How can we teach more inclusively?

I wrote this in preparation for a panel presentation as part of Boston College’s 2021 Excellence in Teaching Day - Title of the panel: “Redefining “Inclusion” when Teaching in Times of Crisis“

TL;DR

• It is incredibly difficult to be a college student (even pre-pandemic).

• Some students have it much harder than others (especially during a pandemic).

• When local or global situations make things hard for everyone, the situation has likely become almost impossible for many of those who were struggling before.

• If we care about inclusivity and equity, we need to design our courses keeping this group of students in mind, rather than designing for what we might assume is our student’s typical situation (i.e., not facing substantial struggle/challenge).

• I’m trying to do this through

  • increasing flexibility in course design,

  • creating more space for connection and reflection, 

  • integrating more diverse voices into the curriculum, and

  • re-thinking final projects.

Reflecting on Inclusion

The past 3 semesters of teaching, advising, and communicating with students have made a few things abundantly clear to me. One is simply how difficult it is to be a college student these days, even in the old pre-COVID world that is currently hard for me to remember. Things have always been harder for some students than others – this goes without saying. But it is something I can no longer ignore as an educator. When things are hard for everyone (as they have been over the last year plus), the situation becomes almost impossible for those who had the biggest challenges under "normal" circumstances. 

I was speaking with a colleague the other day who described our needing to think in terms of inevitable, impending crises. I realized that I’ve tended to think about this very differently - treating a crisis as a rare thing that maybe a few students might deal with in a given semester. I teach 50-250 students per semester, and rather than treating crisis as an “extenuating circumstance” on a case-by-case basis as I’ve done in the past (for maybe 1-3 students per semester), I now assume (and try to remember) that at any time some of my students are struggling in profound ways. I try not to wait for them to share their struggle with me – of course we hope our students will ask for help when they need it, but many do not. This may be because they do not know that help is available, it may be because they see their struggle as something they should be able to handle on their own, it may be that struggling is their baseline and it doesn’t even occur to them that they deserve some additional support, and of course there are other reasons. 

If I accept as fact that some of my students are always facing substantial challenges, and if I believe that it is my job to help students succeed and make the most out of their college experience (both of which I do), then I am faced with the need to do something to support these students even when I may not know who they are or the details of the specific challenges they are facing. It is important, of course, to offer support to students who are able to ask for it. But much like asking your bereaved friend to “tell me what I can do to help”, this flexibility-when-students-request-help is not the best I can do. 

One intervention we can all do is to build flexibility into our course design, and be transparent about the reasons for this flexibility. In my courses this flexibility may look like dropping the lowest scores for different assignment types, and explaining to students that means they can skip one. In a recent course I tried to create a system of grading and assignments such that any student could effectively miss a week’s worth of assignments without a direct impact on their final grade. Of course there will be indirect impacts if a student misses a week’s worth of the course, but this “checking out for a week” model was helpful for me to decide how to implement this flexibility, and specifically how many “lowest” assignment grades to drop overall. In some cases this could simply mean flexible deadlines or leniency with extensions. I heard from many students how hard this past semester was without a spring break to catch up (let alone relax). It has been a shift for me to think of Spring Break not just as time when (some) students take tropical vacations, but as a pause where students are able to do whatever they need to catch up, re-group, and maybe even survive the rest of the semester. However, in hindsight, this is obvious when I think of the value of mid-semester breaks for my own wellbeing.

In addition to increasing flexibility, another change I’ve been attempting to implement is to create more space for connection and reflection – things that 2 years ago it did not occur to me to prioritize in a large introductory science course. It is not enough for me to know that what I am teaching is important. If I want students to engage with the content I care about, I need to help them discover/uncover the ways in which it is relevant to their lives. I need to provide opportunities for them to identify why they care about the content. Small low-stakes (i.e., credit/non-credit) reflections, or “think, pair, share” type discussions in class are two ways that I have found particularly effective for doing this. This requires me to believing in the value of these activities enough to cut some of the content. Yes, I said it (and struggle to do it)… cut some of the content. Some of my introductory students would, I’m sure, scoff at the idea that I have been trying to cut down the content in an attempt to work with it more deeply. I know that my introductory course feels like an overwhelming amount of information to many. This is my work in progress.

