Each year, on the first day of his introductory biology class, Bryan Dewsbury places a trash can in the front of the lecture hall and instructs his freshman students to shoot a basket. The ones seated near the front tend to make it; the ones further back typically miss.
The lesson, Dewsbury tells them, is simple: You’re starting from different points, and some of you will struggle more than others.
The game isn’t meant to scare students — this isn’t an update of the old “look to your right, look to your left — one of you won’t be here by the end of the year” warning that professors used to give students in gateway courses. Rather, it’s meant to reassure.
“My job is to ensure that no matter who you are or where you’re coming from, you’re going to learn biology really well,” says Dewsbury, a first-generation student himself and now an assistant professor at the University of Rhode Island. “I know your doubts and fears, and I’ll have your back till the end of the semester.”
In a time of declining enrollments and shrinking high-school classes, you can’t afford to lose a third of your first-year class. A holistic approach that combines financial support with enhanced advising, earlier identification of struggling students, and a focus on fostering a sense of belonging has proven successful at one college. Could it work for yours?
For Dewsbury, the son of a Baptist preacher from Trinidad, teaching is as much about motivating and inspiring as it is about imparting biological principles. He sees his role as not just dispensing information but helping students see their potential, overcome self-doubt, and ultimately find purpose and meaning in life.
“When I’m in class, they’re not students,” he says. “They are souls that want to be awakened.”
Dewsbury calls his approach “inclusive teaching,” and he believes it holds the key to reducing high failure and withdrawal rates in introductory science courses, particularly among minority students. While over a third of black, Latino, and Native American students enter college with an interest in studying science, technology, engineering, or math, only 16 percent go on to obtain bachelor’s degrees in those fields, according to the National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics.
But awakening souls sounds like a lofty goal, and inclusion is a squishy term. What does it look like in an introductory biology class with close to 150 students?
For Dewsbury, it starts with getting to know his students as individuals. Before the semester starts, he gathers information on their backgrounds and surveys them about their goals and grade expectations. He asks them how much experience they have in biology, and what they would do with a check for $5 million. When they arrive on campus, he has them write an essay on where they find meaning and purpose, a prompt that he says “gives me a window into their souls.”
Then he meets with students one on one, holding office hours in a dorm lounge to “eliminate the fear of walking across campus to see the big bad professor.” When students struggle, he practices “aggressive early intervention,” calling students on their cellphones and even knocking on dorm doors when they don’t answer. He teaches them practical skills they may have missed out on in high school — things like time management and how to study for a test.
In class, he shares stories of his own educational struggles and how he became a black science professor — a rarity in academe. He uses pictures of his own biracial children to teach population genetics and draws on examples from diverse cultures to explain concepts.
When breaking students into small groups, he aims for racial and socioeconomic diversity, “so they can learn what it means to work with individuals who are different from them.”
The efforts appear to be working. The withdrawal and failure rate in Dewsbury’s two sections of intro bio is down from 18 percent to 8 percent, with no racial gaps. His goal is to get it to 5 percent.
Asked how other professors might make their classrooms more inclusive, Dewsbury suggests they learn the names of their students, practice blind grading, and shore up academic supports. Still, he’s reluctant to dispense any blanket how-tos, saying he’s tired of top-10 lists.
He prefers that faculty start with “a deep level of self-criticism and self-reflection,” examining their own implicit biases and how they play out in the classroom.
“A lot of science professors weren’t trained how to teach, let alone think about teaching as an act of social justice and equity,” he says. “I want you to do the hard work, to have the tough conversations.”
