9 Transforming Teaching and Learning

Learning Objectives

1. Reflect on your professional approaches to equity and inclusion to identify strengths and areas to improve.
2. Build on your teaching approaches by adding equity-centred practices and strategies to your professional toolkit.
3. Internalize equity-centred guiding principles to provide opportunities for all students to meet high expectations for learning.

Introduction

“Believe it or not, when I walked into the start of this class, I was defeated and didn’t believe in myself. With your help, I started believing that I could achieve the things I wanted to achieve.”

“In one class, you presented one of my answers (anonymously) to the whole class, and it was such a huge encouragement for me. I am proud to let you know that because of your inspiration, I switched my major.”

Have you ever heard comments like this from students? These quotes are reminders that our work as educators can create belonging, inspiration, and equity.

Equity-centred education means embracing student diversity in all forms — race, ethnicity, gender, disability, socio-economic background, ideology, even personality traits like introversion — as an asset. It means designing and teaching courses in ways that foster talent in all students, but especially those who come from groups traditionally underrepresented in higher education.^[1] These strategies pay off in all types of courses and classrooms, across disciplines.

In the foundational modules you learned that both universal design for learning (UDL) and culturally responsive/relevant pedagogy and practices (CRP) focus on:

• Identification and removal of barriers
• High expectations for all learners
• Building and maintaining relationships
• Fostering the learning process
• Connections to the neuroscience of learning
• Building on strengths
• Attitudinal investment and shifts from educators

CRP and UDL work together to create equitable learning for all students. Both approaches include the use of students’ backgrounds and high expectations for learning. Both CRP and UDL are grounded in neurological science and when implemented, have a positive impact on student learning and wellness.

In addition to CRP and UDL, the foundational modules introduced other essential equity-centred approaches and frameworks. This module will use a set of equity-centred guiding principles intended to build on previous modules to offer guidance as you reflect on and implement these approaches in your professional practice. The aim is to break down equity-centred practices into manageable themes and levels of practice.

The goal? Creating inclusive, equity-centred learning environments and prioritizing student learning.

Equity-Centred Example

Let’s start with a few inspiring examples of equity-centred practices in post-secondary in Nova Scotia.

Mi’kmaw student creates lab at Acadia to share traditional knowledge with future scientists

All first-year biology students at Acadia University now learn about Mi’kmaw traditional knowledge thanks to the efforts of one student who was tired of seeing Indigenous perspectives ignored in science. Leah Creaser, a member of the Acadia First Nation, said she often felt out of place and uncomfortable in her university biology classes.

She remembers taking a first-year lab about plant identification and waiting for her professor to talk about how the Mi’kmaq have been using those same plants for thousands of years. It never happened. “I don’t want to say I got mad, but I was definitely really frustrated to not even see any acknowledgements of any Indigenous peoples at all,” said Creaser, 26, who is now in her fourth year and president of the university’s Indigenous Students Society.

“The fact that the school flies the flag, puts their acknowledgements at the end of their emails, like that’s not enough.” When her professor Juan Carlos López suggested she create her own lab based on Mi’kmaw traditional knowledge as part of a research topic in her third year, she said yes right away and then took it a step further. Creaser wrote the lab from her own perspective, and last fall agreed to teach 120 first-year students some of the traditional plant knowledge she’s learned from her band.

Her lab is now part of the required core biology course at the university. “Decolonization and reconciliation, that is really what’s happening here,” said Creaser^[2].

Read the article: Mi’kmaw student creates lab at Acadia to share traditional knowledge with future scientists by Emma Smith May 15, 2021 posted to CBC News Nova Scotia.

Danika Berghamer: A positive teaching practicum experience

Reflect

Can you think of an example from your own practice, your colleagues, or your campus?

In these examples:

• How did faculty support the process?
• What was the impact on students?
• What is your biggest take-away?

Educational Equity

Throughout the module, we use this icon to suggest times to reflect on a concept, your professional practice, or yourself. We hope these questions help spark your thinking in new and creative directions.

What are Equity-Centered Practices?

Equity-minded teaching and learning practices, no matter the modality, call on us to look at systemic barriers to achieving educational equity in the learning environment…

Equity is about enacting intentional strategies to address disparities that affect students who are already disproportionately impacted.

– Jill Provoe^[3]

Equity-centered practices in education consider, incorporate, and make the most of students’ cultures, learning strengths, and accessibility requirements. These strengths-focused approaches build a foundation for all students to achieve equality in educational and life outcomes. They also build our individual and community capacity to dismantle systemic oppression and create a future with equity for all.

