A key tenet of inclusive teaching asks faculty members to intentionally give up or share some of their power and authority in the classroom, so that students can experience a greater sense of ownership and choice over their own learning. Advocates of this approach tend to assume that every instructor has plenty of authority, power, and status to share. But what if you don’t?
What if you have neither the institutional authority (a full-time or tenure-track job) nor the dominant-culture identity (by virtue of your race, gender, and/or ability) that usually go hand in hand with being treated as a respected, powerful presence in the college classroom?
In urging faculty members to adopt inclusive teaching practices, we need to start asking if they actually can — and at what cost. It’s all too easy to paint faculty members as uncaring if they don’t adopt teaching innovations. Instead, we want to share some practical ways for readers to think about inclusive teaching practices within a framework that acknowledges the complicated variability in the circumstances of students and instructors.
Our aim here is not to undercut inclusive teaching strategies, but rather, to show that some of those ideas were initially developed under unexamined classroom power dynamics. Students — especially white males — are already more likely to challenge the authority, expertise, and teaching skill of instructors who fall into underrepresented categories of the professoriate by virtue of their race, gender, sexual orientation, ability, religion, and so on. So there are real costs for such instructors who adopt inclusive teaching practices like flexible deadlines, ungrading, and classroom-civility policies.
Flexible assignment deadlines. It’s a longstanding grading practice to reduce points when students turn in late work. Proponents of inclusive teaching rightly frame that practice as assessing compliance rather than skills. So on the surface, offering “flex passes” on due dates, dropping a student’s lowest grade on assignments, and allowing several attempts to do a task correctly seem like equitable practices that lower artificial barriers for time-crunched students.
However, as we found recently in our own classrooms, issues of authority and status can affect how this teaching strategy works in practice. Both of us used flexible deadlines during our fall-semester courses in 2021, and our experiences were very different:
- A program director at a large state university in the Midwest, Tom taught a course last fall on top of his administrative duties. As a white, male instructor with gray hair, he ticks a lot of boxes signaling “dominant culture.” He told his students he would set “best by” deadlines — meaning, dates by which he would best be able to provide feedback that could help on their next activity. He also announced that they would have a grace period of two weeks beyond the due date to turn in work, no questions asked. Finally, he offered students a “free-pass token” that they could use on one assignment if they turned it in well beyond the deadline. The result: Only five students used the grace period, and none used their token. He did not have to adjust his feedback schedule much at all. Grade a few stragglers? No big deal.
- Contrast that with Chavella’s experience as a Black, female professor teaching three courses in the fall of 2021. Chavella’s due-date policies were nearly identical to Tom’s, yet the effect on her teaching was far different. She fielded nearly constant requests for extensions — even beyond the flexible boundaries she had initially set. Students often couched their requests in aggressive and entitled language. When she reminded students that they could use their free-pass token, some said they wanted to save it for “real emergencies” — and kept coming back to ask for extensions. For Chavella, removing the penalties for late work was indeed a big deal, resulting in a lot of extra work responding to students’ requests and grading their work in an unpredictable flow.
Ungrading. Think of classroom authority and expertise as a force field that surrounds an instructor and creates a protected space within which the teacher’s expertise and skill is assumed. Ideally, instructors don’t have to worry about what’s outside of the force field, nor about who is trying to get over or through it. They just focus on teaching — creative assignments, lively discussions, real-world examples connected to scholarship.
Instructors with privileged (white, male) statuses mostly don’t even know the force field is there. Women and instructors of color, meanwhile, definitely know the force field is there, that it tends to malfunction, and that they aren’t always guaranteed safety and space in which to teach. They often get distracted dealing with students who test the limits of the force field.
For another example of what we mean here, let’s turn to ungrading — that is, shifting away from percentage and letter grades and toward formative feedback. Here are the very different experiences of two instructors (Tom’s and a tenured woman of color’s, whose name we are not using by her request) who adopted ungrading.
Both explained on their syllabus and in class how student work would be assessed: For each activity, they shared comprehensive rubrics showing the major competencies that students should demonstrate, along with criteria for measuring mastery. After submitting their work, students received detailed feedback, along with a satisfactory (full credit) or unsatisfactory (no credit) determination. Both instructors allowed students to resubmit their work until they showed mastery. And both expected some resistance from students, most of whom were unfamiliar with ungrading. The outcomes:
- For Tom, student resistance took the form of anxiety and requests for clarification. They couched their concerns respectfully: “Dr. Tobin, how will we know how we’re doing?” “I’m worried that I’ll spend all of my time rewriting things.” And “Nobody warned me about this when I signed up for this course.” Most students who spoke up about ungrading — either in class or via email — were white males. After some reassurance, opportunities to practice with ungrading, and class discussions about why Tom had adopted it, students got down to the work of learning. Force field intact.
