Author: Emily Barber

How You Can Be A More Culturally Responsive Educator

Linda Hasunuma, Ph.D.

How You Can Be A More Culturally Responsive Educator

What is Culturally Responsive Teaching?

A culturally relevant and responsive pedagogy provides opportunities for students’ own family experiences, cultural heritage, intersectional identities, and unique lived experiences to be sources of strength and knowledge in their learning experiences. Gloria Ladson-Billings (1995) developed the concept of culturally relevant pedagogy to show how educators can help close racial disparities in educational outcomes. One of her key insights was shifting from deficit- to asset-based models to draw upon the different lived experiences of minority students.

Culturally responsive teaching practices value students’ personal experiences and cultural backgrounds as strengths and assets (Gay, 2018, p.32). Building on Ladson-Billings’ work, Geneva Gay finds that teaching practices that give ethnically diverse students learning experiences that are more relevant to their lives, deepens their engagement and learning (Gay, 2010). These practices help create learning experiences that are more affirming, validating, and representative of the lives of students. Culturally responsive teaching also involves examining ourselves as educators for our own cultural biases, the class climate, the nature of relationships with other students and the instructor, and the course content.  

Why It Matters

Attempting to understand other cultures, particularly those at play in the lives of your students, prepares teachers to be alert to the differences at work in classrooms and to respond with care and empathy. For example, how many religious observances require fasting which might impact the performance of some of your students? Beyond making appropriate accommodations for religious holidays, culturally responsive teaching recognizes that the ways students interact with adults and authority figures, what constitutes appropriate gaze or eye contact, vary across cultures. Consider the simple act of speaking up in class – teachers grading students on participation need to consider the possibility that interjecting or volunteering one’s opinion will come more easily to some than others based on culturally learned habits.

These teaching approaches are relevant and more necessary than ever because of the well-documented change in undergraduate demographics. According to a new report by the American Council on Education, Race and Ethnicity in Higher Education: A Status Report, students of color made up just 29.6 percent of the undergraduate student population in 1996, increasing to 45.2 percent in 2016. The greatest increase was in Hispanic and Asian students. And this change is not going away: the National Center for Education Statistics says that students from ethnic minority groups make up 50% of the pre-K-12 population, our future college students (Pew 2019).

How to Be A More Culturally Responsive Educator

Culturally relevant pedagogy helps teachers nourish a student’s sense of belonging which are critical for motivation, engagement, and learning outcomes. Who your students think they are matters, so why not ask them? A simple pre-course survey can invite students to share more about their backgrounds and provide a pathway to a one-on-one conversation.

Another way consists of thinking about your syllabus as a message as well as a roadmap. What message does it send to students of different cultural backgrounds? How do your course content, activities, assessments, and policies reflect an asset-based understanding of the diversity of your students? As you think about your syllabus and course design, consider going through these exercises, adopted from Jenny Muniz’s Culturally Responsive Teaching: A Reflection Guide:

  • Reflect on One’s Cultural Lens  – How does your identity and your students’ identities shape your values and perspectives?
  • Recognize and Redress Bias in the System  – Do your course content and policies address bias at the individual and systemic levels?
  • Draw on Students’ Culture to Shape Curriculum and Instruction – Do your assignments allow your students to see themselves and others? Do you evaluate your materials for historical accuracy, cultural relevance, and multiple perspectives?
  • Bring Real World Issues into the Classroom – Is your course content relevant to your students’ lives and communities?
  • Model High Expectations for All Students – Be aware of negative stereotypes and how and to whom you communicate your expectations.
  • Promote Respect for Student Differences  – Is your learning environment safe, affirming, respectful and inclusive of all students?
  • Communicate in Linguistically and Culturally Responsive Ways – Reflect on your verbal and nonverbal communication, reduce communication barriers, and be respectful of other communication norms in the cultures your students come from.

If you would like to learn more about how you can apply these frameworks in your own classes, we invite you to set up a consultation with a Faculty Developer at the CAT.

References:

Gay, Geneva. Culturally Responsive Teaching : Theory, Research, and Practice. 2nd ed. Multicultural Education Series (New York, N.Y.). New York: Teachers College, 2010.

Ladson-Billings, Gloria. “But That’s Just Good Teaching! The Case for Culturally Relevant Pedagogy,” Theory Into Practice, 34, no. 3 (1995).

Muniz, Jenny. Culturally Responsive Teaching. New America. Washington, DC 2018.

https://www.newamerica.org/education-policy/reports/culturally-responsive-teaching/

Linda Hasunuma is Assistant Director of Temple’s Center for the Advancment of Teaching.

#You are welcome here: Helping International Students Feel A Sense of Belonging in the Classroom

Hleziphi Naomie Nyanungo and Emtinan Alqurashi

The unique backgrounds, experiences and perspectives that international students bring to the class can enrich the learning experience for everyone in the class. However, if the students do not feel a sense of belonging in the class, they are not likely to share their stories and perspectives. In this blog, we share some practices that will help you foster a welcoming learning environment for your international students. Please note that while the focus of the blog is on international students, the strategies discussed will foster a sense of belonging for students from all backgrounds.  