Inclusive teaching and learning involve deliberately cultivating a learning environment where all students are treated equitably, have equal access to learning, and feel valued and supported in their learning. Such teaching attends to social identities and seeks to change the ways systemic inequities shape dynamics in teaching-learning spaces; affect individuals’ experiences of those spaces; and influence course and curriculum design.^[4]

The Equity-Centred Guiding Principles^[5][6][7][8]

Use of Equity-Centred Guiding Principles in Teaching and Learning

You are invited to use these interconnected equity-centred principles to guide instructional choices across all domains of learning (including content selection and delivery, interactions among and between students and instructor, and assessment) in order to support inclusive teaching environments. These inclusive educational principles are relevant to any discipline or teaching setting, including remote or hybrid settings.

The Equity-Centred Guiding Principles are not a prescription; they are an evolving set of ideas and practices, based on continuously emerging research and practice. The concepts and language in the principles will continue to evolve. You can mix and match elements of the tool to support specific learning goals, content areas, and contexts.

In the following sections of the module, we include examples of practices, aligned with the principles, relevant to inclusive learning in remote or hybrid settings.

Please Note: When the term system racism is used in this module, it includes systemic, structural, institutional, environmental racism and oppression.

Equity-Centered Guiding Principles Checklist

These equity-centred practices are not intended as a checklist for ensuring your professional practice is equitable, accessible, and inclusive. Rather, they are designed to help faculty reflect on a range of inclusive teaching practices to reinforce practices already in use and identify new ones for exploration.^[9] Links to videos, podcasts, and articles are included under each principle to further your learning.

Here is a suggested way to engage with these lists:

Reflecting upon your teaching practice^[10], do you or would you use any of the following strategies?

✓         I regularly use this or a similar strategy in my teaching

~       I sometimes use this in my teaching

X        I do not or would not use this in my teaching/this is not applicable in my setting

✩       I would like to try this, though I may need more information or resources

For ease of use beyond this module, all practices are compiled into a downloadable PDF in Learn More.  

We hope this reflection provides a useful basis for further exploration of equity-centred teaching practices, through conversation with colleagues, communities of practice or engaging in relevant scholarship.

1. Critically Engage Across Difference

Review Current Practice

We bring our experience and our expertise into our professional practice. We also bring our social identities. Our social identities include our social relationships, both on a micro (personal) and macro (social) level. For example, our personal identities are based on our experiences, or what makes us unique, while our social identities are based on our group affinities, such as age, gender, race, religion, abilities, sexual orientation, or socio-economic status. Some identities are visible, such as race and assumed gender, while others are invisible, such as abilities, socioeconomic status, and education level.^[11]

All our social identities intersect, change, and evolve over time.^[12]

Reflect

1. Reflect on your social identities. How do your social identities impact your decisions and the way you interact with the world?  Which parts

• are apparent or even invisible in your day-to-day life?
• are most critical to your personal sense of yourself?
• most affect how others perceive you (positively or negatively)?
• have the most effect on how you perceive others?
• face the most marginalization — or give you the most advantage — in your community?

2. What do you think your students would want you to know about their social identities and worldviews?
3. Have you considered the intersectional identities of your students and how that impacts learning?

Practices to Critically Engage Across Difference

Identify and Name Your Social Identities and Locations

• Persistently reflect on your social identities and locations in relation to systemic racism and oppression inside and outside your institution
• Acknowledge systemic inequities
• Identify your strengths and weaknesses

Be Anti-Racist, Anti-Ableist and Anti-Oppressive

• Learn about the trauma of systemic racism and oppression
• Support and validate students’ intersectional identities
• Reduce students’ social-emotional stress

Adopt An Intersectional Lens

• Recognize students as the subject matter experts in their own lives
• See students as individuals and acknowledge their intersecting identities and communities
• Honour a range of expression and communication

Examples of practices that align with this principle include:

