We often don’t have the opportunity to hear directly from students about inclusive teaching practices. In this episode, Tracie Addy, Derek Dube, and Khadijah A. Mitchell, the authors of Enhancing Inclusive Instruction, join us to explore how student perceptions of inclusive teaching practices align with the growing consensus on what constitutes inclusive teaching.
After serving as the Associate Dean of Teaching and Learning at Lafayette College, Tracie will be transitioning to a new role this summer as the Director of the Institute for Teaching, Learning, and Inclusive Pedagogy at Rutgers University – New Brunswick. Derek Dube is an Associate Professor of Biology and the Director of the First-Year Seminar Program at the University of St. Joseph in Connecticut. Khadijah A. Mitchell is an Assistant Professor in the Cancer Prevention and Control Program at the Fox Chase Cancer Center in the Temple University Health System and Affiliated Faculty in the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the Temple University College of Public Health.
Show Notes
- Addy, T. M., Dube, D., Mitchell, K. A., & SoRelle, M. (2023). What inclusive instructors do: Principles and practices for excellence in college teaching. Taylor & Francis.
- Addy, T. M., Dube, D., & Mitchell, K. A. (2024). Enhancing Inclusive Instruction: Student Perspectives and Practical Approaches for Advancing Equity in Higher Education. Taylor & Francis.
- Addy, T. M., Younas, H., Cetin, P., Cham, F., Rizk, M., Nwankpa, C., & Borzone, M. (2022). The development of the protocol for advancing inclusive teaching efforts (PAITE). Journal of Educational Research and Practice, 12, 5.
- Addy, T. M., Mitchell, K. A., & Dube, D. (2021). A tool to advance inclusive teaching efforts: The “who’s in class?” Form. Journal of Microbiology & Biology Education, 22(3), e00183-21.
- POD Network
Transcript
John: We often don’t have the opportunity to hear directly from students about inclusive teaching practices. In this episode we explore how student perceptions of inclusive teaching practices align with the growing consensus on what constitutes inclusive teaching.
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John: Thanks for joining us for Tea for Teaching, an informal discussion of innovative and effective practices in teaching and learning.
Rebecca: This podcast series is hosted by John Kane , an economist…
John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…
Rebecca: …and features guests doing important research and advocacy work to make higher education more inclusive and supportive of all learners.
[MUSIC]
John: Our guests today are: Tracie Addy, Derek Dube, and Khadijah A. Mitchell. After serving as the Associate Dean of Teaching and Learning at Lafayette College, Tracie will be transitioning to a new role this summer as the director of the Institute for Teaching, Learning, and Inclusive Pedagogy at Rutgers University – New Brunswick. Derek Dube is an Associate Professor of Biology and the Director of the First-Year Seminar Program at the University of St. Joseph in Connecticut. Khadijah A. Mitchell is an Assistant Professor in the Cancer Prevention and Control Program at the Fox Chase Cancer Center in the Temple University Health System and Affiliated Faculty in the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the Temple University College of Public Health. Welcome back Tracie, Derek, and Khadijah.
Derek: Thank you so much.
Tracie: Thank you.
Khadijah: Thank you so much.
Rebecca: Today’s teas are:… Tracie, are you drinking tea today?
Tracie: I am drinking tea. And I love that I’m drinking it from my Tea for Teaching mug that John gave me at the POD conference in November. And the tea that I’m drinking is just a simple kind of peppermint tea.
Rebecca: Sounds wonderful, and in the best mug possible. [LAUGHTER] How about you, Derek?
Derek: I’m just drinking water. But I would also like to shout out to my mug, which is actually a mug that I recently received from an instructor in my first-year seminar program here where the second semester of our first-year seminar program is a service-based learning course. And this mural that you see on the mug, and also behind me today, is one that their class created as a means to, as it says, inspire and engage and unite the globe around topics of digital and media literacy and things like that. So shout out to the mug, more so than the beverage within the mug.
John: It’s a very impressive mug and image behind you.
Rebecca: And something good to drink to, for sure. [LAUGHTER] How about you, Khadija?
Khadijah: So, I am drinking organic spearmint tea, and my mug has my name on it and in the spirit of inclusivity, this is probably the first thing I’ve ever had with my name on it. [LAUGHTER] When I go on vacation, I never get a keychain. So I’m very excited to drink the spearmint tea out of this mug.