Being aware of our own assumptions is the first step in supporting a sense of belonging in international students, as they will often guide our interaction with them. Some assumptions we make about international students and their learning can do more harm than good. Here are some examples of assumptions we should try to avoid and what we can do about them: 

  • Language proficiency/Accents: While some international students have limited proficiency in English and will need your support, it is important not to assume that students with non-US accents are unable to articulate or produce high quality work. It is also important to keep in mind that the great diversity in the international student body comes with a wide range of proficiency with English, so do not assume all international students are English language learners.  To these students, statements such as “oh wow, your English is so good” or “when did you learn to speak English so well?” are actually not compliments. In fact, they can be seen as condescending.  
  • Culture: Don’t assume that everyone should understand US specific cultural references (e.g. pop culture.) Be sure to explain and clarify, and if appropriate, invite others to share examples in other contexts, if they are comfortable doing so.
  • Quiet participation: When international students have low participation in class discussions, do not assume disengagement. They might need some time to process language or new information. They may also feel shy about speaking aloud in a large group setting. Providing opportunities for brief reflection, small group or paired discussion, and alternative ways to participate can benefit not only international students but domestic students as well. You can support their learning by using Universal Design for Learning (UDL) Principles (multiple ways for engagement, assessment, and providing information). You could, for example, provide closed captions during videos, or record lectures, put oral prompts on a slide, ask them to share their ideas or thoughts in different ways, use polling in class to check for understanding. 

A welcoming environment is where students feel valued, cared for, and a sense of belonging. It is the foundation for active engagement and participation for all students, including international students. Here are a few things you can do to create a welcoming environment for your students:

  • Be transparent: Communicate in both oral and written form that you value all perspectives and voices in the classroom. You could, for example, explicitly say at the beginning of every class that ‘every single person in this class’ is welcome in this space. Provide clear expectations for class conduct and class participation. This is particularly helpful to international students who may be coming from educational backgrounds that are vastly different.  
  • Get to know your students:  Your students will feel cared for when you are genuinely interested in them as individuals, and not just as international students. Ask your students to complete a survey at the beginning of the semester to get a sense of students’ backgrounds and interests, and any information they would like to share to help them engage better with the class. It is also a good idea to invite students to meet with you during your office hours before they need help. 
  • Learn your students’ names: While it is understandable that it may be difficult to pronounce names that are unfamiliar to you, your students will appreciate you making the effort. If you don’t know how to pronounce a name, ask the student to help you. This article explains why it is important to learn your students’ names and offers helpful strategies for learning names. 

When taking class attendance, some teachers will ask only students with names unfamiliar to them ‘where are you from?’ While often well-intentioned, this question does not create a welcome environment for international students (or other students from underrepresented communities). For the student who is asked this question, the message to them is ‘you are not one of us.’ To foster a welcome environment, you should learn the names and allow the story that comes with those names to emerge organically in the course of the semester.

  • Invite students to share their perspectives without singling them out: Singling out is when a teacher asks a student to speak for their race, religion, nationality or any other identity group. For example, asking an international student to respond to a question like ‘how does this work in your country or global region?’ puts the student in a position where they have to represent an entire country or region. You should instead frame discussion questions that invite all students to share their perspectives and experiences. This article provides helpful suggestions for engaging with international students in ways that would make them feel welcome.

Finally, learning in a diverse classroom prepares both domestic and international students to become global citizens. Creating an inclusive and welcoming environment can help us overcome learning barriers and bring all students together. If you’d like assistance with making your course more inclusive and welcoming, please contact us at cat@temple.edu or make an appointment with one of our pedagogy specialists.

Resources

Hleziphi Naomie Nyanungo and Emtinan Alqurashi are Director and Assistant Director, respectively, at Temple University’s Center for the Advancement of Teaching.

Using Proctorio Thoughtfully

Hleziphi (Naomie) Nyanungo and Jeff Rients

As we continue to tackle the ongoing challenges of teaching remotely, one of the sticking points in some online classrooms is the use of AI proctoring solutions such as Proctorio to maintain academic integrity. While preventing cheating in online, closed-book tests is a challenge, students, faculty and technology experts have pointed to practical and ethical issues with this type of solution. Students on a number of campuses have objected to the use of this software and some universities, such as University of Illinois Champaign, University of British Columbia, and California Berkeley, have banned use of the tool.

What are the concerns?