I want my students to be able to envision them in my field. If my students cannot identify in some way with the experts I highlight in my introductory (gateway to the Biology major) course, I make harder for them to feel like they belong. As such, I become more and more convinced of the vital need to authentically integrate a variety of voices into the curriculum, and pointing out explicitly how the field historically and through the present day has been, and remains, full of barriers that exclude(ed) diversity. I began this process by interviewing different scientists and sharing those interviews with my students. I am now working to more thoroughly bring the work of the interviewed scientists into the curriculum itself and tie this to quantitative skills that I am also working to incorporate in my introductory course. This is another work in progress.

In my upper-level electives, I’ve tried to re-think final projects in a way that will facilitate deeper engagement, and tap into students’ creative sides. Rather than having a final exam (in a course where I don’t particularly care if they memorize the details), or requiring all students to write a research proposal (in a course where most of my students are unlikely to become researchers), I’ve experimented with a project where students select a topic to focus on throughout the semester. First they do background research requiring them to read technical research papers (a fundamentally important and broadly applicable skill), then they attempt to translate that technical research for a general audience (through Wikipedia editing), and finally they communicate their research in a final project format of their choosing (the only requirement being creativity). In a semester where attention was fractured, students felt isolated, screen fatigue was intense, and honestly I was not excited by the prospect of reading 40 final papers, many students welcomed this flexibility and the opportunity to express themselves creatively in a science class. I believe that many of them put in more effort, and got more out of the final project than they would have if it had been more traditional. Of course this flexibility brings challenges as well – some students are uncomfortable with the unfamiliar format, others just want to know what they need to do to earn a particular grade, and evaluating a wide variety of project types equitably is a challenge. I found that a detailed rubric along with peer- and self-evaluation (asking students to tell me what was challenging for them and how they had integrated the various requirements) made grading easier and much less ambiguous for the students. I was not anticipating how much enjoyment I would derive from seeing (grading) these creative final project – quite the added bonus! 

Biologists have discovered that a bit of stress is good for us – keeping us alert and engaged and even building resilience. Without this acute stress we get bored. However, it has also been shown (and, of course, known outside of scientific research) that too much (or chronic) stress is incredibly harmful. If the background level of stress in the world increases substantially (as it has this past year and is likely to continue to do so in the future), and we do not adjust our course structure, our assignments, and/or the ways that we interact with students, then we run the risk of pushing our students in to the dangerous zone of debilitating stress, rather than helping them to achieve their best through appropriate use of rigor and high expectations.

Teaching with WikiEdu

The following was written for the WikiEdu blog (posted September 22, 2020) and is cross-posted here.

I teach a biology elective course called Deep Sea Biology. My primary goal in this course of mostly senior bio majors is to increase awareness of, and enthusiasm for, the deep sea. I don’t particularly care if 5 years after my course students still remember what depth corresponds to the ocean’s abyssopelagic zone, but I hope that students are still thinking about how little we know about the ocean’s depths, that they remember the ways in which their own lives are indirectly affected by Earth’s oceans, and that they consider the impacts on the marine realm that their daily actions have. 

Because of these course goals, I have chosen to forego a traditional final exam, and instead have students take on a final project. I’ve done this in a number of ways, but in the Spring of 2020, I added Wikipedia editing (through WikiEdu) to the course for a few reasons. I wanted something that was an authentic contribution to the world beyond our classroom. When students know that I am the only person reading their paper they feel a different level of engagement and ownership of the project then something that may, ultimately, be publicly accessible. One of the themes I stress over and over again is how poorly understood the deep sea is. We spend a lot of time reading the scientific literature the course, which is accessible to us through our institutional journal subscriptions, but much of this information is not accessible to the public. Translating and summarizing some of that information for a general audience seemed like a valuable academica exercise, and sharing it on Wikipedia felt like a valuable contribution. I could tell my students that they were going to play a role in making our knowledge about the deep sea more accessible to the general public. I could tell that this responsibility and challenge was something that appealed almost instantly to many of my students. They all use Wikipedia regularly, and have heard mixed messages about whether or not it is a “good” source, so in addition to the contributions they would make, this project would help them better understand how Wikipedia works.

