Inclusive Teaching

Rollins is committed to inclusive teaching, a pedagogical practice designed to ensure all learners have equitable access to a successful learning experience. This is only possible when instructors are prepared to co-create, alongside their learners, a safe learning environment that values the expression of diverse views, opinions, and concerns and where every learner's identity and experience is honored. Commitment to inclusive teaching requires an iterative process of intentional and authentic engagement, humility, reflection, and reflexivity. Inclusive teaching is generally experienced by learners through:

1. course content and materials that reflect diversity and are designed for accessibility and

2. clear expressions of course expectations, instructors' self-awareness regarding their position of power, culturally-responsive communication, and attention to interpersonal dynamics, all of which contribute to an inclusive overall course climate.

As a RSPH instructor, you are strongly encouraged to complete the DEI Curriculum Assessment Tool each time you prepare to teach a course, even if you have taught your course for many years. This tool is designed to help you assess the degree to which your course content and material reflect elements of diversity and inclusion as well as how confident you feel in implementing various inclusive teaching principles in your course. While not exhaustive, below are some instructional strategies and considerations regarding inclusive teaching principles developed by Northwestern Searle Center for Advancing Teaching and Learning. Follow the links to learn more about each principle including examples of application in the classroom. 

Principle 1: Instructors' Social Identities and Impact on Learning 

• Consider your and your learners’ social identities and their implications for learning.
• Engage in work around your personal racial, ethnic, and multicultural identity development to increase your awareness of privilege, oppression, and racial consciousness.
• Reflect on how your identities impact your teaching.

Principle 2: Communication of Course Standards and Expectations

• Establish and communicate clear course standards and expectations (e.g. use RSPH syllabus templates).
• Reflect critically on what you want your learners to be able to do, know, and value by the end of the course and explain why this matters.
• Avoid assumptions about learners’ prior knowl­edge and skills.
• Create communal guidelines on the first day of class.
• Communicate expectations about what it means to participate in a discussion, whether in small or large groups or in face-to-face or online environments, especially if there is a grade attached to participation.
• Clarify assessment criteria.
• Communicate a balance of rigor and empathy in both words and actions—learners should be held to high but achievable standards.

Principle 3: Demonstration of Learning and Knowledge

• Offer varied ways for learners to demonstrate their learning and knowledge.
• Help learners reflect on what they bring to a task.
• Provide learners with autonomy and choice.
• Offer learners ways to develop competence and self-efficacy.
• Offer alternative assessments that allow learners to relate more clearly to the context.
• Provide multiple opportunities and choices for informal expression.
• Ensure that the varied means of expression are accessible and equitably affirmed and highlighted.

Principle 4: Communicated Sources of Support for Learning

• Learn about academic support resources and communicate to your learners.
• Include a statement in the course syllabus about external sources of academic support.
• Emphasize the purpose and importance of office hours.
• Direct learners to campus resources for support.

Principle 5: Cultivate an Inclusive Course Climate

• Become aware of any biases or stereotypes you may unconsciously hold and treat each learner as an individual.
• Be attentive to terminology and model inclusive language, behavior, and attitudes.
• Convey the same level of confidence in the abilities of all your learners and be mindful of low-ability cues.
• Structure opportunities for collaboration and interaction with peers.
• Facilitate and encourage group dialogue.
• Turn discord and tension into a learning oppor­tunity.
• Learn to intervene when microaggressions arise or when you perpetrate a microaggression. 
• Examine course content while crafting an inclu­sive curriculum.

Principle 6: Diverse Teaching and Learning Frameworks and Methods

• Trauma-informed teaching, like inclusive teaching, assumes there are contextual factors that have the potential to inform and inspire, but also derail students from learning.
• The 5E model (engagement, exploration, explanation, elaboration, and evaluation) is grounded in constructivist theory, which suggests that students learn best when they have opportunities to experience and interact with new phenomena and reflect upon their own learning.
• Universal design for learning invites educators to not simply react to a student who requires real or perceived specialized support but instead plan a learning experi­ence with the assumption that all students enrolled have a diversity of learning needs and interests.
• Transformative pedagogies that are informed by critical race theory, feminist theory, disability studies, decolo­nizing pedagogies, pedagogy of the oppressed, and queer theory are social-justice-oriented interventions that have advanced inclusive teaching, learning frameworks, and methods. These transfor­mative frameworks and methods often entail a greater emphasis on incorporating course content that critiques systems of social and economic power and resists all forms of oppression and domination.

Principle 7: Assess your Inclusive Teaching

• Reflect on your own experiences as a learner and as a teacher.
• Reflect on your inclusive teaching strategies (e.g. using the DEI Curriculum Assessment Tool)
• Seek learner feedback in a variety of forms beyond end-of-term course evaluations.
• Solicit feedback from peers.
• Solicit feedback from external evaluators.

Principle 8: Stay Current With Inclusive Teaching Literature, Strategies, Initiatives

• Read inclusive, cross-discipline pedagogy liter­ature.
• Read literature that specifically addresses teach­ing in your discipline.
• Encourage departmental discussions by bringing in a speaker on developing pedagogies of inclusivity in your discipline.
• Familiarize yourself with the RSPH Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Policy Statement and remain engaged with ongoing RSPH DEI initiatives. 

   

References

Northwestern University - Northwestern Principles of Inclusive Teaching

University of Michigan CRLT: Creating Inclusive College Classrooms

Columbia University: Guide for Inclusive Teaching at Columbia