Commonly cited concerns include:

  • Privacy – The electronic surveillance of their homes and the encoding of location information can make some students feel vulnerable, and critics have questioned how secure the data collected is. Where does this data go? How long is it retained? Who has access to it?
  • Anxiety – Test performance tends to go down as anxiety levels go up and for some students simply knowing they are being electronically scrutinized increases their anxiety level. Students may also worry that they will inadvertently do something (talk to themselves while taking an exam, for instance) that will flag them as cheaters.This creates a situation where the effort expended to catch cheaters actually penalizes some of the students acting in good faith.
  • Technology Access: Proctoring solutions work on the assumption that all students have access to the technological tools needed to participate, including a stable wifi connection, a laptop or desktop computer, and and a working webcam (and a quiet space in which to work, free from activity that might set off flags in the system).
  • Equity – Algorithm-driven proctoring solutions treat some students whose bodies do not conform to an ideal as inherently suspicious. The tool has had difficulty recognizing students with darker skin tones, for example, and the normal movements associated with certain motor neuron diseases can be read as suspicious behavior.

What Can I Do to Address These Concerns?

So given that there are  legitimate concerns about the use of this software, how should we as instructors respond to them? As with so many pedagogical issues, there is no one-size-fits-all solution. Instead, we’d like to suggest a range of possible moves you can make:

  • Review your use of Proctorio – Perhaps the settings (there are lots of options!) don’t need to be as stringent as the defaults. Apply an ethic of minimal invasiveness to your use of this tool. Consider not using a room scan before beginning the test to reduce privacy concerns. If you do use room scans before the exam, definitely do not interrupt an exam to do an additional room scan later in the exam period.
  • Talk to your students – Make sure you have a clearly articulated policy as to what constitutes cheating. Talk to your students also about the importance of academic honesty. Research shows that a timely reminder urging academic honesty works! Reassure the students that any activity flagged by the algorithm as suspicious will be individually reviewed by you before any action is taken.
  • Offer another assessment option – Many instructors already offer alternative assessments to students when they can’t be at a scheduled examination or when other exigencies arise. Consider making another assessment available to students who object to the use of online proctoring.
  • Review the Proctorio report carefully – if you are using Proctorio simply as a deterrent but never reviewing the reports that the tool provides, you are misusing the tool and should look for a different method to manage assessments. Please review the reports carefully before making decisions about whether students are cheating in your class as students are often flagged for behavior that does not constitute cheating.
  • Reexamine your assessment plan – In last year’s transition to emergency remote teaching, many instructors found the easiest path to success was to simply recreate their usual assessments in an online environment. Consider instead going back to your learning goals for your students and build assessments that take advantage of the online environment. Working online, students can do research-based tasks or demonstrate higher-order thinking skills beyond simple recall and procedural knowledge questions. Here are some resources to help you think about alternatives:

If you’d like further assistance with reevaluating the use of online proctoring in your course, please contact us at cat@temple.edu or make an appointment with one of our educational technology or pedagogy specialists.

Hleziphi (Naomie) Nyanungo is the Director of Educational Technology and Jeff Rients is Senior Teaching & Learning Specialist at Temple’s Center for the Advancement of Teaching.

Supporting Students During Wellness Week

Kyle Vitale & Jeff Rients

The CAT would like to share some classroom strategies that instructors can adopt to support student mental and physical health. These strategies revolve around four central pillars adapted from Rebecca Pope-Ruark that can help prevent burnout and energize students: Purpose, Compassion, Connection, and Balance. We invite you to peruse the strategies below and consider what approaches you might adopt now or start preparing to implement as we move forward in the semester.

Purpose

So what? As the semester wears on and the number of assignments due grows across all their classes, students will begin to ask themselves “why should I give a damn?” Consider recording a video or speak to your students during synchronous sessions in ways that recontextualize the course and class activities and articulate their short and long-term value. Or, build an activity where students tease out why what they’re learning is of value to their personal and professional lives, or to the society in which they live.

Revisit course goals. Remind students of your course goals, i.e., you will be able to do all these awesome things by the end of the semester, and here’s how doing them will help you for the rest of your lives. Reconnect what they’re learning to the course goals you outlined at the start of the semester and note which ones the students have already achieved.

Compassion

Check in with students. Mid-semester is a good time to check on how your students are doing. Ask them to do a short- write activity where they answer simple prompts like “How are you doing?” or “What help do you need?” Follow up with individual students who report struggles.

Anonymous and informal channels. Anonymous and informal channels can support students who feel pressure about speaking with instructors, or who have sensitive information to share. Zoom or Canvas offer anonymous response features if you’d like to collect feedback about particular assignments or the course. Additionally, you can provide opportunities for informal chats with you by arriving early to your Zoom course or staying after. Also, remind students regularly about your office hours and warmly invite them to visit.

Campus resources. Review the resources we have on campus for students who may be struggling academically, emotionally, and physically, and help students connect to those resources.

Guidelines for discourse. Help students create guidelines for civil discourse in your class or revisit them if you have already been using a set of guidelines. Remind them that these guidelines exist so you can learn together, making room for all voices in the room while finding productive ways to discuss difficult topics.

Connection

Create community. Build new and existing bonds among your students by making space for them to share interesting or unexpected parts of their lives outside of class.You can participate as well.

Share your own experiences with learning. Where did you struggle in your courses when you were a student? Share how you overcame your own struggles in learning so students understand its value in the learning process.