• Acknowledge the ways that campus or world events may be creating barriers to students’ capacity to engage in coursework, or their sense of being welcomed and valued; acknowledge the differential impacts developments may have on different students
• Model vulnerability by sharing the ways your own identities shape your relationship to your work or the discipline
• Deepen your understanding of culture beyond race, language, etc.
• Ask students to be mindful of their own positionalities and the range of (more and less visible) identities among students in the course; this supports students’ inclusive interactions with their classmates
• Consider opportunities for respectfully integrating Indigenous and African Nova Scotian perspectives and worldviews within your courses
• Consider opportunities to integrate anti-racist, anti-ableist, and anti-oppressive perspectives within your courses
• Understand microaggressions and how they might occur in both in-person and online environments; be ready to address them
• Stay present in dialogue; monitor it regularly and intervene when necessary
• Critically reflect on your roles and responsibilities in removing systemic barriers to student success; don’t attribute disparities in outcomes exclusively to perceived deficits in students’ identities, life circumstances, or capabilities
• Normalize the fact that students will have a range of background preparation and find ways of highlighting those differences as assets for learning (e.g., learners who are new to material can often pose useful critical questions that help those familiar with the material identify gaps in their understanding or think about the material in new ways)
• Provide opportunities for students to consider the relevance of course concepts to concerns of communities that they are part of
• Draw examples you use to illustrate course concepts from a range of social or cultural domains. Or invite students to identify examples from their own arenas of knowledge or expertise
• Use a background questionnaire early in the term to learn about individual students’ past academic experiences, goals, concerns, or other information that could help you plan relevant and inclusive learning opportunities
• Choose course materials and activities with a range of student circumstances in mind (e.g., physical abilities and disabilities, financial and technological resources, time commitments such as work or family care obligations)
• Proactively invite requests for accommodations as a chance to include everyone more fully in learning (through a non-stigmatizing syllabus statement, a reminder in class, an email); be inclusive in your messaging to not single out students who require accommodations
• Communicate concern for students’ well-being, and share information about campus resources (e.g., Counseling & Psychological Services, Sexual Assault Prevention & Awareness Center, Services for Students with Disabilities, Indigenous Advisors, Black Student Advisors)
• Ask students for concrete observations about content (e.g., simply describe an image, passage, or diagram) before moving to analytical questions; this can provide everyone a common starting point, highlight multiple different approaches, and model analytical processes you want to teach
• Present course material in a variety of modalities (readings, diagrams, lectures, podcasts) rather than relying on one mode of engagement
• Accompany verbal instructions with a written corollary; multiple modes can be helpful to students with processing disabilities as well as multilingual learners

Internalize Your Learning

Reflect

What other strategies do you use to acknowledge or affirm students’ different identities, strengths, or needs in your courses?  What else could you do?

Choose another question from this list that resonates for you:

• What is one tiny shift you can make today that would have the most significant impact on your students?
• Where do you feel this work is most urgently needed?
• What area or topic makes you feel the most uncomfortable and what will you do to tackle that?
• What has emerged for you that you can meaningfully act on today?
• Where do you feel most alive in this work?
• What’s your biggest take-away so far that affirms one of your own values?

Learn more about Critical Engagement Across Differences

Watch

Danika Berghamer: Not knowing something is an opportunity to learn and grow

Jean-Blaise Samou: Institutional strategies for change

Tereigh Ewert: Our task is to expect and pursue academic success for all students

Jean-Blaise Samou: Decolonize your own perspective and co-create knowledge with your students

Kimberlé Crenshaw: What is Intersectionality?

Niigaanwewidam (James) Sinclair: What does an Indigenous University Look Like?

Read

First Peoples Principles of Learning – an infographic by First Nations Education Steering Committee

Walking Together: First Nations, Metis and Inuit Perspectives in Curriculum by Learn Alberta

Student Survey Questions to Assess Classroom Climate and Potential Microaggressions

University of Alberta Creates Hub for Intersectional Gender Research

Innovative Designs for Accessibility Student Competition

Examples of Microaggressions in the Classroom

First Nations Pedagogy

Nguzo Saba Principles a blog by Los Angeles African American Cultural Center

2.  Shift Attitudes and Mindsets

Reflect

Review current practice

1. How do you recognize that changing attitudes are key to changing action?
2. How do you see students as co-learners?
3. How do you consider the life experiences of the students when offering services and consciously create a safer learning environment?
4. How do you offer multiple options for accessing services so that students may interact in a way that is compatible to their learning needs?