Rebecca: I love a special mug. John and I don’t really have special mug.
John: Well, I do…
Rebecca: Oh you, do. Right.
John:…from the SUNY Oswego School of Ed, because we moved to a new recording room that they’ve loaned to us after we lost our other one. And along with the room, we got a tea mug, a nice insulated one.
Rebecca: And what kind of tea are you drinking?
John: In line with what we’ve just heard, I am drinking a peppermint spearmint blend today.
Rebecca: I missed the mint protocol today, unfortunately.
John: You didn’t check the calendar?
Rebecca: I didn’t. I’m sorry. [LAUGHTER] But I have a nice Jasmine black tea this morning, which feels nice and springy.
John: We’ve invited you here today to discuss your new book: Enhancing Inclusive Instruction: Student Perspectives and Practical Approaches for Advancing Equity in Higher Education. Your previous book, What Inclusive Instructors Do, was the basis of a very well received faculty reading group that we ran at SUNY Oswego, in collaboration with Jessamyn Neuhaus at SUNY Plattsburgh. So this book is a superb follow up. Could you tell us a little bit about the origin of this new book and how it connects to your earlier work?
Tracie: Absolutely, John, pleasure to do so. So when we think about inclusive teaching, and when I think about it, I would say in general, we know that instructors started at different points in their journeys. And when we wrote What Inclusive Instructors Do, we really knew that it will be really helpful just to have the voices of instructors who do that work, and their thinking about how they think about it, their mindsets, their values, etc. But also kind of distill it into some principles and practices that were very practical, because we know that that speaks well to instructors, but also that would allow them to reflect on their teaching. So after What Inclusive Instructors Do, we knew that instructors aren’t the only voice, right? [LAUGHTER] So we also knew that how important it was to really get students involved and students seeing the benefits of inclusive instruction, how did they experience these spaces in terms of their sense of belonging, welcoming environment, the feelings that it’s equitable or fair as well. So that kind of elicited our next step to really do a study on students and to find their perspectives. And a couple of things that we were able to do with this study, which I think is really helpful and useful for anybody, whether they’ve read What Inclusive Instructors Do or not, is we were also able to identify and ask students aspects according to what are the pitfalls? What have you seen not be inclusive? So that emerges kind of more strongly also in this book than the first book, for example. So we were able to really capture their experiences and these are students from a variety of institution types. They’re coming from a variety of classes they’ve been taking, various identity backgrounds, etc. So it really feels like now we’re talking about students like students [LAUGHTER], it’s their voice in this book. So Enhancing Inclusive Instruction, basically is just that, so that we can have a more comprehensive picture understanding of an inclusive classroom. What does it mean to students? What does it look like for instructors? And the beauty of it, and this is something that I’ve been speaking about a lot is, how are these alignments? What are the alignments between these two perspectives? What are the differences between these two perspectives? And how can we use this wider body of knowledge by having these viewpoints to really inform our practices in what we do in the classroom. So in general, both books, you can read both, you could read one, either/or, but they really were meant to really support inclusive instruction, no matter where an instructor is in your journey.
Rebecca: As a user experience designer and interaction designer, I really love the very student-centered or audience-centered nature of this book, and really bringing those voices to the forefront. Could you tell us a little bit about how you found the student participants to participate in your project.
Derek: So much like we set out with the goal of hoping that our teaching is as inclusive as possible, we also wanted that to be the case for our study, and our recruitment in the voices that we were hearing back from. So we made extensive efforts to have as broad a population be able to give us feedback, to participate in our surveys and our interviews. And that’s an important part, there were opportunities for our student respondents to reply via survey or via a virtual interview where they could potentially even go further and have deeper conversations around some of the topics if they wanted as well. So in order to recruit, after many collaborative meetings between myself and Tracie and Khadija, we came up with a broad spending plan to recruit students through using connections that we had, various educational listservs like POD, social media. We directly communicated with various institutions across the country, their teaching and learning center specifically, but also faculty that we knew that were invested in this type of work. And this included institutions at the community college level and research intensive institutions, liberal arts, HBCUs, colleges for students who learn differently, and basically any type of college you can think of. We also did lean on and take advantage of an opportunity to leverage technology through cloud research, to expand our reach as well. And through all of this, we did end up with well over 300 responses from various students when looked at geographically or institutionally that were very diverse. And we felt good with that as a basis for which to move forward.
