Inclusive Teaching

Community Engagement

Situating Your Work

Teaching through community engagement is a powerful exercise for all involved. Thinking through the purpose of community collaboration, forms of engagement, and desired student learning outcomes helps faculty members clarify the many decisions they make in creating or revising a course with community connections. This page helps instructors become more aware and explicit about the framework of their course, as well as discover questions and resources that others have found useful.   

Purpose

U-M students, like the faculty, have a broad range of purposes as they explore courses on community engagement. Some are seeking basic information, some want to engage critically with ideas like community, equity, and power, some are advocates for social justice, and others want to hone skills for activism. These different motivations overlap, and they can lead to one another over time. Being explicit about the different kinds of purposes a course can serve helps students locate their own development and can generate valuable discussion. Talking about the different kinds of skills that instructors and community members cultivate also helps students locate themselves on a trajectory toward future work. 

Responding to Difficult Moments

Inclusive Teaching Resources and Strategies

In any discipline or field, a key goal as well as challenge is supporting the learning of all students. Through programs, consultations, and resources, CRLT supports teachers in creating learning environments where students of all identities and backgrounds can flourish. This page features a range of online resources that define inclusive teaching and provide specific strategies for practicing it.

CRLT Resources

Overview of Inclusive Teaching at the University of Michigan: This webpage provides a definition and overview of inclusive teaching and its research basis.

The Research Basis for Inclusive Teaching: This webpage provides an overview of the kinds of evidence that demonstrate inclusive teaching practices can benefit all students' learning.

Principles and Strategies for Inclusive Teaching: This document lists specific strategies for fostering four dimensions of inclusive teaching. Instructors can use it to reflect upon practices they already use or might adopt.

Creating Inclusive College Classrooms

Shari Saunders and Diana Kardia (1997)
Center for Research on Learning and Teaching

Inclusive classrooms are classrooms in which instructors and students work together to create and sustain an environment in which everyone feels safe, supported, and encouraged to express her or his views and concerns. In these classrooms, the content is explicitly viewed from the multiple perspectives and varied experiences of a range of groups. Content is presented in a manner that reduces all students' experiences of marginalization and, wherever possible, helps students understand that individuals' experiences, values, and perspectives influence how they construct knowledge in any field or discipline. Instructors in inclusive classrooms use a variety of teaching methods in order to facilitate the academic achievement of all students. Inclusive classrooms are places in which thoughtfulness, mutual respect, and academic excellence are valued and promoted. When graduate student instructors (GSIs) are successful in creating inclusive classrooms, this makes great strides towards realizing the University of Michigan's commitment to teaching and to diversity and excellence in practice.

In an inclusive classroom, instructors attempt to be responsive to students on both an individual and a cultural level. Broadly speaking, the inclusiveness of a classroom will depend upon the kinds of interactions that occur between and among you and the students in the classroom. These interactions are influenced by:

Multicultural Teaching Services for Faculty and GSIs

CRLT's Coordinator of Multicultural Teaching and Learning Services and other professional staff develop and facilitate a variety of customized programs (e.g., workshops, retreats) that address multicultural issues in specific academic contexts. The planning of these programs is typically done in collaboration with faculty and/or graduate students who are members of the college or department that has requested the service. CRLT also provides campus-wide workshops and individual consultations for faculty and GSIs to help them serve the learning needs of UM's diverse student body. These services address multicultural topics such as transforming course content, creating and maintaining inclusive classroom environments, and expanding pedagogical techniques to be more inclusive of different styles of learning and to facilitate the achievement of all students. CRLT also maintains a set of resources (books and articles, in-house publications, videotapes) to support multicultural teaching and learning. Contact CRLT (via e-mail at [email protected] or via phone at 734-764-0505) for information.

See also:

CRLT Multicultural Teaching: Occasional Papers

Student Teams in the Engineering Classroom and Beyond: Setting up Students for Success by Cynthia J. Finelli, Inger Bergom, and Vilma Mesa, 2011. (pdf)

Teaching for Retention In Science, Engineering, and Math Disciplines: A Guide for Faculty by Marie Kendall Brown, Chad Hershock, Cynthia J. Finelli, & Chris O'Neal, 2009. (pdf)

Instructor Identity: The Impact of Gender and Race on Faculty Experiences with Teaching by Diana B. Kardia and Mary C. Wright, 2004. (pdf) 

Making Accommodations For Students with Disabilities: A Guide for Faculty and Graduate Student Instructors by Crisca Bierwert, 2002. (pdf)

The Effect of Student Diversity on Student Learning at the University of Michigan: Faculty and GSI Perspectives, 1999. A collection of twelve narratives written by UM faculty and graduate student instructors to convey their personal experiences with the complex dynamic of diversity in the University's learning environment. (pdf)

Multicultural Teaching: Links to Other U-M Sites

Multicultural Teaching: Annotated Bibliographies

Promoting Diversity in College Classrooms

Maurianne Adams, Editor
New Directions in Teaching and Learning, 1992, Volume 52

Curtis, M.S.; Herrington, A.J., Diversity in Required Writing Courses.

Today’s challenge, for students and teachers of writing alike, is to construct a social identity on which we can all agree amid a growing confluence of identities, both individual and ethnic. The objective of teaching writing, the author’s state, is for writers to be able to move confidently and thoughtfully through private meaning-making to significant communication with others. In this chapter, the authors describe a multicultural Basic Writing course that they designed, which included significant books by writers from outside of the Anglo American canon. Basic Writing was designed to be more inclusive and student-centered; student writing was the principal activity and student writings the principal texts. The authors comment that in exploring the multicultural content of the works studied, they became conscious of their own interpretive processes, and it was these processes, rather than the interpretations, that they meant to pass on to students.

Hardiman, R.; Jackson, B., Racial Identity Development: Understanding Racial Dynamics in College Classrooms and on Campus.

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