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.