Record a mid-course re-introduction. This would look a lot like your initial introductory video for the course, but in it you would celebrate how far your students have come and outline your vision for the rest of the semester.

Ice-breaker activities. We usually use these at the start of the semester, but a fun activity that encourages social interaction can support the wellbeing of students any time of the year, and help deepen the exciting community you have all been developing.

Balance

Be alert. We know the midterm season can be stressful for students; how much more so with the additional daily effects of Zoom fatigue, isolation, and COVID-19? Be on the lookout for tell-tale signs of student burnout and withdrawal like uncharacteristic silence or lower energy. Ask students, privately, how they’re faring, and know the campus resources that may help.

Be wary of busy work. Ensure that you regularly explain to students the purposes for your assignments. Small, formative assessments are highly valuable; at the same time, revisit your assignments and ensure they are streamlined, remain relevant and aligned with course material, and leave enough time for effective grading and revisions as expected.

Be flexible with due dates. Due dates matter and teach self-regulation; at the same time, pandemic life calls for even more grace than may be typical. Approach late assignments by assessing student well-being to the best of your ability, offering extensions if helpful, and asking how you can further support them.

Revise towards flexibility. Revisit your course policies and workload. Are there places where you can build in choice and flexibility without lowering your standards? Students might choose from an array of possible final projects, or appreciate some shifted deadlines.

Please don’t try these suggestions all at once! You as the instructor are best qualified to judge which of these options will do the most good in your class. Whatever route you take to help the students find renewed purpose, experience compassion, reconnect with each other, and/or find their balance will help sustain them through the second half of the course. As always, the CAT is here to help if you want to talk through how these options might manifest in your class. Schedule a consultation or reach out to us at cat@temple.edu<. The Wellness Resource Center also offers a variety of services and opportunities to support student mental and physical health.

Wellness week is about you, too! Stay tuned for our faculty wellness tips coming soon!

Kyle Vitale, Ph.D. is the Associate Director at the Center for the Advancement of Teaching

Jeff Rients, Ph.D. is the Senior Teaching and Learning Specialist at the Center for the Advancement of Teaching

Fostering an LGBTQIA+ Inclusive Learning Environment

Cliff Rouder

This blog post has been adapted from an article in Faculty Focus written by Cliff Rouder titled, Seven Ways You Can Foster a More Inclusive LGBTQIA+ Learning Environment.

In this time of social unrest and physical disconnection from our students, we need to be especially mindful of creating inclusive learning environments. For all students–especially those from underrepresented and stigmatized groups–feeling that sense of belonging matters. That includes students who identify (publicly or privately) as LGBTQIA+. Creating an inclusive learning environment gives all students the chance to challenge biases, critically think and respond in a productive manner, and succeed academically.

In 2011, Temple University contracted with a national leader in conducting higher education surveys to assess the LGBTQ (as it was then abbreviated) climate on Main Campus. Members of the Temple community were invited to participate, and 2,693 surveys were returned.

Here are some positive results from this 2011 survey:

“The vast majority of respondents would recommend Temple to an LGBTQ prospective student,” which appears to jibe with the general finding that “more than three-quarters of all respondents felt comfortable or very comfortable with the overall climate at Temple.”

So why the need to foster a more LGBTQIA+ inclusive learning environment?

Because…

  • Despite some proactive measures Temple has taken to address the need, including the preferred name rollout (see the bullet point under Modeling Inclusive Behaviors below), our and other campus and classroom climates are not as welcoming and inclusive as they can be. A 2012 article about the survey in The Temple News reported that, “13 percent of respondents said that they had experienced ‘offensive, negative, or intimidating conduct that interfered unreasonably with their ability to work or learn on campus, and 18% said that they had seen or heard actions that created an ‘offensive, negative, or intimidating working or learning environment’ on Main Campus.”
  • Intolerance, hate and violence persist, and depression and suicide are still at disproptionately higher rates than for heterosexual counterparts.
  • Living a lie every day by hiding one’s identity is stressful and exhausting. Deciding who to tell means repeatedly facing the possibility of rejection, ostracism, and potential violence. For those students who have started to live their truth after leaving home for college, having to return home for online learning could mean going back to hiding who they are.
  • All of these realities can be exacerbated if one’s LGBTQIA+ identity intersects with an identity from another oppressed minority group. They can also be exacerbated by an intersecting identity in a community/group that has historically marginalized people who are LGBTQIA+.

What steps can I take to create a more inclusive learning environment for students who identify (publicly or privately) as LGBTQIA+?