Practices to Shift Attitudes and Mindsets

Challenge Your Mindset

• Recognize that changing attitudes are key to changing actions
• Know equity-centred practices can help all students
• Integrate an inclusion mindset to foster innovation, performance, academic and personal success, opportunities, and well-being

Expand Your View of Students

• Reorient your view to students as co-learners
• Value students’ diversities as strengths and build on them
• Commit to identifying and removing barriers for — and challenging all — students

Embrace Intentionality

• Plan and design for predictable variability in students’ lived experiences, strengths, and needs
• Formulate proactive approaches, instead of reactive approaches
• Work to move responsibility for knowledge and healing from the individual to the community

Examples of practices that align with this principle include:

• Embrace learning and inclusive mindsets; accept vulnerability as without it, you miss key opportunities for growth
• Cultivate growth mindsets:  Allow for productive trial and error (e.g., through low-stakes practice quizzes, drafting opportunities, modeling, or discussion of interestingly productive wrong answers). Emphasize that risk, struggle, and failure can be important parts of any learning process and/or the scientific method.
• Communicate high expectations and your belief that all students can succeed
• Remember that service provision is a teaching and learning interaction/ experience in both directions
• Hold high expectations for performance — for your students and for yourself
• Reject deficit perspectives about students’ intellectual capacities or fit for higher education; validation and positive messaging are critical
• Tell students, “you belong;” “you can do the work;” “you can succeed;” “you have the ability;” and “you are intelligent”
• Seek opportunities to expand your own knowledge and skills in helping students with specific concerns (e.g., bias, navigating systems of oppression) as well as interfacing with equity groups
• Be open to feedback on barriers
• Establish rapport with students, groups, colleagues, and others that acknowledge differences in lived experience
• Ensure all students feel welcome as an integral part of the institution
• Learn students’ names to create the feeling of more than a number
• Engage in continual relationship building
• Have an open mic session for students to ask general/informal questions. Or use an anonymized tool such as a question box if students do not want to be identified
• Use external community supports (like the Youth Project) to do presentations/ training for faculty and students on gender identity
• Exhibit culturally inclusive active listening skills (e.g., appropriately establishing interpersonal contact, paraphrasing, perception checking, summarizing, questioning, encouraging, avoid interrupting, clarifying)
• Allow for flexibility when assisting students who feel uncomfortable with current processes. When a student feels intimidated going to a formal meeting invite them to meet in the cafeteria over coffee and allow for pauses so students can formulate thoughts and have a chance to speak without feeling they are interrupting
• Consistently update student information to ensure all populations are included in approaches
• Demonstrate culturally inclusive advising, supporting, coaching, and counseling strategies
• Design or modify services and programs to support well-being and a positive organizational culture and ethic of care, considering students holistically

Bradley Sheppard: Having an inclusive mindset

Danika Berghamer: Not knowing something is an opportunity to learn and grow

Emily Duffett: Be open to dialogue about barriers, and how to help

Bradley Sheppard: The power of learning students’ names

Jean-Blaise Samou: Putting students at the centre

Read

CAST webinar slide deck on The Language of UDL: Shifting Mindsets presented by Melissa Sanjeh and Bill Wilmot. You can also listen to the audio recording of the presentation.

Language of Appeasement (March 30, 2017) by Dafina-Lazarus Stewart posted on Inside Higher Ed.

Engineers Canada creates an inclusive environment for LGBTQ students posted on Universities Canada October 15, 2018.

Universities across Canada make way for the “non-traditional” student, posted on Universities Canada October 15, 2018.

UDL and Growth Mindsets by Katie Novak, July 10, 2015 posted on Novak Education.

Internalize Your Learning

Reflect

What other ways do you help facilitate students’ sense of belonging in your practice?  What else could you do?

Choose another question from this list that resonates for you:

• What is one tiny shift you can make today that would have the most significant impact on your students?
• Where do you feel this work is most urgently needed?
• What area or topic makes you feel the most uncomfortable and what will you do to tackle that?
• What has emerged for you that you can meaningfully act on today?
• Where do you feel most alive in this work?
• What’s your biggest take-away so far that affirms one of your own values?

3.  Design the Learning Environment

Reflect

Review current practice

1. How is the learning environment welcoming and accessible to all individuals of differing skills and abilities?
2. How do you foster student voice and agency?
3. How are you open and engaging to all students and share a belief in their equitable treatment?
4. How do you welcome and inclusively navigate courageous conversations?
5. How do you connect content, assessment, and approaches/strategies to students’ lived experiences and cultures?

