Teaching & Learning in the Diverse Classroom

Week 1: Instructors
Reflect on your social identities and lived experiences, and consider how these shape who you are as a teacher and your approach to the classroom.

Week 2: Students
Explore students’ social identities, what the research says about how social identity may become salient in the classroom, and selected, key strategies for supporting student learning, including ameliorating implicit bias and stereotype threat, and fostering a disability-inclusive learning environment.

Week 3: Pedagogy
Examine how to create and sustain an inclusive learning climate, with a focus on strategies useful in facilitating dialogue when unexpected challenges come up and how to prepare in advance for such moments.

Week 4: Curriculum
Evaluate your curriculum—what you teach—at both course and disciplinary levels, from a diversity perspective.

Week 5: Action and Change
Plan for future actions you may take to affect the broader context of inclusion in teaching and learning, when and how you want to make change from the individual (course), to institutional (college), to cultural (disciplinary, community) levels.

This course is meant to foster self-reflection, interdisciplinary exchange, and offer practical, course-based change strategies. These are complex issues that extend far beyond a single experience. Our intention, therefore, is to also lay a foundation helpful in continuing to learn beyond this course.

We are committed to full inclusion in education for all persons. We encourage you to engage thoughtfully and professionally with other learners in the course and be generous in listening. We acknowledge that social identity and issues of power and authority affect everyone, and, based on our identities, some of us are asked earlier and more often to navigate these dynamics as they act to mitigate our progress individually and collectively.