  • Include an open-ended question in a pre-semester survey, such as “What would you like me to know about your identity, background, or needs?” That gives students the opportunity to share whatever they’d like you to know about interacting with them in class. 
  • Familiarize yourself with terminology. Language is constantly evolving. For example, queer was used as a slur against people who were LGBTQIA+, but has more recently been reclaimed by some, but not all, in the LGBTQIA+ community. Remember that it never hurts to ask a student first. If you do use a word inappropriately, humbly correct yourself on the spot. Then help correct others, if need be, in a positive manner.  
  • Assess your own classroom climate for indicators of implicit bias (aka microaggressions–words and behaviors typically not intended to be hurtful but that nevertheless marginalize others) and explicit bias (overt expressions of prejudice) about gender and sexual orientation. Think about the language you and your students use. The well-meaning greeting, “Good morning, ladies and gentleman,” excludes people who don’t fit into the female/male gender binary. Are you addressing marginalizing language, and if so, how? 
  • Serve as a resource.
  • Model inclusive behaviors.
    • Put the pronouns you use on your email signature. Doing so signals to students that you are sensitive to identities outside of the gender binary. 
    • Refer to students by the pronouns they may indicate. Stay tuned for more details about Temple’s upcoming rollout of the new pronouns option within TU portal and Canvas! The new rollout will allow students and you to identify their pronouns more easily, and that will help you use them and get them right! In addition to being able to see what pronouns your students use, you might also encourage them to rename themselves in their Zoom window so that they are not misgendered by fellow students. Note that different plural pronouns like “they” are now commonly used in place of the singular “her” and “him” to refer to an individual who does not identify as female or male. 
    • Refer to students by their preferred first name. Students at Temple now have the option of providing their preferred first name to be used instead of their legal name in Canvas and on course rosters. They may also choose to include both their preferred and legal name, in which case use the preferred name.  
    • Assess your course content. Incorporate LGBTQIA+ history, current events, and people who have contributed to your field into course content and assignments where applicable. If you identify as LGBTQIA+, consider whether self-identifying would support course content and be a resource for your students’ learning. Remember that there can be risks as well as benefits to sharing this part of yourself, and thus should be done thoughtfully. 

To learn more about creating an LGBTQIA+ inclusive learning environment, watch this video created by the CAT’s 2018-2019 Faculty Learning Community members and featuring Temple faculty, students, and administrators.

Clifford Rouder, Ed.D. is the Pedagogy and Design Specialist, Center for the Advancement of Teaching

The Zoom Black Box Blues: Building a Flexible Camera Policy

Kyle Vitale & Jeff Rients

The question of whether or not to require that students keep their Zoom cameras on during synchronous online classes can be fraught. On the one hand, we use faces to help gauge participation, presence, and even the flow of conversation. On the other hand, a variety of legitimate concerns can keep students from turning their cameras on. As we enter a new semester, here are some ideas and strategies for crafting a course policy that respects your students’ needs while ensuring effective and rigorous class participation.

Let’s start by acknowledging that students have a lot of good reasons for turning off their cameras. These reasons can range from social (anxiety over being constantly seen by the rest of the class) to familial (sharing a small room with other zoomers) to technical (Zoom optimizes bandwidth, so turning off the camera may be the only thing keeping them in class when using a subpar internet connection). It is better to assume good faith on the part of the students. They logged into the Zoom room, after all, so let’s find ways to honor that decision.

Zoom is a communication tool and we recommend using it to communicate! Talk to your students. If the array of black boxes on the screen is impacting your ability to teach, discuss that fact with the students. As with all things, relate to them as human beings first. You might provide a flexible camera policy in your syllabus, and be sure to discuss your camera policy throughout the semester.

Also, please keep in mind that a live camera is not necessarily evidence of student engagement. Have you ever been in a meeting where you appeared more attentive than you actually were? Even in physical classrooms, presence does not always equate to attention. A robust participation policy will ensure engagement more than any hard rule about camera usage. Also, consider that the Zoom classroom is not a perfect recreation of a traditional classroom. Prior to the COVID lockdown, we did not spend our entire class time looking every single student in the class directly in the eyes from mere inches away. Now we spend all day doing exactly that! Meanwhile, we have no idea what students are looking at on their own screens.

With these facts in mind, you can take some simple steps to mitigate the issue. First of all, ask students to add a profile picture. This can be done by going to the profile section of zoom.temple.us or, in a live meeting, using the video settings tool to navigate to the profile settings. Some smiling faces, even still pictures, may help you feel more comfortable teaching in the Zoom environment.

Second, begin Zoom sessions with a breakout room activity. Students are more likely to turn on their cameras when doing a small group activity like discussing a question, reviewing prior material, or completing an activity. Some of those students may leave their camera on when they return to the main room, and regardless, students will have had a chance to warm up to class time.

Third, consider warm-calling. This strategy lets students know that they are expected to participate during class. In warm-calling, students reflect quietly on a question or chat together, before the instructor randomly calls on names. While reducing stress by giving students time to sort their thoughts, this strategy also maintains the expectation that students be focused and attentive to class lecture or discussion.

Fourth, practice screen rest. For long synchronous classes, consider a “screen break” or encourage all students to turn their cameras off during a reflective moment. This practice helps students suffering from Zoom fatigue and can reenergize everyone’s focus and attention.