Practices to Design the Learning Environment

Be Culturally Relevant and Affirming

• Know your own cultural and social lens
• Learn about diverse cultures, lived experiences, and ways of knowing
• Connect content, assessment, and approaches/strategies to students’ lived experiences and cultures

Foster A Community of Learning

• Ground decisions in accessibility and equity
• Welcome courageous conversations
• Build a learning community that goes beyond the classroom and institution

Cultivate Safe(R)/Brave Learning Environments

• Create intellectually and socially safe(r) learning environments
• Foster student voice and agency
• Establish a culture of accountability with equal space for culturally relevant conversations

Examples of practices that align with this principle include:

• Recognize the importance of students’ physical, emotional, spiritual, and social well-being in learning, development, and success
• Demonstrate a willingness and capacity to generate, critically examine, and change policies and practices that privilege one group of students or educational stakeholders over another
• Perceive and analyze unspoken dynamics in a group setting
• Create dedicated opportunities (time during class, dedicated office hours, online forms, etc.) for students to ask questions about assignments and expectations
• Invite students to share information about their own expectations about the learning environment based on their prior experiences to help you understand where your expectations may be mismatched and what you might need to explain
• Explicitly communicate the purpose, task, and assessment criteria for graded assignments; also identify any assumed capacities, abilities, skills, or prior knowledge embedded in your assignments or course learning activities, and connect students to resources that help them bolster those skills if necessary
• Explain the learning objectives of activities you use class time for (e.g., discussion of readings, lectures, critique of peers’ work, independent work on projects)
• Ensure information is created in multiple formats
• Make your documents, presentations, and websites accessible (there are website accessibility guidelines) and check with your Centre for Learning and Teaching center or IT supports
• Make your online meetings more accessible (see the Nova Scotia Accessibility Directorate‘s guide online for tips).
• Make videos accessible (e.g. use closed captions, have ASL interpreters when possible, create transcriptions)
• Clearly articulate core course learning objectives so you can make deliberate decisions about what elements in the course can be revised, adapted, or made optional in response to individual and/or collective student needs.
• Build in opportunities for student choice, for example, flexible or self-paced deadlines for assignments if possible; multiple options for topics or modalities for assignments; optional opportunities for instructor or peer feedback on drafts
• Design course policies that provide clear pathways if students need to be absent, turn in work late, leave class early, etc.; explain how these are designed to support student learning when unforeseen circumstances arise; avoid framing such policies as simply punitive
• Solicit feedback from students about what teaching approaches or technologies work best for their learning and be willing to make adjustments accordingly when you can
• Regularly assess student understanding of key course concepts so you can provide relevant instruction or access to supplementary materials to fill common gaps
• Prioritize student learning needs when content coverage is in tension with responding to student learning needs; be willing to adjust lecture pace, reduce information on slides, make course materials available to students for study and exam preparation, etc.
• Learn about students’ prior skill and familiarity before introducing a new technology in your course; gauge how demanding learning the technology is likely to be and to make informed decisions about students’ capacity to add that learning to the core learning in your course.
• Design your course with both synchronous and asynchronous options for participation; flexible design choices can help you adapt to changing conditions and meet student needs as they arise

Bradley Sheppard: Perspective taking – Asking yourself how you would feel in the same situation

Rashida Symonds: The importance of enjoyment in learning, and acting on student feedback

Cynthia Bruce: Why it’s important to provide learning materials in multiple accessible formats

Cynthia Bruce: Use multiple formats when posting pre-recorded lectures online, and always anticipate the broadest spectrum of learners

Empowering Students to Own the Assessment Process

Read

Key UDL Questions to Consider when Designing Lessons by CAST, extracted from the book Universal Design for Learning: Theory and Practice.

Student Voice section on the website Inside Higher Ed.
Student Voice is a news hub spotlighting the student perspective on higher education.

Faculty guide: Make class a safe space with Oops/Ouch Method posted on Campus Reform. Campus Reform defines their mandate as being a conservative watchdog to the nation’s higher education system, Campus Reform exposes liberal bias and abuse on the nation’s college campuses.

Internalize Your Learning

Reflect

What other strategies do you use to acknowledge or affirm students’ different identities, strengths, or needs in your courses?  What else could you do?

Choose another question from this list that resonates for you:

• What is one tiny shift you can make today that would have the most significant impact on your students?
• Where do you feel this work is most urgently needed?
• What area or topic makes you feel the most uncomfortable and what will you do to tackle that?
• What has emerged for you that you can meaningfully act on today?
• Where do you feel most alive in this work?
• What’s your biggest take-away so far that affirms one of your own values?