Now that I’ve gone through the Wikipedia editing process once, I’ve learned a few things that will hopefully make things smoother. I want to separate out the research from the editing more than I did in the past. Trying to do both things simultaneously was frustrating for some students. The WikiEdu platform has lots of great tutorials, but having students do these too early (before they’ve selected a topic, for example) left some students feeling like the WikiEdu platform was a lot of busy work… I’m hoping that condensing these tutorials and assigning them right when students need that information will help.

This semester (fall 2020) I am formatting the project in 3 parts

1. Background research: Students choose their topic, read primary source documents, and create an annotated bibliography.

2. Wikipedia editing: Students summarize and translate their research into content that can be added to Wikipedia. For some topics this might just be adding some references and citations, for others it may be a page reorganization, and for some it could involve adding substantial text to their topic’s page (or even creating a new page). 

3. Get creative: Students propose a creative way to share what they’ve learned about their topic, that they will submit digitally for peer review before final submission. This semester especially, I wanted students to be excited and energized by their projects so I’m leaving this pretty open. I might end up with children’s books, music videos, art projects… who knows!

The following are some quotes from my students last semester about the Wikipedia editing project.

• With the WikiEdu project, I thought it was a cool way to combine research and teamwork while making an impact by providing updated information to be people browsing Wikipedia. I enjoyed being in groups for the project and would not want to complete the task alone. Some of the training felt tedious but it was also helpful to understand how to actually make edits and utilize the software.

•  I did enjoy the Wikipedia assignment, it was cool to be behind the scenes like that and get to make a contribution!

• I really enjoyed the Wikipedia project. It was interesting to study just one deep sea organism, and although we didn't get to finish, it helped a lot with scientific writing and research.

• I liked doing the research and editing the article myself, and it made me feel like I was contributing to something bigger than had I just done the research and written a paper just for a professor to read and then nothing come from it

• I think Wikipedia was a good way to expose those who do not know a lot about the deep sea to the greater community. It showed that people search this ad look through this information

• I think I'll probably remember the Wikipedia project -- I now have a lot of oddly specific knowledge of an obscure genus of octopus, which should be fun at parties.

• I think the Wikipedia project was actually fun and it was a good experience in finding proper sources and adding to articles.

• I did enjoy the Wikipedia assignment, it was cool to be behind the scenes like that and get to make a contribution!

• I also really enjoyed the Wikipedia project, the team, and that it was something I could feel good about because others benefitted from our efforts.

Letter to a future grandchild, mid-pandemic

July 29, 2020

Dear grandchild,

As I write this, my daughter (who I expect will be my only) is not yet five, and still in preschool. Although, even that feels odd to write because she hasn’t actually been in her school since March. We are 6 months into a global pandemic known as COVID-19 (the illness caused by the virus SARS-CoV-2). Neither have I been in my office or a classroom in that time. I don’t know whether I will ever have grandchildren, but my own grandmother lived through the 1918 Flu Pandemic and I now wish I had known to ask her what her experience was like during those two years. I believe she was born in 1911, so her experience at 7 might have had similarity to what my daughter is currently experiencing. Or, maybe I am romanticising a shared experience across a century gap.

I am sure you can find factual & historical accounts of the chaos that is (was for you) 2020, so I won’t try to document the contextual details here, but I will try to explain my experience during this time of crisis. The first word that comes to mind is uncertainty. I am a planner by nature. I’ve developed a habit over the years of thinking through the worst-case scenario at a given moment, convincing myself that that scenario would likely be manageable, and proceeding with some level of comfort that everything will be ok. This, of course, demonstrates the immense privilege I've enjoyed throughout my life - knowing that my worst-case scenarios were rarely catastrophic and almost never came to be. But that strategy has started to fail me during this time. The possible worst-case scenarios I find myself contemplating today (and for the last few months) include deaths of loved ones, job loss, and the collapse of societal structures and institutions I’ve assumed would not change dramatically in my lifetime. These scenarios provide anxiety rather than comfort. So, I’ve tried to pivot from searching for comfort in the worst scenario to attempting to find comfort in hoping and expecting that the worst will not come to be. No longer being able to rely on my rational brain to convince myself that things are fine (because rationally, they are not fine) is unsettling.