John: One of the things we really appreciated when we were running the reading group was the reflection questions you had embedded in what inclusive instructors do. And this book also contains reflection questions spread throughout each of the chapters. While most teaching centers do encourage faculty to engage in reflective practice, it’s nice to see that embedded in the books that they’re reading. But might this be even more effective when faculty are reflecting on the student voices that make up so much of the focus of this book?
Khadijah: Right, so one of the things that stood out to us, when we did survey the inclusive instructors, there was a particular quote saying that inclusive teaching is a perpetual work in progress, informed by research, dialogue, and reflection. And when we think about that, in the context of incorporating student voice, it’s a perfect example of this. So when we think about research, actually collecting data from our students thoughout our courses, and I mean that as a community of inclusive instructors, and really fostering dialogue, and to be honest, what we found from what students say it is, that dialogue means we have to be willing to share and discuss and actually negotiate the space in our classrooms. And when we think about reflection, thinking that there’s no one set of practices for every inclusive instructor that we can act, and we’re not superheroes. So you can’t do all things, but you can do what you can to be responsive to your learners’ needs at the same time. So with that being said, when we came up with these reflection questions, and actually thinking about one of those quotes from the instructor, we saw that there were some mirroring with the first book in terms of course design, and creating a welcoming environment and conducting the course. But really, we saw that there were these 13 key themes, and that, although sometimes they reflected what we saw in the first book, we actually saw new themes emerge. So we really wanted to write reflection questions that captured that, that would help you delve deeper in thinking about the student perspective. And I think to echo something that Tracie mentioned, we really thought about potential pitfalls with these questions that we wouldn’t have thought if we didn’t speak with the students from their perspective to basically avoid certain types of things that may not have been the best for course design or maybe didn’t make everyone feel welcome, or when conducting the course. So that was very encouraging, the way that we could tailor these reflection questions based on what the students said.
Rebecca: And I love that so much. One of the tools that you developed and described in the book is the Protocol for Advancing Inclusive Teaching Efforts, or PAITE. Can you describe this instrument for our listeners?
Tracie: Sure. So the Protocol for Advancing Inclusive Teaching Efforts is a classroom observation protocol that enables instructors, in a formative way, low stakes, to obtain feedback on 15 specific instructional behaviors that are considered inclusive, equitable types of behaviors. And this protocol actually emerged from my work. And it’s a lot of what I’ve been doing in my own work is really thinking about tools that can support our instructors in building more inclusive classrooms. And so this PAITE actually originated from that. And we co-created it with students. So the student partners that work on a lot of the inclusivity efforts that I’ve done at my institution, basically supported this work and helped us measure reliability, et cetera. They were like, you know, the researchers, they helped us think about and devise it. So this particular protocol, I think, has been pretty impactful. We’ve done hundreds of observations with it at the institution that I was previously at. And thinking about all the debriefings, and all the feedback, it really supported instructors in thinking about their inclusive teaching practices. In fact, I like to share some of the responses that I’ve seen or heard them have around it. Some of them and even some of the student partners will actually, in future classes, they’ll say, “Am I doing this?” “Am I doing that?” They’ll actually reflect on the codes that are embedded within this protocol and continue to think about their practice. And that’s actually a very positive outcome of this. If they’re actually putting it in their awareness, awareness is critical for knowing are we actually doing these things that we say or hope we are doing in the classroom, and that has actually helped them really think about their teaching differently. And then some of the students said that actually, when they go to their own classes, they’ll start to think about the codes, because they’re so immersed in actually doing a protocol or conducting it with their partners as well. So that has been really great to see. And so we included it in the actual book, it has like a separate methods kind of paper, or how we developed it. But in the book, it really talks about how it can be used, and how it aligns a lot of the behaviors, and I’m actually doing a lot of this interesting mapping, align with what the perspectives of the students are, and also our instructors in What Inclusive Instructors Do. So it provides a really beautiful way to think about your teaching and monitor your approaches, reflect on your teaching, by actually having that data from your actual classroom. And I think it’s just really been helpful. We’ve embedded it in a variety of different academies and institutes, and different programming at my previous institution.
John: So you mentioned the themes that have arisen from the student interviews. Could you talk a bit about those themes?