Finally, we acknowledge that different types of courses require different levels of camera use. An acting instructor, for example, needs to see the faces of students performing a scene. If you need cameras on, make your case to the students. Explain how the camera helps them achieve the learning goals of the course. Specify when cameras must be on–such as when giving a presentation–and when it is okay to have them off. Review this policy with the students early in the course, remind them of it regularly, and incorporate these rules into your syllabus. Whatever approach you take to Zoom, make sure the students know what to expect from the beginning of the course.

The resources below offer more ideas for navigating Zoom camera policies. As always, feel free to reach out to the CAT with any questions!

Kyle Vitale and Jeff Rients are Associate Director and Senior Teaching & Learning Specialist at Temple’s Center for the Advancement of Learning, respectively.

Opening Doors: Promoting Equity through Accessibility

Hleziphi Naomie Nyanungo, Linda Hasunuma

When hearing the term ‘accessibility,’ many immediately think about accommodations to meet the needs of specific individuals or groups, primarily those with disabilities.  While related, accessibility and accommodation are not the same. According to LaGrow, ‘accommodations are reactive solutions to address special cases. Accessibility is a proactive solution to providing equal access for all.’ The word “proactive” is essential here as accessible learning spaces are intentionally and thoughtfully designed and delivered so that all students have access to the tools, resources, and support they need to be successful. In Radical Hope: A Teaching Manifesto, Kevin Gannon (2020) invites teachers to think of access as a feature of our pedagogy by asking the question: ‘Do all of our students have the same degree of access to us, the course, the material and to learning? (pg 74).

Accessibility promotes equity by making it possible to engage students who would otherwise be pushed to the margins. Take, for example, a student like Tanya (name has been changed). Due to COVID safety restrictions, she lost her job as a waitress, and now lives with her grandmother, mother, and sister. The only place she is able to get her work done is in her car. A course designed to provide flexibility and options will allow Tanya to access course content and participate in activities in a way that works best for her situation, and increase her ability to be successful. You may have students in a course you are teaching this semester who are in situations similar to Tanya’s, and are having to navigate barriers such as internet connectivity issues, availability of computers and technology, health matters, the demands of work and family, and more.

Universal Design for Learning (UDL) and the Peralta Equity rubrics provide guidance for designing and evaluating your courses for equity, inclusion, and access. UDL Guidelines and the UDL Progression Rubric can help instructors create more inclusive and accessible learning experiences. UDL asks us to anticipate our students’ needs instead of putting the burden on the student to request an exception. We can provide options or pathways that benefit everyone, including those who may need accommodation, thereby potentially lessening the need for individual accommodations. For example, captioning tools may benefit students who may have a hearing impairment, but can also benefit English language learners who process information differently as well as those who must attend class in a space that is not private. 

The Peralta Community College system’s Peralta Equity rubric was developed to close gaps in learning outcomes in online courses and promote more inclusive and accessible online learning experiences. The rubric consists of the following areas:

  • addressing students’ access to technology and different types of support (both academic and non-academic); 
  • increasing the visibility of the instructor’s commitment to inclusion;
  • addressing common forms of bias (e.g., image and representation bias, interaction bias); and 
  • helping students make connections (e.g., between course topics and their lives; with the other students).

Drawing from these two frameworks, we offer some recommended strategies as well as some simple things you can do right now to make your courses more equitable and accessible. 

  1. Get a sense of who your students are and what they may need. A good way to do this is administer an anonymous survey at the beginning of the semester that asks students about their needs and well-being. The ‘Who is in the Class? Form’ is a good example of a survey with questions related to factors that may impact the students’ learning experience such as internet connectivity, disability and health concerns, work and family obligations.
  2. Offer low tech alternatives: Students may not have the same access to stable internet connectivity, computers and other technology tools. It is important to keep this in mind as you assign readings and activities. See this article for low-tech ways for teaching online.
  3. Use low-cost or open source instructional materials, where possible: The increasing cost of commercial textbooks can be a barrier to students. Consider low-cost or open source high quality educational materials. Visit Temple University Library OER page for guidance.
  4. Be flexible and provide students with options: Consider ways to adapt your course to meet the needs of your students. CAT’s Agile Pedagogy resource page offers some guidance for being flexible in your teaching. 
  5. Design for accessibility:  Take advantage of the accessibility options (e.g. automatic captioning in Zoom) available in the technology used for online teaching. While typically designed to accommodate people with disabilities, these accessibility features provide great options for everyone. ‘Accessible Teaching in the Time of Covid-19’ highlights accessibility features in educational technology tools.

If you feel overwhelmed by the prospect of applying these frameworks to your courses, we recommend a simple approach where you think about one thing you could try from either rubric. Consider Tobin and Behling’s (2018) Plus One strategy from “Reach Everyone, Teach Everyone: Universal Design for Learning in Higher Education.” Pick one strategy to implement in a course you are currently teaching.

Good teaching means honoring and recognizing the full diversity of our students, and the accessibility mindset offers us a way to design learning experiences that benefit all learners. The principles and strategies shared here can help you create more equitable, inclusive, and accessible classrooms that help all students succeed. If you would like to  learn more or think through how you can use these approaches in your own teaching practice, please make an appointment for a one-on-one consultation with one of our faculty developers or Ed Tech specialists at the CAT.

