Equitable teaching, he said, requires instructors to change their assignments and class activities to reckon with those structural barriers. In the early days of his teaching career, as a graduate student at the University of California at Berkeley, Estefan and some of his colleagues thought that instructors could use more guidance on this aspect of inclusive teaching.
“What we felt was missing is really deep thinking about how to design and organize every aspect of the learning process within a course,” said Estefan. “Regardless of what type of institution you’re in and whether that institution has the resources to have, say, a center for first-generation students or a center for transfer students, which provide an array of types of resources and support, in the end, students are spending most of the time in classes and studying.”
In a new paper, Estefan and his co-authors, Jesse Cordes Selbin and Sarah Macdonald, provide a framework for this type of equitable teaching. The authors describe three strategies, which can be combined, and offer examples of each.
Deliberative interdependence: This counters the typical individualistic model of American higher education by embracing community. Instructors who use this approach create conditions in which students’ success depends on one another. One example is a “collective quiz” where students answer multiple-choice questions in groups by reaching consensus. The consensus piece is important for equity, the paper underscores: It “forces the majority to persuade those in the minority, not overrule them.” Students then complete a self-assessment where they indicate how much of the material they read and their participation in the group as both speakers and listeners.
Transformative translation: People learn by connecting new information to what they already know. This can be done through assimilation, fitting new information into existing categories, or by transformative translation, which the paper describes as an “active process in which students modify their understanding by drawing on existing resources as they process new material and translate between them.” The paper provides an example Selbin uses, in which students learn about the historical context of literature they are studying in part through constructing a digital timeline to which they add events that tie into their own academic or personal interests. This strategy promotes equity by increasing students’ sense of belonging and their intrinsic motivation, as well as by connecting what students are learning to their lives.
Proactive engagement: This strategy seeks to go beyond welcoming students to putting them at the center of the learning environment. One example is crowdsourcing a grading rubric as a class, which, the paper says, “actively involves students in the assessment process and helps imbue grading criteria with a sense of legitimacy.” The approach can be particularly helpful for first-generation students as it helps reveal the hidden curriculum of college.
Do you use these strategies in your own teaching? Do you have other examples of deliberative interdependence, transformative translation, or proactive engagement to share? Are there other strategies for equitable assignments and activities you’d like to draw our attention to? Share your ideas with me at beckie.supiano@chronicle.com, and they may appear in a future issue of the newsletter.
Further reading on inclusion
This summer, we’re sharing readers’ book recommendations on teaching. In keeping with this issue’s theme, this week I’m passing along three that focus on equity and inclusion:
Eli Collins-Brown, director of the Coulter Faculty Commons at Western Carolina University, recommends What Inclusive Instructors Do: Principles and Practices for Excellence in College Teaching, by Tracie Marcella Addy, Derek Dube, Khadijah A. Mitchell, and Mallory SoRelle. “I’m an instructional developer as well as an instructor,” Collins-Brown wrote, “and there are very practical actions that an ID can take to help an instructor create more inclusivity in their classroom.”
Kate D’Auria, an associate professor of education and faculty learning-communities coordinator at Bucks County Community College, in Pennsylvania, recommends Inclusive Teaching: Strategies for Promoting Equity in the College Classroom, by Kelly A. Hogan and Viji Sathy. The book has “many ideas for rethinking our practices and implementing practices that help students feel connected and succeed at higher rates,” D’Auria wrote. “I have used it for faculty book groups, and the response has been very enthusiastic. I will continue to share it with my colleagues.”
Flower Darby, an associate director in the Teaching for Learning Center at the University of Missouri, recommends The Norton Guide to Equity-Minded Teaching, which she wrote with Isis Artze-Vega, Bryan Dewsbury, and Mays Imad. “I learned A LOT (as I knew I would) from the author team conversations and from reading and editing my co-authors’ research-packed contributions” Darby wrote. “In particular, I learned about ways to motivate racially and culturally diverse students who are leading complex lives, the importance of trust and belonging to facilitate deep engagement and learning, and the challenges yet real value of critical reflection on student feedback and our own identities.”
Is there a book that’s helped shape your teaching you’d like to recommend to fellow newsletter readers? Tell us about it here.
ICYMI
- My colleague Megan Zahneis and I looked at how legislation to restrict how professors teach about race is affecting instructors in Florida and Texas.
- What happens when students’ desire for online options bumps into colleges’ efforts to return to normal? Julian Roberts-Grmela, a Chronicle reporting intern, examines the issue in this recent story.
- New findings from the Community College Survey of Student Engagement suggest that students who attend college exclusively online have lower levels of interaction with instructors and classmates, raising questions about how online courses are designed, Jeffrey R. Young reports in 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.
