1.4 Continuous learning

While you might not immediately think of this as a skill, your openness and commitment to continuous learning is a vital aspect of diversity and inclusion. For example, your willingness to learn about different world views, perspectives and lived experiences, will enhance your diversity and inclusion knowledge and practice. Also, as this is an ever evolving topic, continuous learning is a necessary approach.

Watch this short video in which Asif Sadiq explains the importance of continuous learning and the concept of conscious inclusion.

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Transcript: Video 7: Continuous learning

Asif Sadiq

So, many times, we think of training as a one-off experience, unconscious bias training, everyone must do it, we must get our organisations through this unconscious bias training. The truth is, learning is a lifelong experience. There’s different elements that we must embrace, we must introduce. But we must create environments where people continue to learn, that they continue to learn in many different ways, from taught sessions, to self learning, to experiential learning. So we must enrich those processes of learning if we’re truly going to really embed diversity, equity and inclusion as a critical principle.

The other key element to understand is that when we think about tackling our biases, and there’s many biases, even I can’t name all the biases, and if we sit and spend time wondering which bias is coming in or which bias should I be mindful of, it is very hard. But what we can do is start to think about how can we be consciously inclusive in every decision we make, every conversation we have. And when we start framing everything around conscious inclusion, that means we’re thinking before we make those decisions, we’re thinking who’s missing from the room, who could be included in this, what could I do to support this group. And that conscious inclusion can drive more positive change and impact than just worrying about what biases we have or knowing that we have biases and then not knowing what to do with that.

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Video _unit6.2.4 Video 7: Continuous learning

Valamis (2022) describes continuous learning as follows:

You can see from this description that personal characteristics, such as initiative and willingness to take on a challenge, are going to be important. Reflection also plays a key role in consolidating your learning.

Walsh (2018) emphasizes the importance of motivation, and you’ll explore that in more detail in the next activity.

Now that you’ve considered some of the personal tools (i.e. skills and behaviours) that you can develop to support your work on this agenda, the next section will focus on some of the professional tools you could use.