References:

Addy, T. M., Dube, D., Mitchell, K., & SoRelle, M. (2021). What Inclusive Instructors Do: Principles and Practices for Excellence in College Teaching. Stylus Publishing, LLC.

Gannon, K. M. (2020). Radical Hope: A Teaching Manifesto. West Virginia University Press.

Tobin, T. J., & Behling, T. K. (2018). Reach Everyone, Teach Everyone: Universal Design for Learning in Higher Education. West Virginia University Press.

Hleziphi Naomie Nyanungo, Ph.D. is the Director of Educational Technology at the Center for the Advancement of Teaching

Linda Hasunuma, Ph.D. is the Assistant Director of the Center for the Advancement of Teaching

Pulling Back the Curtain: Sharing Pedagogical Concepts with Students

Geoff Keston

Pulling Back the Curtain: Sharing Pedagogical Concepts with Students

Imagine you’ve given students an exercise, say, think-pair-share, when someone asks, “Why are we doing this? Can’t you just teach things instead?” Could you, off the top of your head, explain the pedagogical theory? If so, how would you do it?

Pedagogical concepts enrich our teaching, but let’s consider whether they’d work even better if we explained the reasoning behind them to students. A good starting place for exploring this question is remembering what we want from students—that they engage with material, summon their creativity, work hard to solve problems on their own, and transfer learning to other domains. Toward each of these goals, knowing at least something about your pedagogical motivation helps students.

And as the coronavirus has pushed us and our students into new territory, openness about our teaching choices might be more important than ever. We’re trying novel techniques and need students’ input about what works. And after years of learning in-person, students need our help to develop new habits and find fresh sources of motivation.

But how can we share our pedagogical reasoning? One simple way is to discuss it casually, avoiding theory in favor of stories. For example, when explaining why I have students give presentations in a Technical Communication course at Temple University, I described the commonplace experience of thinking you understand something until you try to explain it out loud. I also said—not-too-scientifically—that talking out loud to a group “uses different parts of our brains” than does writing. After their presentations, I had students work on the next revision of their papers for a few minutes, with the goal of adding content that they may not have thought of before. This non-technical explanation and the short exercise helped the class see for themselves how presenting sharpened their thinking about their research topics and encouraged them to apply new perspectives to their papers.

Another way to share pedagogical reasoning is to make it a part of a course’s content. This was the approach taken by LaVaque-Manty and Evans (2013), who, in college writing-based courses in two different disciplines, taught explicitly about metacognition, “thinking about thinking.” They used technical language, included the concept in the syllabus, and gave assignments to have students put the idea into practice. This approach elevates a pedagogical idea from a technique used for learning another skill into a valuable skill in itself: students learn how historians, writers, engineers, and scientists think about questions in their fields and how they use reflection in the real work they do as professionals. (For a similar case study of a college class, see Hall et al. (2013).)

Two thoughts about “pulling back the curtain” on your teaching techniques are useful. First, while you’ve talked out loud about your core discipline many times, you probably lack practice in putting pedagogical concepts into words. When I first talked to students about metacognition, it felt like my first day ever teaching. I knew my topic, but didn’t have a feel for explaining it. In past semesters I had assigned metacognitive self-analysis exercises but hadn’t used the technical term, hadn’t explained my own thought process behind giving the assignments. With this hazard in mind, it is good to rehearse even when you are taking the casual approach. Your presentation may be loose and informal, but the behind-the-scenes work takes time and practice.

Second, understanding the science of teaching and learning will be new to students. They might resist the topic, thinking it is merely extra work. And even if they embrace the idea in principle, the concepts and terminology are likely to be unfamiliar because previous instructors didn’t explain their own pedagogy.

In online learning in particular, both you and your students are figuring out new ways to teach and to learn. Making pedagogy a subject of class conversation will help to make this a shared journey. Some of the pedagogical reasoning behind online teaching that you might share with students includes:

  • why Zoom attendance is required (see the literature on the Community of Inquiry model, for example, especially regarding social presence in online learning),
  • what the goals of breakout room activities are (for example, peer instruction ).

And in some cases you could—with caution—invite discussion about what works well with an online learning technique and what doesn’t, allowing students to help shape the activity. With pedagogical reasoning already a part of open classroom discussion, students will have more vocabulary to talk about these issues and will feel freer sharing their thoughts. One candidate for such discussion and experimentation is the use of discussion boards in an LMS.

Whether using an informal approach or integrating it into course content, sharing pedagogy with students might still seem radical and burdensome. If it does, keep in mind that we all share our teaching philosophy on the first day of the semester, when we hand out the syllabus. The course calendar and instructional goals give students our pedagogical plan and philosophy. Let’s go deeper and keep the conversation going after day one.

References

Hall, E. A., Danielewicz, J., & Ware, J. (2013). Designs for writing: A metacognitive strategy for iterative drafting and revising. In Using reflection and metacognition to improve student learning (pp. 147–174). Sterling, VA: Stylus Publishing.