Khadijah: Sure. So we saw 13 themes. And interestingly, seven of them centered on inclusive course design. So I’ll elaborate on the two that were the most prominent. We were really interested and surprised to see that maximizing student engagement from the first assignment and throughout the course. So the student has highlighted the importance of that first assignment, and several of them, they really believed that it helped them have a high degree of engagement. But also it was important that it required little content mastery, and built upon their existing knowledge. And there was a lot of positive feedback from successfully completing that first assignment. Students referred to short-term as well as long-term positive emotions from that first assignment. So that was really interesting. And group work… we often think about group work in higher education as a seminal active learning strategy, different learning teamwork, and things like that. So a lot of the students also echoed that, that it maximized the engagement. But what we saw them speak about was the pitfalls from their perspective with the group work, but in particular, those students that were neurodivergent and had disabilities. And so some students along with autism spectrum disorder, and also attention deficit hyperactivity disorder mentioned that, in that particular context, they didn’t feel most engaged with that. Student choice was very prominent. We talked a lot about: flexible deadlines were really important, individual student preferences on assignments and exams and accessibility needs and I think many of us are going to talk a lot about mental health and student well being. So that was very clear there. So those two were some of the key things, but also, including course policies that respectfully consider student time, structures that are easily followed and designed for student success. And students really wanted to encourage feedback on the instructions, diversity of materials, and finally, accounting for the type of course delivery. So I think in a post-COVID19 world, they talked about the importance of in person and hybrid and online themes. So that was the last theme that we saw in that regard.
Rebecca: When you quote students, you include references to their identities. And when faculty first start teaching, they sometimes assume that students in their classes are maybe just as they were as a student, but the mention of the diverse student identities in the book, hopefully help [LAUGHTER] remind faculty about the diversity of their students, and may also help encourage faculty to use a version of the “Who’s in class form.” Can you talk a little bit about that?
Derek: So with Inclusive teaching, I think identity is a key word to be keeping in mind, this concept of identity, this concept that everybody that enters the classroom has their own unique identity that brings with it a wealth of assets, but also potentially some personal bias. And this goes for the instructor just as much as the students if not more, and with the role the instructor is playing, it might be most important there to acknowledge it. So why we include the identity information that our student respondents shared willingly within their surveys was to that reason, for some of our faculty, for our readers, for our instructors, to acknowledge that the students that are responding are not identical to us when we were students, or us as we are now. But also beyond that, to acknowledge that no two students are the same. And we’re seeing different identities across these student respondents. And with all of this in mind that even the idea of teaching to the average student, well, there is no average student really, and that creates significant issues, to the idea of inclusive teaching. So for all of these reasons, we did think it was really important to include those identity aspects of the quoted students that was shared. We think this helps frame the quote, with some context, some important context, and hopefully also makes the quote more real for our readers. This came from somebody, a real person, a real student. So I do think, to your point about the “who’s in class form,” and things like that, that once we as instructors recognize and are aware of the diversity in our student populations, it becomes much more clear that getting to know our students is critical to teaching inclusively, and to including them in the learning process. So you mentioned the who’s in class form, which was part of the first book, and that’s certainly one way to do it that we’ve had a lot of success with. I’ve personally used it for years now in every class that I’ve taught since its development, and had just great personal experience and positive feedback from the students. There was a study that was published that showed student perception and instructor perception also very positive for the who’s in class form. So it’s a tool that we share, because we want it to be available for instructors to use, they don’t need to reinvent the wheel in this situation. It’s a great way to start from the very beginning from the first day like Khadija was mentioning with that first assignment being important… also, that first day, that first interaction, that first relationship building step to be one where it says, “I want to get to know you because you matter in this classroom.” So that’s one tool that we offer up to our readers and want them to be aware of, but there are other ways to do it as well. And I think that it’s important for instructors to think critically about their classrooms and their institutions and their contexts and determine what works best for them within their class to get to know their students.
John: You mentioned the importance of the context for instructors. And one of your chapters in the book focuses on providing advice for historically excluded instructors and their allies, because faculty are often in a very different context in terms of how students perceive them and how students perceive their identities. Could you talk a little bit about some of the things that you emphasize in this chapter?
