Topics Map > Inclusive Teaching > Equity & Inclusion
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Know Your Students

Ways to get to know your students and challenges they may face with inclusion.

Identity, ethnicity, and culture should be considered in your course. Therefore, it is generally worth considering who the students enrolling in higher education are at UW-Madison, your school/college/department, and your courses. We will share ideas on how to do that in an upcoming activity. First, we will start with who are UW-Madison students.

“Even though some of us might wish to conceptualize our classrooms as culturally neutral or might choose to ignore the cultural dimensions, students cannot check their sociocultural identities at the door, nor can they instantly transcend their current level of development… Therefore, it is important that the pedagogical strategies we employ in the classroom reflect an understanding of social identity development so that we can anticipate the tensions that might occur in the classroom and be proactive about them” (p. 169-170)

Reference: Ambrose, S. A., Bridges, M. W., DiPietro, M., & Lovett, M.C. (2010). How learning works: Seven research-based principles for smart teaching. San Francisco, CA: Jossey Bass.

Read the profiles and note what challenges these students may face with inclusion in your course.

In this podcast episode (26:56 minutes), Dr. Julie Martin discusses social capital's role in student success, retention, and persistence for first-generation and continuing-generation students in undergraduate engineering. https://teaforteaching.com/104-social-capital-and-persistence/

Get to Know Your Students

We also need to understand our students' social identities and how we can help foster a sense of belonging, especially for marginalized students. Authors Addy, Mitchell, and SoRelle (2021), co-authors of What Inclusive Instructors Do, explain: “Inclusive Instructors seek to understand which attributes their learners bring with them to their course so that they can leverage them to design an inclusive learning environment” (p. 26).

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Keywords:
online, teaching, ethnicity, culture, diversity, inclusion
Doc ID:
122422
Owned by:
Karen S. in Instructional Resources
Created:
2022-11-09
Updated:
2024-08-23
Sites:
Center for Teaching, Learning & Mentoring