Teaching To Include All Students

Inclusive Teaching Practices Enhance the Success of All Students

A classroom characterized by inclusive teaching stretches us to think more deeply about teaching and learning in our disciplines. Rethinking our biases and stereotypes helps us reach an understanding that comes from testing our assumptions against viewpoints different than our own.

This understanding values active participation from all students and encourages faculty and students to share unique perspectives and experiences.

Inclusive teaching assures students of respect, encourages critical thinking, and thrives when ideas and concepts are balanced with experience and applications in our discussions. This approach to teaching embraces respectful listening, so that differing points of view and questions can be raised and heard and ideas developed in an intellectually sound and full manner.

Students and faculty stand to reap the benefits of a college education that prepares them to meet the changing needs of a global society, one in which we live and learn among peers whose life experiences and values differ from our own.

Faculty teaching inclusively gain greater awareness of how personal values and beliefs are expressed because we pay greater attention to the identities of our students and how we engage them in the classroom. Inclusiveness entails a re-examination of the scholarship of our disciplines and a reconsideration of our teaching methods.

To begin to address the challenges of teaching and learning in a diverse classroom, faculty need to consider their own self-awareness, awareness of students, the discipline-based content of the course, and the pedagogy they plan to use.

Know Yourself as an Instructor

Becoming more aware of and responsive to our diverse student population means stretching beyond our own "comfort zone."

How do our discipline-based biases, personal beliefs, and experiences serve to underpin our teaching methods and style? Increased self-awareness can help us better understand the subtle ways we may be influencing the teaching and learning environment for our students.

Accepting the mores and traditions of the mainstream group as preferred ways of thought and action makes it difficult when challenging negative stereotypes and assumptions about those who do not share similar values or beliefs.

We can begin to open ourselves to change by trying low-risk activities, like reading an article or attending a workshop. Or we might try high-risk activities, such as engaging in candid dialogues with peers or talking to students who have traditionally been seated on the "outside aisles" of our institutions.

Know Your Students

Getting to know your students can be your most effective tool for creating an inclusive teaching and learning environment. Such efforts can help faculty better address the needs of all students.

Mainstream students often come to higher education from high schools and communities where they have not been exposed to diverse student and instructor populations or multicultural courses. For this reason, some may be slow to accept the value of multicultural contributions and dialogues.

Similarly, some students from targeted social and cultural groups also come from homogeneous communities. They are often first-generation college students. They may not share mainstream values and beliefs about time frames, family norms, expectations, work, or religion.

Students from targeted social and cultural groups often have had negative classroom experiences. They may have experienced stereotyping, the insensitive use of language, curricular exclusion, alienation and isolation, offensive humor, or low expectations.

We can work to gather more frequent feedback from these students by using classroom climate assessment techniques. Brief writing assignments, called one-minute papers, can be tailored to gather feedback on lectures, assignments, class discussion, course content, and group projects.

Gathering information from your students early on can also help you plan better. For example, students with physical and learning disabilities may require accommodations with test taking, reading, the physical arrangement of the classroom, and supplementary class instruction.

Knowing your students requires developing a relationship of trust where understanding and respect for individual differences are shared and valued. This trust can bring tremendous rewards.

For example, nontraditional age students bring a dimension of diversity to the classroom based on their life experiences and prior learning.

If addressed sensitively, bringing this experience into the life of the classroom can enrich the overall experience of all students. In many ways, establishing good relationships with your students assures you the opportunity to create a teaching and learning environment of excellence.

Teach from a Multicultural Perspective

A multicultural perspective includes a critical analysis of the overall goals of the scholarship in our disciplines as they relate to multicultural education.

Some guiding questions: Is it a goal of my course to help students value diversity and equity? Is it a goal of my course to help students acquire a more comprehensive knowledge of the course content? Is it the goal of my course to prepare all students to work in a global society?

Answering these questions necessitates an examination of course content, including course materials---texts, handouts, learning activities, and assignments---and the sources of knowledge we tend to emphasize.

These sources often reflect only western and male schools of thought. They should be re-examined to include non-mainstream perspectives. An example: A course in preventive medicine could examine alternative methods from the traditions and values of Native American, African, and Asian cultures.

Some teaching approaches do not belong in a diverse classroom. An approach, for example, that incorporates non-mainstream scholarship only from the additional perspective of an exceptional outsider---adding Alice Walker's book, The Color Purple, to a literature unit without changing the unit's structure doesn't fit. This add-on approach only serves to reinforce stereotypical beliefs without challenging basic assumptions.

To teach from an add-on, rather than a integrative perspective, leads students to believe that multicultural issues are outside the realm of normal discourse of course content. And, when an instructor is pressed for time, the add-on course content is often the first to go.

Use a Variety of Instructional Strategies

Effective teaching affirms the presence of diverse ways of learning. The research literature is replete with information on learning styles, teaching styles, and the cognitive development of college students. Learning style is not directly related to race and gender, but research does suggest some patterns.

Analytical learners, for instance, are more comfortable in a learning environment that focuses on tasks, independence and flexibility, formality, impersonal rewards, emotional detachment, and analysis and problem solving. Many European men and Asian American students tend to be analytical learners.

Relational learners tend to be more comfortable in an environment where there is guidance, modeling, discussion, constructive feedback, awareness of emotion, needs, and values. Many women, African American, Native American, and Hispanic American students display this style.

Our emphasis should be stretching the experiences of the learner, not on matching learning and teaching styles. Since we often tend to teach the way we learn, a broadened repertoire of teaching methods stretches an instructor, too, requiring us to rethink how best to present course material so that our teaching methods take into account a spectrum of approaches to learning.