And yet, we are fine. I am incredibly lucky and fortunate to be financially, residentially, familially, and professionally stable. No one in my immediate circle has fallen ill. I have had the opportunity to spend more quality time with my young daughter than I ever expected I would as a mother who chose full-time employment. Our “Family Team,” as we call it, feels like a team more often than not. We garden, go on hikes, swim, do puzzles, have dance parties, cook, do art projects, and other things that come to mind as we try to find new ways to combat isolation as a team of three. There have been many unexpected moments of pure joy and lots of snuggles which have truly felt magical. I find myself trying to lock certain moments away in my memory, appreciating them in the moment in a way I never did before. So, for us, it has not been all bad.

Broadly, I find reasons to remain hopeful as well. It seems that the pandemic has been able to bring to the collective forefront issues of social justice and racial equity that have been ignored for far too long. It seems we might be at a tipping point here in the U.S., and I see a possibility for a world even five years in the future that is in some fundamental ways better for more people than it was five years ago. The collision of pandemic, political polarization, impending ecological collapse due to climate change, and glaring social inequity have me feeling at times that the world I know is coming to an end (this perception may or may not be influenced by the post-apocalyptic dystopian science fiction I’ve been reading lately). As I write that, I feel the need to acknowledge that the world I’ve known, that seems to be at a breaking point, has been very comfortable for me and deeply unjust for many others. So, while the uncertainty, ever-present worry, and fear have made this all feel, at times, impossible and unbearable, I do not want things to just go back to “normal” as I keep hearing others hope for. I hope for a new normal to arise from this in which the multiple intersecting crises are acknowledged and action is taken to enact real changes that make life better and more just for millions of people who have suffered systematic oppression for too long, and millions of species currently facing extinction due to climate change and related factors such as pollution and habitat loss.

This is the most momentous point in history that I have lived through in my 38 years. I have never before been aware of collective suffering, anxiety, fear, and anger all around me (again this is evidence of the privilege I have experienced). In communicating directly with family members, friends, neighbors, students, and colleagues, I have yet to engage with someone in my circles who is not facing new challenges and heavier burdens. But, I started this letter with the goal of documenting my personal experience, and I seem to have avoided that so far.

Professionally, The challenge of shifting to teaching online has been surprisingly exciting and fulfilling, although it did not start out that way. At first I felt stifled as an educator, and saddened to miss the daily interactions with my students. These student interactions are typically a source of energy for me. Seeing a student’s enthusiasm build for something I care deeply about is deeply gratifying. Having a student ask a question after class that demonstrates their genuine curiosity, or even better makes me consider something in a new way, are examples of the near daily reminders of the myriad reasons I love my job that I had become accustomed to. With the abrupt shift to online, my daily interactions with students were through email and mostly focused on challenges, hardships, or severe anxiety. It became very clear that many of my students were struggling, and I realized that pushing for deep engagement with the material and academic rigor was no longer in the best interest of my students. As I was suddenly engaged in childcare full time, I was pulled between wanting to do more to support my students, and needing to attend to my own reality of (shared) full time childcare (I can only imagine how exponentially more difficult it is to do this particular job as a single parent). I felt my own limitations in ways I had not previously. I felt guilty for not doing more for my students, guilty for not coming up with more creative activities to keep my daughter entertained and ideally learning, guilty for not being able to better support my parents in their new loneliness, and guilty for being impatient and unavailable with my partner who was going through his own challenges as an educator teaching from home. I’m very good at feeling guilty. And lately I even feel guilty about feeling guilty.

