A group of graduate students has pushed the department of environmental science, policy, and management at the University of California at Berkeley to take this on. Last year, a group of professors and graduate students in the department published a tool kit for instructors who want to make their courses more antiracist and inclusive.
Then, over the summer, graduate students with related expertise were paired with interested instructors in and outside the department to use the tool kit to revamp 10 large-enrollment life-sciences courses, many of which focus on the environment.
For Haider Ali Bhatti, a graduate student who helped with the summer project, and wrote to tell me about it, it all comes back to something his adviser told him about what’s really at the heart of effective teaching: “You could have the most pedagogically advanced, forward-thinking, research-based course, but if students themselves don’t feel like they belong, that they’re included, that they matter, that their voices matter, none of it’s going to have any effect.”
The project grew out of a broader graduate-student push to make the department more welcoming to students of color — and Black students in particular — in the summer of 2020, when outrage over the murder of George Floyd by a police officer fueled calls for change on many campuses.
Among the department’s responses was addressing classroom culture.
The tool kit, which was created with support from the university’s teaching center, covers syllabus language, course policies, student and instructor positionality, course materials, and more. It also has a section on including indigenous perspectives.
The writers broke the tools into levels so that instructors already using an approach can deepen it. So, for instance, Level 1 of “community guidelines” suggests that professors lay out terms that “foster an atmosphere of mutual respect, collaborative inquiry, and belonging, including how to deal with challenging material that may provoke strong student opinions or identity-based negative reactions.” Level 2 suggests that professors co-create such guidelines with their students.
The existence of the tool kit, its authors knew, would not be enough to drive change. Even professors who are committed to moving their courses in this direction can struggle to find the time and energy to do so — a predicament that pandemic teaching intensified. The group toyed with several ideas of how to encourage them, landing on a summer learning community where graduate students received funding to help professors incorporate ideas into their courses.
While the tool kit tackles many dimensions of teaching, its writers see it as a first step — one taken with a sense of urgency: Graduate students want to see change while they’re still in the department. At the same time, they know most professors who take it up will incorporate just a few of the ideas, at least initially.
Bhatti, who is in an interdisciplinary graduate program for students pursuing doctorates in STEM education, worked on a large introductory biology course over the summer. Given the course’s complexity, he said, the instructional team incorporated only a few of the tools. But one they chose — adding lecture pods in which students would interact with their classmates — seems to have made a real difference. Bhatti recently spoke to one of the course’s teaching assistants, who had noticed a positive shift in the culture of the class.
The authors’ bigger message is that it’s these kinds of concrete changes — even if they’re iterative and incremental — that make a difference for students, says Benjamin Wong Blonder, an assistant professor who led a subcommittee working to improve the department’s classroom culture. “Teaching better isn’t necessarily a matter of changing one’s worldview or one’s vision,” he says, “but of specific actions that one can definitely take or fail to take.”
From here, the group has plans to measure perceptions and outcomes of changes made to the courses for both students and instructors.
Have you worked to make your courses more inclusive and antiracist? If so, what results have you seen, and how have things unfolded since then? Let me know, at beckie.supiano@chronicle.com, and your example may appear in a future newsletter.
Keep on Teaching
Many professors have struggled with lower-than-usual class attendance and participation in recent years. There’s no single culprit here: students get sick, face mental-health challenges, and are often working. The pandemic has chipped away at their focus — and changed expectations and norms around going to class, too.
Professors can’t resolve all of those things. But they can make class time meaningful, and they can communicate its importance to students.
As a new semester kicks off, Beth and I will moderate a discussion on how instructors can accomplish this. It’s the first session of Keep on Teaching, our new two-part webinar series. We hope you’ll register to join us live on Friday, January 20, at 2 p.m. Eastern (or watch a recording afterward if you can’t join live). When you sign up, you’ll have the chance to submit a question to our panelists.
We will continue the conversation in the newsletter, and in a second event on Friday, February 10. The second webinar is exclusively for subscribers to the Teaching newsletter, so please sign up to get us directly in your inbox if that’s not how you’ve been reading. And tell your friends! Both the newsletter and the webinar series are free.
Read more about the series and sign up here. We hope to see you then!
ICYMI
- Students’ willingness to learn is a crucial but overlooked factor in their academic success, Jonathan Malesic writes in an opinion guest essay for The New York Times.
- Susan D’Agostino reports on professors’ shifting thinking on giving students credit for class participation in an article for Inside Higher Ed.
- Professors should ask students what they need, and really listen to what they have to say, writes Tyler Roeger in an opinion piece for EdSurge.
Thanks for reading Teaching. If you have suggestions or ideas, please feel free to email us at beckie.supiano@chronicle.com or beth.mcmurtrie@chronicle.com.
— Beckie
Learn more about our Teaching newsletter, including how to contact us, at the Teaching newsletter archive page.