4.  Support the Learning Process

Reflect

Review current practice

1. How do you centre equity, diversity, and inclusion in your practice?
2. How do you ground relationships in humility, trust, respect, and care?
3. What are your strategies for inclusive information processing, engagement, and assessment?
4. How do you maximize choice in expression and assessment and encourage self-reflection?

Practices to Support the Learning Process

Centre Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion

• Engage in personal and professional learning and development
• Apply a social justice/decolonizing/anti-racist/anti-ableist/anti-oppressive lens to programs and environments
• Commit to designing for diverse learners

Build Authentic Relationships and Rapport

• Ground relationships in humility, trust, respect, and care
• Support students’ ownership of their learning and have high expectations for all students
• Reach out to students often and engage positively

Strategize For Inclusive Information Processing, Engagement, and Assessment

• Maximize choice in expression and assessment and encourage self-reflection
• Connect your practice to the neuroscience of learning
• Advance digital equity, offer flexible delivery, and ensure access

Examples of practices that align with this principle include:

• Learn and use students’ names and pronouns, and encourage them to learn and use one another’s, accurately pronounced and spelled; be aware that what students choose to be called may differ from the name that appears on your class roster
• Build rapport in the class through regular icebreakers, small group activities, collaborative thinking, etc.
• In course materials, meetings, and communications, express your commitment to creating an accessible, inclusive course, and invite student feedback about practices that do and don’t facilitate that goal
• Assess students’ prior knowledge about your field and topics so you can accurately align instruction with their strengths and needs
• Encourage or require students to visit office hours early in the term, and use that time to ask about their interests and experiences with course material
• Highlight the diversity of contributors to your discipline (through the authors you assign, the research you highlight, the guests you invite to meet with your students, etc.), and/or sponsor discussion about the reasons for a history of limited access to the field and current efforts to change it
• Seek to identify professionals who bring a range of backgrounds, including identities that are different from yours, when inviting outside critics or speakers
• Prepare outside visitors to contribute to the inclusive environment of your class meetings (e.g., make sure they are aware of community norms, accessibility needs, etc.)
• Deliberately avoid generalizations that may exclude students who are already experiencing marginalization on campus; these are often communicated through phrases (e.g, “when you go home for Thanksgiving,” “if you have a child some day,” “just walk over to my office,” “it only costs $x”) that make implicit assumptions about students’ physical ability, family structure, social identities, citizenship status, or economic means.
• Create intentional opportunities for students to provide feedback on their experience of the learning environment and share ideas for improving it; this could include short anonymous polls, check-ins at the beginning of a class meeting, or more substantial written feedback opportunities.
• Online, invite students to create short videos about themselves as a way to start building meaningful relationships; in person, find safe ways for students to meet and get to know each other
• Convey unconditional positive regard; see your students as being fully capable of succeeding; approach them in non-judgmental ways
• Develop discussion guidelines or community agreements about interactions during class (see examples on the University of Michigan Center for Research on Learning and Teaching website; reflect upon those guidelines with students at strategic points throughout the term; revise them when useful
• Use strategies for including a range of voices in facilitated discussions, for example, take a queue; ask to hear from those who have not spoken; wait until several hands are raised to call on anyone; or use paired or small group conversations to seed larger discussion
• Give all students time to gather their thoughts in writing before sharing ideas with the whole group
• Task students to work in pairs or small groups on brief, well-defined activities (with a timeline and specific goals/outcomes)
• Assign student groups/teams or provide criteria for student-formed groups/teams that both help leverage diversity and avoid isolating students from underrepresented identities, when possible
• Create time and a process for students to discuss their respective strengths, personal learning goals, anticipated contributions, etc. at the beginning of group or team projects
• Give students regular opportunities to reflect upon ways their learning has been enhanced by interaction with classmates; this could be as simple as asking them to reflect on their learning at the end of a session with the question, “What did you learn from someone else today?”
• Establish processes for ensuring you’re giving equitable time and attention to each student

George Swaniker: Help students feel like they belong

Rashida Symonds: Giving students options for demonstrating their learning

Tianyan Yu: The importance of giving all people an opportunity to speak in the classroom and in meetings

Please Note: It may be problematic to suggest that folks who are already marginalized are singled out to speak in a meeting first. This video demonstrates one suggestion but might further marginalize some people.