As the semester ended and I transitioned into summer planning for the Fall semester, this has become a time for me to reevaluate my teaching and my curriculum. I'm asking myself questions about why I teach the way I do, how I could do it better, what the most important aspects of my course are, and what should be stripped away to emphasize and make that essential core more impactful and beneficial for my students. I am simultaneously saddened and excited by the prospect of teaching a large introductory course in a new format - fully online and mostly asynchronous. I will deeply miss the face-to-face connection with students, but I believe that whenever I teach this course again in person, it will be changed for the better and that is exciting. It makes the work I am currently doing to prepare feel meaningful. I am starting to find again that energy I’d been missing through creative planning. Recording myself lecturing is not at all energizing. Making videos for my students outside in some of my favorite nature settings and teaching myself basic video editing feels like dusting off myself as an educator - new and improved. Moments of tingly excitement remind me of the forgotten feeling of walking out of a successful class.

These moments of fulfilled excitement have been welcome relief from the far more frequent moments of overwhelming anxiety. Triggered by scrolling through the news, or email after email about something out of my control, or weighing conflicting articles or bits of advice related to how and whether to visit with family and friends, or the daunting task of planning simultaneously for multiple versions of multiple courses, or even something as trivial as a dirty kitchen, I have become accustomed to a previously-unfamiliar feeling of tightness in my chest accompanied by an inability to make decisions, sadness, and feeling like I just can’t handle it all. Luckily these feelings don’t last long. Some solitude and a quick “dose” of tech-free nature generally bring me back to feeling more like myself.

Over the last few months, I have been in a continual process of trying to decide and reevaluate what really matters and what matters most. Asking myself if I am choosing to spend my time addressing those things, or allowing myself to get distracted by things that matter less. For example, right now should I play with my daughter, clean the kitchen, follow up on some email, or go for a walk? At first this seems obvious - my daughter should be the priority as she is the most meaningful thing on that list. However, if the kitchen stays dirty or I skip my walk (one of the rare occasions where I experience solitude), I know I am more likely to snap at my daughter when I inevitably grow tired later this afternoon. And, if I ignore my email for another day, I may miss an opportunity to support a student through a struggle, or I could miss some important information about preparations or changes regarding the upcoming semester. Balancing all the things has never been easy, but the physical distance between home and work (and even the transition period provided by my previously-dreaded long commute) used to enable me to focus on certain things in particular spaces. Now I am trying to enact that compartmentalization mentally, through daily attempts at hour-by-hour scheduling or by doing different things in specific rooms in my home.

In a sort of personal-professional intersection (that dichotomy has always felt false, albeit useful) all of this has led me to decide that my research has to be deprioritized at this time. Rather than write the two papers (one long, long overdue) I hoped to complete this summer, I have done other things that feel more urgent and in some ways more important, despite the fact that publishing papers is fundamental to my success and even my identity as a scientist. Instead, I have done a lot of reading and reflecting to better understand my whiteness, white supremacy, and the implications of both. Instead I have spent hours researching child psychology and searching for better strategies to better help four-year-olds deal with their overwhelming emotions. Instead, I have spent many hours trying to prepare for the upcoming semester: making pedagogical and content changes to (hopefully) more effectively support student learning during this time that is incredibly challenging for my students in myriad ways that are both similar to and completely different from the challenges I am working through. Instead, I have realized I have to make time for myself to walk in solitude away from all others’ voices and ideas, to read things that draw me in and distract me (like the stories of Octavia Butler), and to (attempt to) stay connected with the handful of people who feel, currently, like my team beyond my immediate family.

I don’t know how I will remember this time. Perhaps I will remember feeling like I was living in a mass of contradiction. Simultaneously being joyful and despondent, newly fearful and newly hopeful, feeling secure while bracing for worse to come, worrying about the long-term impacts of all this on my daughter and knowing that children are resilient and she will be fine, being comforted by my privilege and also keenly aware of how unfair it is that I have that comfort while so many others do not. And so, dear grandchild, I’ll end with my hope that you have learned about 2020 as a turning point - the time when we as a global society and as individuals were challenged to examine our values, and chose to do better and to be better.

With love, hope, and determination,

Heather Olins