Designing the learning environment to be meaningful, relevant, and accessible for every student in the course/program is inclusive pedagogy. This toolkit offers concrete suggestions for designing inclusive learning environments through six key interconnected aspects of teaching and learning relevant to all courses. These ideas are intended to contribute to the development of inclusive pedagogical practices.
The following six inclusive teaching areas are covered in the toolkit:
- Content: Analyzing your design choices regarding assignments, materials you share, and topics and authors you cover.
- Pedagogy: Being mindful of various situational factors at play in our design choices: implicit biases, institutional norms, curricular design.
- Assessment: Considering the purpose and intent of the practice; clear criteria; motivation and retention; and formative, low-stake opportunities that allow students to monitor their own progress.
- Climate: Creating an inclusive climate means cultivating a learning environment that fosters students’ sense of belonging and connection to the course, discipline, and a community of learners and leads to students feeling valued and supported in their learning.
- Power: Teaching and learning takes place in a context shaped by power dynamics. Intentionally taking note of all these dynamics and reflecting on your own identities and positions and perhaps sharing these reflections explicitly with the class can help you navigate this complex social space.
- Mentorship: Inclusive mentoring means being sure to open the door to all your students, highlighting resources that not all might know about, helping them help each other, treating them like scholars, and maintaining clear boundaries.
A sense of belonging to an academic community has been shown to be an important predictor of academic success. It’s also been found that efforts to increase marginalized students’ sense of social belonging led to increases in both academic success and well-being of students and these benefits can last for years. Therefore, this toolkit focusses on interventions that contribute towards increasing the sense of belonging of marginalized students to achieve greater academic success and well-being of students.
The Inclusive Pedagogy Toolkit is designed by the Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship (CNDLS) of the Georgetown University.
Read more about the tool here.