Jean-Blaise Samou: The benefits and challenges of diverse discussion groups

Read

Strategies for anti-racist and decolonized teaching by Anamika Twyman-Ghoshal and Danielle Carkin Lacorazza posted on the Faculty Focus website March 31, 2021.

Why I Put Pronouns on my Email Signature (and LinkedIn profile) and You Should Too by Max Masure (they/them) August 10, 2018 posted on Medium.

13 Teacher Tips for Building Student Voice and Agency by TeamXQ, October 28, 2019 posted on XQ.

Resources for Inclusive Digital Pedagogy compiled by Esther Lherisson, Davidson College FIRST program. FIRST stands for
Fostering Inclusivity and Respect in Science Together.

Reflect

What other ways do you build flexibility into your courses to support and respond to students’ range of needs and circumstances?  What else could you do?

Choose another question from this list that resonates for you:

• What is one tiny shift you can make today that would have the most significant impact on your students?
• Where do you feel this work is most urgently needed?
• What area or topic makes you feel the most uncomfortable and what will you do to tackle that?
• What has emerged for you that you can meaningfully act on today?
• Where do you feel most alive in this work?
• What’s your biggest take-away so far that affirms one of your own values?

Conclusion

Summary

Remember that becoming an equity-centered educator is a process that will happen over time and with conscious effort. You do not need to know and understand everything to do better and do more for your students.

[P]eople will falter throughout their EDI work, whether they’re an EDI novice or expert, faltering is okay as long as you remain accountable and take the time to learn from those missteps. The primary goal is to keep your students safe and, therefore, taking ownership of your mistakes and continuing to learn and grow your equity practice is critical and will allow you to come back stronger than ever.

– Jill Provoe^[13]

We hope the guiding principles and sample promising practices we’ve outlined here provide a road map to make sure your classroom interactions and course design reach all students. When we as faculty members include more students in the learning, we empower them to achieve and show that we care about them and their sense of belonging.

Learn More

Download:

Transforming Teaching and Learning Practices

Read:

The Quiet Revolution. A website that provides resources and stories for and about introverts. Susan Cain

Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking by Susan Cain

Diversity Toolkit Diversity Toolkit: A Guide to Discussing Identity, Power and Privilege

Pulling Together: A guide for Indigenization of post-secondary institutions Professional Learning Series, BCCampus [downloadable book]

Online Equity Rubric Distance Education, Peralta Colleges

Review:

CSIE current resources Review the resource list, including “Equality, Making it Happen,” A guide to help schools ensure everyone is safe, included and learning (2016). Centre for Studies on Inclusive Education

Collections of Instructional Strategies

Read:

This list of sample instructional strategies from UBC.

This is a collection of practical ideas collected by York University offered for use by the educational development community. Based on the notion of a cookbook put together by a community we offer Starters (ice breakers), Main Courses (ideas for workshops and events) and Desserts (ways to obtain feedback or evaluation).

Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion Resources

Read:

Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion-Minded Practices in Virtual Learning Environments – Jill Provo, NSCC

Universal Instructional Design, Creating an Accessible Curriculum by the University of Toronto at Scarborough Teaching and Learning Services, and AccessAbility Services, published in 2004.

How to Make Your Teaching More Inclusive: Advice Guide by Viji Sathy and Kelly A. Hogan posted on the The Chronicle of Higher Education website.

Strategies for Antiracist and Decolonized Teaching by Anamika Twyman-Ghoshal and Danielle Carkin Lacorazza posted on Faculty Focus, March 31, 2021.

Inclusive Teaching by Bryan Dewsbury and Cynthia J. Brame in
the journal CBE—Life Sciences Education, April 26, 2019.

Structure Matters: Twenty-One Teaching Strategies to Promote Student Engagement and Cultivate Classroom Equity by Kimberly D. Tanner in the journal CBE—Life Sciences Education, fall 2013.

Getting Under the Hood: How and for Whom Does Increasing Course Structure Work? by Sarah L. Eddy and Kelly A. Hogan in the journal CBE—Life Sciences Education, October 13 2017.

Listen:

The Teaching in Higher Ed podcast: Interactivity and inclusivity can help close the achievement gap by Viji Sathy and Kelly Hogan, March 22, 2018.

Read the transcript for Interactivity and inclusivity can help close the achievement gap.

Review:

University of Michigan Center for Research on Learning and Teaching website page on inclusive teaching resources and strategies.

Brown University’s Center for Teaching and Learning web page on inclusive teaching.