Tracie: Yes, perfect segue. So in this chapter, we really wanted to emphasize that we see you, we hear you, like understanding instructors from historically excluded backgrounds can have different experiences in the classroom, as you mentioned, John, a bit, but also to give some advice and encouragement and support for how to still do this work because we know that a lot of instructors even from historically excluded backgrounds, in even my experiences and me being one [LAUGHTER], we know that there’s a lot of investment in this. There’s a lot of investment and then the importance of this. So some of the advice we give is general advice. What we know that students really appreciate in general and then also some really concrete advice to really support them in having the evidence that they are teaching well. [LAUGHTER] So the first thing to really think about and we talk about in this section is just care, like, how do we demonstrate care for our students, and regardless of whatever identities, care is critical. We also talk a little bit about other types of strategies. Some of them may or may not resonate with folks, again, all of the stuff we give as options to really think about, to experiment with, to practice with, to really think about what makes sense for you. So we give a couple of examples from people who’ve actually been doing this work as well. So things that have been published around storytelling, thinking about your story and who you are, what you choose to share with your students. And you might withhold some things, you might share some other things, and there’s good reasons for that, depending on your identity as well. We also talk a little bit about engaging your allies and advocates, because you really want to have people in your departments, and at your institution, who really value and can speak highly of your teaching, they know that you’re doing a good job, and they can advocate for that. So engaging them in various ways is important. We have these great tools we talk about, the PAITE, etc. So being able to actually have data that actually shows that you are doing things that align with what the research and evidence says can support students and their success in the classroom. So collecting that information, and just making sure you have it when you need it. And just for your own practice is also really critical, I think, for instructors, in this way, too. So those are just a few of many types of guidance that we do give in this section. I think it’s really important to consider what makes the most sense. I will say, in working with instructors, and also thinking about myself as a black woman teaching as well, it’s so contextual. It’s just like you can’t say that this will happen in this course, or this or that with this instructor. But we know that there’s a lot of variation that can happen. And I think a lot of these different guidance points can really help equip people to really think about what makes sense for them in terms of how they engage with Inclusive teaching practice. And the last thing I’ll share is that even in What Inclusive Instructors Do, if we break down and disaggregate the instructors a bit, we see a lot of instructors successfully talking about doing this work from historically excluded backgrounds. And so we know like it’s happening, we do it in our classes, as well. So this is not being meant to be like discouraging at all, but a very encouraging chapter. And just having some tools and equipment to kind of continue so that you also can be seen that way at your institution and you have that information.
Rebecca: I love these themes of reflection and data and being able to tell your story of who you are as a teacher and why you’re doing these inclusive practices and that there’s evidence that it’s working and supporting your students. Chapter 10 of your book focuses on a topic that we’ve certainly talked about a bit on this podcast, and it’s all over the news and conversations in higher ed, which is AI and instructional practices. Can you talk a little bit about some of the ways in which generative AI can support an equitable learning environment?
Derek: I think it’s a really important topic right now. And on the ground, what I hear most commonly instructors talking about, and faculty talking about are the challenges that AI presents us around commonly topics like academic integrity, like, “Oh, here’s my assignment, my students are just going to go to [insert AI platform here] and complete that assignment and then submit it. And it’s hard for me… the tools for understanding if that occurred or not, can be challenging still at this point.” But I think what our chapter wanted to do more than focus on those challenges is kind of flip the table on that and focus on what are the potential benefits, like you mentioned, to increasing equity in the classroom and inclusivity in the classroom? And they are manifold, when you take the time to actually look at it and think about it. And I think the chapter goes over a number of examples to show how this can be done. In terms of benefits that we see AI being able to be leveraged with in the classroom, incorporating and developing more efficient learning experiences is certainly one of them. It can kind of balance prior knowledge gaps that students come with to the classroom by being a tool which can be used for brainstorming and ideation and things along that line, so that maybe a student can go to a platform with a particular question or broad topic and use that platform as a tool to help kind of narrow down something that they want to explore more deeply, get some ideas that maybe they didn’t have the knowledge that they brought with themselves to class to come up with that idea on their own, but now they can get there, and it can kind of even up that playing field a little bit. There’s also additional benefits to multilingual learners in terms of helping learn the language that their course is being taught in, writing more fluently and efficiently, and better understanding written material that’s present. It can help personalize learning in a really equitable way. There’s a portion of the chapter that speaks to the idea of using AI as an additional support for overcoming kind of the muddiest points in a classroom. So if an instructor is either directly asking students what is the most challenging topic, what is the muddiest point, those points could then be used and imported into an AI platform to help navigate those situations, or it could just be pointed as a tool that students could use on their own when they come up with their muddiest point and when they find a topic that’s challenging for them. Now, of course, all of this has to go within the concept of how reputable is the response that we’re getting, how trustworthy is the output of these different platforms. But that also actually leads into what a really potentially beneficial assignment tool would be with this, which is the idea of using these platforms, seeing what their responses are, and then having the students kind of fact check and revise and edit and think critically about those responses. And there’s an assignment there where students can essentially take a prompt, import it into an AI platform, see what they get back, and then the assignment is actually go through this, revise this, edit it, fact-check it: “What would you change?” And that can be a really great way to enhance the critical thinking and evaluation aspects that we’re really trying to build in a lot of our students with, again, narrowing and balancing what’s needed for kind of background knowledge coming in. So there’s these and many other mechanisms that are talked about in the chapter, including ones for, as instructors it can be a tool to brainstorm ideas for: “What are the most inclusive ways I can teach on this topic? Give me a list of 10 of these?” And then the instructor can look through that list and say, “Hey, which one of these might work best for my class context? And how can I adapt that to work for me?” So there’s lots of ways in which AI can be a really positive tool, as long as we use it in that way, and are appreciative and recognize the potential challenges that it also faces.
