Tag: Inclusion and Diversity

Questions about Designing Teaching for Inclusion and Diversity

I attended a workshop yesterday for IST faculty called “Inclusive ADDIE” and at one point, we were asked the following questions based on what we had learned so far.

  1. How would you design a student group project for one of your classes?
  2. How would you handle dividing students into groups?
  3. How would you revise the content, examples, resources?

I don’t feel like I had great answers based on what I had learned. I started with what I would do without particular thought to inclusion and diversity.

  1. How would you design a student group project for one of your classes? Start with learning outcomes, then decide upon an assessment and rubric if needed, develop directions that includes all the required references to relevant learning content, review my content for accessibility.
  2. How would you handle dividing students into groups? I don’t think I would change. I prefer to form groups based on the order that students made submissions to the first, low-stakes assignment of the course. Having said that, if this were a WC section I would also try to account for timezones.
  3. How would you revise the content, examples, resources? I would look to make sure that I am considering minority groups at least ⅓ of the time in all of my examples, content, and assessments. This one, I took directly from the content of the workshop.

After listening to some other participant’s responses, I copied or added the following:

  1. How would you design a student group project for one of your classes? Provide reminders to class guidelines related to etiquette and group work. We have or can find these guidelines, but I wonder how inclusive and diverse those guidelines already are?
  2. How would you handle dividing students into groups? I didn’t have anything new to add here. Teaching through the WC, I do not get to know the students enough to be able to assign groups in ways that account for inclusion and diversity. I don’t think that’s how groups are formed in the real world, so why should I try to make accommodations in my class? I believe that my role would be to try to address issues around inclusion and diversity if they present themselves. I realize that is a slippery slope because if I am not openly addressing inclusion and diversity through out the course, how will my students know that I will address those concerns when there is an issue in the class. How will students even know to be mindful of inclusion and diversity practices in my class? Perhaps I need to develop a resource for faculty to help us provide guidelines to students about working in groups in ways that are inclusive and diverse? Teaching from the WC course template for the class I teach, I’m not sure we have much information about best practices for students working in groups. Perhaps I need to start there and include universal best practices in that resource from the start.
  3. How would you revise the content, examples, resources? I believe Jon Hughes mentioned to create group assignments with roles to allow for individuals to have a voice. This reminded me of Col. Jake Graham (ret. USMC) group work assignments where he will assign students different analytical roles depending upon the scenario/exercise he’s provided them. Dr. Lynette Yarger reminded us of something Dr. Alison Murphy shared with faculty during her McMurtry Excellence in Teaching and Learning Award presentation: create something for an under-represented community and through doing so, you will learn more about that community.

Including Inclusion and Diversity

I have recently created a new category, “Inclusion and Diversity (I&D),” in our Design Team Fortnight meetings. This will give time in our discussions to share and learn about I&D efforts, initiatives, and professional development. I&D has always been part of our work, but we are doing more explicitly to incorporate I&D best practices and strategies into our design approaches.

In a similar effort, I am going to propose that we also create a new category for I&D in our weekly office meetings. This will give our team the opportunity to voice office-wide (or greater) projects and initiatives related to I&D. I think it will be very important to recognize our questions, strengths, shortcomings, and opportunities in a formal way so that we can improve.

Forms of Discrimination

Recently, our Director of the Office of Teaching, Learning, and Assessment asked us to consider how we can improve Inclusion and Diversity into our mission and goals for the upcoming year. Before I could start thinking about making strategic improvements, I realized that I wanted to better understand forms of discrimination. I started brainstorming a list and ended up adding additional items from the web:

  • Skin color, phenotypes
  • Religion
  • Class/power, education, hierarchy
  • Sexual identity, sexuality (incl. sexual harassment) and gender identity
  • Non-english speakers and national origin
  • Age
  • Politics
  • Disability
  • Employment, military service, wealth/poverty
  • Body-image and pregnancy/parenting
  • Addiction, drug use
  • Reprisal/retention/retaliation
  • Personality, idiosyncrasy, phobias
  • Reverse discrimination

The list isn’t meant to be authoritative or comprehensive. I did it for me as an exercise to think about ways I’ve seen people be discriminated, how I’ve made mistakes and ways I’ve never even thought of before. If I can’t be mindful of how I discriminate, I can’t do better, I can’t grow.

I remember that I made fun of a classmate, a friend, back in the first grade for being what I thought was fat. I don’t remember doing it, but I very clearly remember my teacher pulling me aside and scolding me for that because she heard/saw what I did. I grew up with him in school and Boy Scouts and considered him a friend, but always felt guilty for doing that.

I’ll add that I found this cartoon that made me wonder about how we treat each other. It’s meant to be funny and I think it is is a dark way.
https://i.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/ifm4su/the_world_without_religion/

It’s a reminder to me that when looking back at my list, we’ll find all sorts of ways to hurt one another. I don’t know if I can ever live a life free of discrimination or bias–I’m not even sure if that is possible, but at the very least I have to try to be aware and make the best choices I can.

How does this impact my work? My office is learning together about Inclusive Teaching and Design. We are transforming how we design classes and work with faculty to encourage design decisions that are inclusive from the start. We’re trying to expand the definition of Universal Design based on Chris Gamrat’s recent work. I’m not sure that’s how he would define it, but I’m still learning.