LaVaque-Manty, M., & Evans, E. M. (2013). Implementing metacognitive interventions in disciplinary writing classes. In Using reflection and metacognition to improve student learning (pp. 122–146). Sterling, VA: Stylus Publishing.

Geoff Keston is an Adjunct Assistant Professor of technical communication at Temple University. Please share your thoughts on talking to students about pedagogy: gkeston@temple.edu. 

Using Course-Level Student Learning Outcomes (SLOs) to Structure a Final Portfolio Assignment

Helen Bittel

treasure map and compass

This assignment grew out of a recent overhaul of my British Literature II survey course using backwards design to shift emphasis from coverage of material to student learning. It also aims to better engage the increasing number of nonmajors taking the course for General Education credit, students for whom the purpose and value of studying literature is often not self-evident.

In this final portfolio assignment, students first take each of the four Student Learning Outcomes (SLOs), choose one or two artifacts demonstrating their competency, and write a paragraph explaining how the artifact shows their achievement of the outcome. The artifacts can come from either graded work (low- or higher-stakes assignments) or from in-class work (small group activity answers, exit tickets, personal course notes). Then, they write longer answers to two additional questions: one “big picture” question that the SLOs were designed to help them answer and another question about their own individual learning.

[Editor’s note: A wide variety of online solutions are available for the creation of digital learning portfolios, starting with a simple Google Doc or Microsoft Word file. For more sophisticated options, instructors may want to consider asking students to build portfolios using Google Sites or Wix.com.)

Student responses were strongly positive across varied majors and skill levels; they reported feeling less stress and more control than with a traditional final exam, presentation, or literary analysis paper. Nobody who followed the instructions earned a poor grade, nobody plagiarized, and nearly everyone successfully connected their individual efforts to our shared goals. They were also relatively easy to grade, since for each item, I only needed to evaluate two criteria.

In addition, the SLO-driven final portfolio:

  • Implicitly requires students to review everything they did over the semester—in class and at home— in light of what they now know and can do and to demonstrate cumulative learning
  • Levels the playing field, in terms of majors and nonmajors. The portfolio requires less knowledge of disciplinary conventions than traditional assessments, and working directly with SLOs is familiar to many pre-professional majors.
  • Fosters metacognition, a habit of mind that supports learning well beyond a single course.
  • Gives students significant choice in how they demonstrate their learning and unique perspective, and thus ownership of the project
  • Makes visible both how course activities are connected to each other through the SLOs and how the work of the course is connected to the big picture of college learning

Helen Bittel is Director of Center for Transformational Teaching and Learning and Associate Professor of English at Marywood University. 

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, PO Box 1866, Mountain View, CA 94042, USA. Public domain image courtesy Steven Johnson.

3 Tips for a More Inclusive Syllabus

Simuelle Myers

When creating a syllabus, it is important to make sure that course goals and expectations are clear. However the syllabus can also be a place to get students excited to learn and to signal that your course is an inclusive environment. The following tips provide three simple ways to create a more inclusive syllabus and start your course off more positively from day one.

Start with a Welcoming Message

Why is this course interesting? What skills can students hope to gain? How does this course relate to their everyday lives? The answer to these questions can spark students’ interest and prepares them to explore the content of your course. Before jumping into the technicalities of grades and policies, create a welcome message or expand your course description to include reasons that students should look forward to engaging with course content, and you as the instructor. For students who may be new to college or nervous about your course, this can help to alleviate some concerns before the course even begins

Bonus tip: consider what aspects of your course or field that you found the most interesting, this can be a great place to draw inspiration for communicating its value to students.

Use Student-Centered Language

Instead of writing course goals as if they were simply for the professor or the course catalogue, write them for the students. Statements such as “at the end of this course you will be able to” can communicate the importance of the student in the learning process. It also implies an expectation of engagement, and speaks to each person in the class directly as opposed to referring to everyone in the course under the general category of “student”.

Bonus tip: When writing your syllabus, imagine that you are speaking directly to one student and describing what their journey through the course will look like.

Create an Inclusive Teaching Statement

Also known as a diversity and inclusion statement or a respect for diversity statement, an inclusive teaching statement signals explicitly that your course is inclusive of all students. An inclusive teaching statement should express the course climate you strive to create and invite students to be active participants. Many statements also encourage students to reach out to the faculty member if they have any concerns about the class and invite suggestions students may have to make the class better. See a few examples here.

Bonus tip: Students with disabilities pay close attention to how the disability statement is presented. If you are using a standard disability statement, consider expanding this to include language that lets students know that your goal is to support them.

Remember, a syllabus can be more than a contract! Instead, consider how it can be an important tool to communicate the value of inclusion, diversity and student success and add a positive start to your semester.

Simuelle Myers formerly served as Assistant Director of the Center for the Advancement of Teaching. She is now Chief Diversity and Inclusion Officer for Delaware County Community College.