John: It’s certainly a bit of a challenging time in terms of professional development for faculty, because as you said, so many people just say, “this is just another tool for students to cheat,” because they haven’t really played with it that must themselves, they haven’t really seen the potential. And I think that’s something that all teaching centers are going to have to continue to work on quite a bit to help faculty become more aware of how these tools can be used to complement other forms of learning, rather than as a substitute, which is what they’re concerned about. So in addition to your two books, what are some other strategies that faculty can use to help create a more inclusive environment in their classes? I know, you’ve talked about some of them, like the “Who’s in class form,” and so forth? But what are some other ways that faculty can work to become more inclusive? Or what are some of the things faculty who have not thought about this much should start focusing on most immediately?
Khadijah: That is a great question. I think, yes, we have a ton of great resources, like books and tools like PAITE, and our lived experience. There’s something that I really think this particular study and process and talking to students that really resonated with us is thinking about nonverbal communication. Often people think inclusive teaching takes so much effort, but even thinking about your personality, you’re smiling. So for example, smiling, warm and welcoming tone, being thoughtful about tone. For example, students say not getting angry. So to throw back to something that Derek mentioned, is thinking about your instructor background, and what type of strategies or the nonverbal communication are you communicating. So that is definitely easy if you’re in person. [LAUGHTER] But if you’re online, some things that I think you can think about is the use of thumbs up, clapping, things like that. Something that recently came up for discussion was when you are online courses, do you tell your students to change the tone of the thumbs up so that everyone is reflected in that space and welcome? Students have actually responded that they feel more included in that space with nonverbal communication. So using emojis in emails, some students actually thought that made their instructor more approachable, but I will say, that being an instructor in 2024, you have to watch that. There is a pitfall there. Studies have shown overuse of the emojis, induce sometimes less confidence in the instructor. I think, being mindful of any strategy that you can use to be mindful of the nonverbal communication. But the verbal communication I’ll say, unequivocally, I keep going back to this… [LAUGHTER] the mug… it is really important to know names, say names correctly, and to use chosen names. So name tents can help with that, using an annotated class roster, seating charts, photos, mnemonic devices, student introductions, those things are concrete. And I think the last thing I would say, is actually telling jokes. So a lot of instructors use humor in college and university classrooms. So that tends to go over very well, there’s a positive effect on students in the learning environment, and making people feel included. But again, a word of caution, thinking about how the joke can land. So it could be very powerful in that way. But also wanting to be mindful if you’re going to, in fact, use that particular strategy to make your students feel welcome.
Rebecca: Well, we always wrap up by asking: “What’s next?”
