturer’s power to put right.

Imagine a criminology lecture on violent offenders, where the slide shows a young Black man in a hoodie. There might not be intended harm or overt racism behind the choice, but that stock image has taught the class something the syllabus never intended: who to picture when we think of a criminal.

Bias takes many forms, and in my research on race, gender and inequality in higher education, it rarely shows up as overt hostility. Far more often, it’s a habit no one has stopped to question, in how we choose examples, award marks and decide who we expect to struggle, whether along lines of race, gender, class or disability.

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This bias shapes outcomes because a student who feels out of place gets less from a course than one who thinks it was made for them. These habits sit within our own teaching, so they’re ours to correct.

Double-check what you present to students

The materials we use are a sensible place to begin. It’s worth asking whose face illustrates the problem, whose story becomes the default case study and who appears only when the topic turns to disadvantage. The manager is assumed to be a man and the carer a woman. The students in an example rarely have jobs, children or a disability, and a discussion of Africa proceeds as though it were a single country.

I’ve watched a topic touching on race turn every head towards the one Black student in the room, who never asked to represent anyone. It happens to many marginalised students left carrying a whole group on their shoulders, and correcting this is a matter of habit more than policy.

Check every example and image for who’s represented and who’s cast as the problem, then diversify until a mix of faces and stories is simply the norm. A lone Black case study on an otherwise unchanged reading list isn’t inclusion, and neither is one lecture on women in the field.

Before I joined my institution, my colleagues ran a full inclusive curriculum audit and worked through it module by module. Inclusive curricula are a great institutional change mechanism that can help to bring implicit bias to the fore. Our forthcoming paper, “A methodology for an inclusive and accessible digital curriculum”, explores our methodology. However, individual actors don’t have to wait for an audit to take a critical look at their teaching slides.

Check your marking, not just your teaching

Assessment carries as much hidden bias as the classroom, and rewards the same scrutiny. Two students can arrive with near-identical profiles and still leave with different degree classifications. The gap between white and Black full-time undergraduate awarded a first or a 2:1 was at 20.4 percentage points in 2023-24, according to the Office for Students.

That gap doesn’t reflect the students; it reflects how we assess. Race isn’t the only fault line – assessment can also disadvantage disabled students, mature learners, part-time students and those with caring responsibilities. Often, this can be through nothing more than an inflexible deadline or an assessment format that assumes every student is a 19-year-old with no job and no dependants.

Grade distributions are a good place to look, because patterns you would never predict in a single case show up in the aggregate. It helps, too, to design assessments that are both inclusive and hard to outsource to artificial intelligence because asking students to produce a piece of work and then analyse it tests understanding in a way a template essay simply cannot.

Start with your own defaults

The other place to look is inward, at the snap judgements we make about who reads as capable or as a good fit. We can default to expect less of the mature student returning to education after 20 years, the student with a strong regional or second-language accent, or the student juggling work shifts and childcare, and students sense those expectations quickly.

A few habits help here: varying who we call on, watching the language we use to praise and correct, and asking students to question the assumptions in sources, rather than treat a reading list as neutral. Representation also matters, because when teaching staff reflect the range of people they teach, students speak up more readily and ask more questions. I’ve seen first-hand the difference that makes to how confidently a class engages.

You can’t restaff a department overnight, but you can be the person who makes a room feel safe enough to speak. None of this needs a task force, a bigger budget or a new strategy document. It comes down to the small choices you make every week, such as which image you use, which example you reach for, which work you reward and which student you expect to struggle.

That is what makes bias so persistent, and what keeps change within reach of the individual academic. Fairer teaching isn’t an addition to good teaching, it’s part of what truly good teaching is.

Dami Folayan is researcher and lecturer in EDI at Arden University.

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