INCLUSIVE PEDAGOGY

Inclusive pedagogy is fundamental to student success and sits at the heart of your teaching. The evidence-based practices below are taken from the Inclusive Pedagogy domain of the Teaching Effectiveness Framework.

1) START WITH KEY PRACTICES

BEGIN WITH TRAINING AND SELF-REFLECTION

Engage in self-reflection and training related to inclusive practices. Being aware of your own background can help you mitigate assumptions, biases, and microaggressions that occur in your classroom, helping to create an inclusive and productive learning environment.

Check CSU’s Office of Inclusive Excellence for training opportunities.

GET TO KNOW YOUR STUDENTS

Know who is in your course, why they are taking it, and what they most want to learn. Call your students by their correct name and pronouns. If you are unable to memorize student names, create a seating chart or ask students to create name tents. Be responsive to religious holidays and keep current on contemporary cultural issues, considering how these issues may be impacting students in your class.

CHECK YOUR COURSE MATERIALS FOR INCLUSIVITY AND ACCESSIBILITY

Choose and create course materials that deliberately reflect the diversity of contributors to your field and the students in your course. This includes texts, videos, examples, visuals on slides, test questions, and assignments. It is important for students to see themselves in the course and in the field.

Ensure all electronic content is accessible. This includes PDF’s, Word documents, content slides, multimedia, web content, and Canvas. Go to the Assistive Technology Resources Center for information and tutorials.

INTEGRATE INCLUSIVE TEACHING STRATEGIES

If lecturing is your prominent teaching strategy, take the next step to interactive lecturing where lecture is broken into 8 – 10 minute segments with processing activities after each segment. Activities might include turning to a peer and explaining the concept to each other, discussing and answering an i-clicker question, writing a “so what” paragraph about a concept, sketching a concept, explaining to a peer how a concept links to another concept, making a prediction, or arguing for or against something. In other words, inclusive teaching intentionally engages students with course material.

ADDITIONAL CONSIDERATIONS FOR TEACHING ONLINE

In online courses, much of the material is delivered in writing. Written delivery may present certain challenges for students whose first language is not English. This can be addressed by offering various delivery formats like video, captions, transcripts, podcasts, etc. for students to engage with content.