Tracie: I’ll share a little bit about some of the things that I’m working on. So with regards to my scholarship, I kind of hover between teaching and learning and also educational development in general. And so a couple of things that are exciting, I think, for the future is we’re currently proposing a multi-site PAITE study. And so that study will dig deeper into the impacts of, we’re hoping, of the PAITE in the classroom. Since now, we’ve been using it a lot, but we don’t have all the data from the classroom and the experiences of students and the instructors. So we’re going to be doing a multi-site study in the next year or two. So hopefully, you’ll see that come out. Another project that we actually just finished off, a smaller project, we talked about group work, students experiences with group work, and that being a challenging area. So we implemented an intervention this past year at my previous institution, in collaboration with another center, and several classrooms, several instructors in their classrooms. And so we did collect some data on that. We just are synthesizing it. So we’re gonna hope to write that up and also share the resource that we use, that was an intervention that we created that students use to help empower them to really have more effective group work experiences, more inclusive, more equitable kinds of experiences. And then a couple of things I’m working on in an educational development realm, we just collected data from the POD community and outside on educational development right now in our times, so we can track how it changes. So we’re in the process right now, this summer, of starting to write the book, which will be the next one… it’s written like almost every 10 years educational development in the age of… and we’re gonna ffill that in [LAUGHTER] based on the results of the study, and then some other educational development things. And lastly, as was mentioned earlier, I’m moving to a new institution. So I’m going to launch a new Institute for Teaching, Learning, and Inclusive Pedagogy. So that’s going to be very exciting to really think about what’s next there, it will be launching the first center at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, and it will have embedded within it all of this inclusive stuff. So there’s so many things to bring there and to increase and expand.
Derek: Yeah, for me, I mean, I think coming out of the work of this study that led to this book, I think where I am is continuing to spread the word, but then also putting it into action. And that means personally, for me, in my own teaching, taking all the things that I learned through this process of listening to students, working with my fantastic colleagues, and writing this book, and having conversations like these, putting that into action, and making sure we’re walking the walk, so to say, because that’s the only way this actually happens. And in my role at the University of St. Joseph, again, I’m not only a instructor, a faculty member in the biology department, but I’m also the director of the first year seminar program here at USJSJ.. a two-semester long program. It’s a true first year program, where the first semester is a three-credit course that is kind of half transitioning to college and half an academic component where the students get to dive into college learning. And the second semester is a one-credit course where it’s service based and meeting the mission of our university to engage in compassionate service. So as in my director role, I am thinking a lot about how do we help students transition to college in their first year? And I think there’s a lot that we can gain from listening to students. And that was reported out in this book that can be leveraged there. So building in some of these ideas of really getting to know the students, engaging in opportunities for student choice within our first-year seminar program itself as well, kind of coming out of the work of this, I’ve created a college success portfolio that we’re implementing in the program. We implemented it for the first time this past year that ties a lot of these features in that allows students to talk about right off the bat, their first assignment is nothing to do with the content, but it’s the “Why are you here? Why college? What are your goals, both in college and out of college? And this is something that the students can succeed with, right away to kind of set that form and let them know that their instructors here at the institution care about them as learners, and that the learning that they’ll go through will be personalized for them. So something that we’re piloting here at the University of St. Joseph trying out but long term would be something that we would hope to share out with the greater community and hopefully help those first-year experiences at institutions around the nation and globe.
Khadijah: Well, for me, there’s one thing that really struck me as we worked on these two projects, was that inclusive teaching is very similar to inclusive research mentoring. And so I do a lot of research mentoring. There’s a lot of teaching strategies in dealing with different types of learners in a research laboratory setting, so I’m really interested in going in the direction of thinking about how some of these strategies and things that we learned translate to a research mentorship context. And also, because I’m at an institution now that has graduate students and postdocs, really train the next generation of inclusive instructors, and particularly those that are in STEM spaces. So when I’m working with a mentor to our postdoctoral advisory committee here, and trying to get them excited about being inclusive instructors as they transition to their next phase.
Rebecca: We’re looking forward to hearing about all the things that you’re continuing to do because you’re making an important difference in our teaching and learning community. Thanks for joining us.
Khadijah: Thank you.
John: It’s great to see all of you again and talk to you again. And this time, we shouldn’t let it go quite as long as between our last discussion and this one.
Derek: Thank you so much for having us again. It’s been a pleasure.
Tracie: Yes. Thank you.
Khadijah: This is so fun. [LAUGHTER]
Rebecca: Either that or you’re enough to write books faster, one or the other. [LAUGHTER]
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John: If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on iTunes or your favorite podcast service. To continue the conversation, join us on our Tea for Teaching Facebook page.
Rebecca: You can find show notes, transcripts and other materials on teaforteaching.com. Music by Michael Gary Brewer.
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