- Contrast that with the experience of the tenured woman of color who adopted ungrading. Student resistance was widespread and confrontational. Here is a sample from a series of emails in which a student grew more aggressive with each message: “How do you not [have] grades? I’m sorry but this is getting a little ridiculous. … I understand your grading policy but as a student, I am reaching out to you to get my grade. … I’m sorry but I don’t agree with how you do things. I think I’m going to reach out to the dean of students. I pay way too much money.” The student complained to the department chair and then to the dean of students. Force field breached.
Classroom incivility. Faculty of color and women are more likely to experience student incivility, especially when they are teaching topics for which there is already resistance in the public sphere, such as gender studies and race relations.. Yet strategies for how to deal with hostile or confrontational students rarely mention the role of the instructor’s own status and identity. Too often, once again, the assumption seems to be that students will recognize the instructor’s authority — the same authority that we know is more likely to be challenged if you are, say, a Black woman.
Many teaching experts recommend strategies without realizing that they are less effective for faculty of color and women. Worse, these strategies can put those same instructors directly in harm’s way. For example, when a student is disruptive or makes an offensive remark, a common suggestion we see is for the instructor to move toward the student; physical proximity is meant to signal to the student that the instructor has noticed the disruptive behavior.
But that is a horrible idea for some faculty members. In a tense classroom conflict, if a Black, male faculty member moves closer to an upset white student, that student may fall back on stereotypes and misperceive the instructor as a physical threat. Pick whichever mix of underrepresented characteristics come to mind, and then imagine moving into a student’s physical space. A generic technique that ignores faculty status and identity is likely to inflame, rather than calm, tensions.
Some well-intentioned tenured professors will read these arguments and rush to try to fill the gaps we’ve identified. Doing so, paradoxically, means they will continue to elbow out and silence voices that are already muted in many teaching centers and other faculty-development programs. Well-meaning intent crosses over into harmful action when classroom innovations aimed at helping students come at the expense of the safety and well-being of other faculty members, especially women and people of color.
How, then, do we balance the benefits of inclusive teaching with the very real inequities faced by some instructors? We see four concrete actions as starting points:
Understand that your classroom choices may unintentionally affect or undercut a colleague. A good example: You may ask your students to call you by your first name because it seems more inclusive and welcoming. Tom used to do that, too, thinking that it signaled how unstuffy and approachable he was. However, he realized that exercising that privilege created discomfort for some women and people of color who taught alongside him. For them, the use of professional titles is a concrete way to reinforce the respectful relationship between learners and instructors. Tom now asks his students to call him “Dr. Tobin” to avoid the “Why are you such a stickler when Tom is so laid back?” impression that was undercutting those marginalized faculty members who asked students to use “Dr.” Explaining to his students why he asks for the professional title moves Tom’s practice beyond performative into intentional allyship.
Discuss in your department the issue of bias in students’ ratings of teaching. For years, studies have found biases in students’ ratings of their professors, based on their race and gender. Likewise, contingent instructors typically lack the job security to take teaching risks that tenured and tenure-track instructors feel more comfortable trying. Plenty of instructors want to use inclusive teaching practices but know that doing so may lead to negative course ratings from students who are new to these practices and more likely to question their legitimacy when adopted by a faculty member of color. Talk openly and collectively about how inclusive teaching approaches can be perceived as ceding authority and control, and can risk instructors who are not white males getting punished in student ratings — the very evaluative measures that may affect whether they get tenure or are asked to come back for another semester.
Respect the variability among your colleagues, as well as among your students. Work with your institution’s administration to create policies that, across the instructor pool, invite experimentation rather than discourage it. For example:
- Every three or four years, allow faculty members to pick a semester in which they can toss out their teaching evaluations for courses in which they experimented with new techniques, so the ratings are not counted toward employment decisions.
- Examine and talk openly with colleagues about the tension between giving away authority to increase learner agency versus retaining/strengthening authority to maintain a productive classroom atmosphere and dialogue.
- In discussions about teaching experiments, model how to engage in conversations that end with the instructor asking the administrator, “Do you have my back on this?”
Find trained help. Don’t attempt to become an overnight expert on the intersection of faculty status and teaching practices. Avoid asking women or colleagues of color to help figure out the boundaries of your comparative privileges. Rather, bring in the voices of faculty developers, instructional designers, and support staff members from diverse backgrounds who are trained and experienced in how to balance inclusion for learners with instructor presence, authority, and identities.
In our departments and colleges, we can take steps to balance inclusive and equitable efforts for students with inclusive and equitable efforts for instructors.
Share your stories, experiences, and thought processes as you negotiate your instructor role in the classroom — in your faculty meetings, with your campus leadership, and in publications like this one. Help to normalize the conversation about instructor identity and status as a necessary element in the adoption of inclusive design and teaching practices.
