Promoting Inclusive Classroom Dynamics in Higher Education

A Research-Based Pedagogical Guide for Faculty

Kathryn C. Oleson

• Publisher: Stylus Publishing
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781620369012
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Theory & Practice

This powerful, practical resource helps faculty create an inclusive dynamic in their classrooms, so that all students are set up to succeed. Grounded in research and theory (including educational psychology, scholarship of teaching and learning, intergroup dialogue, and social justice theory), this book provides practical solutions to help faculty create an inclusive learning environment in which all students can thrive.

Each chapter focuses on palpable ideas and adaptive strategies to use right away when teaching. The first chapter consider professors' intersecting personal and social identities and their expectations for themselves and their students. Chapter 2 considers students' backgrounds, including class, race, disability, and gender, and focuses on what students bring to the classroom, exploring their basic psychological needs of autonomy, competence, and belonging; their approaches to learning; and their self-doubts and uncertainties. Chapter 3 draws on universally-designed learning in combination with educational design rooted in social justice and multiculturalism to describe ways to design spaces in which students flourish academically. Two chapters focus on classroom dynamics. Chapter 4 primarily focuses on preparation for having difficult conversations in the classroom, considering how instructors can create a shared understanding between themselves and their students. Chapter 5 focuses on in-the-moment strategies to both create and manage discomfort about sensitive and controversial topics while supporting students of various social identities (such as gender, race, disability). In the closing chapter, the author integrates all the elements in the preceding chapters, and also presents more general college-wide programs to help faculty develop and improve their teaching.

1

INSTRUCTORS

“I think identity plays a huge role in the classroom. I don’t think any of us can think outside. . . . We can think beyond our identities potentially, but we need to be aware we’re doing so. . . . I don’t think identity is a trap, but I do think . . . it’s how we see the world, right? Our identities—and the groups we feel a part of, the groups we feel we belong to—are going to shape our perceptions.”
—Faculty Member (Oleson, 2017)

“My identity shapes the classroom, all my students, all 30 students or 40 students or however many I have in the room, shape what’s going on. And how do we best teach and reach students of all these varying identities? . . . It’s about re-centering. . . . It’s about bringing those marginalized identities into the center.” —Faculty Member (Oleson, 2017)

This chapter focuses on you, the one teaching the course. What do you bring to the classroom in terms of your identities? What do you expect from yourself and your students? What are your biases and how do they impact interactions in the learning environment? This chapter provides the initial elements in this how-to guide for building an inclusive classroom. First, it gives a concrete set of questions to ask yourself about your identities, and if and when you should strategically disclose them. Second, it offers tangible strategies for both reflecting on your biases and mitigating their influence on your judgments of and interactions with students.

What follows are practical principles grounded in relevant research. However, their usefulness depends on your thoughtful application of these ideas to your own life. While reading the chapter, be open to both learning new ideas about identity and bias and reflecting on those aspects of your identities and biases you find most significant in terms of your classroom experiences as an instructor.

Faculty Members’ Intersecting Personal and Social Identities

To begin, instructors bring themselves—their self-concepts—to the classroom. Their self-concepts include both their personal identities and their collective or social identities.

The Self

According to Baumeister (2010), one’s self or self-concept has three key features:

1. Individuals have self-awareness and can look at themselves. For instance, I have knowledge about myself that includes ideas about my personal qualities (e.g., I am friendly; I like math) and my strengths and weaknesses (e.g., I often remember people’s names yet sometimes forget how to pronounce certain names), among other things.

2. The self is social. It is created, maintained, and changed through interaction with other people. For instance, feedback from my students and my colleagues influences how I feel about my job and how competent I feel about my teaching.

TABLE 1.1
Worksheet: Applying Baumeister’s Ideas About the Self-Concept to the Classroom

What are your important self-aspects/personal qualities in the classroom?	While teaching, how are you influenced by your relationships, roles, and the environment?	In what ways do you exert control over and regulate yourself, your students, and the classroom environment?	What questions do you have? What aspects are working well? What would you like to improve?

3. One’s self has the ability to act on the world, to self-regulate, and to make decisions. As a professor, I can exert a powerful role in the classroom, one that shapes my students’ expectations, norms, and behaviors.

In Table 1.1, begin reflecting on yourself in the classroom, including both how you are shaped by and how you shape others.

Intersecting Personal and Social Identities

One’s self is made up of more than personal identities. We also comprise social identities, “[those parts] of an individual’s self-concept that [are] based upon the value and emotional significance of belonging to a social group” (Jones, 1997, p. 214). I identify as a social psychologist. I am a mother. I identify as White. To truly understand these social identities, one must also consider the ways that the social world intertwines them with each other, resulting in novel intersecting identities (e.g., I identify as a White woman or a cisgender White woman). Kimberle Crenshaw (1989) made clear the limits of considering identities in isolation when she introduced the term intersectionality in the realm of legal discrimination against Black women. More recently, Lisa Rosenthal (2016) stressed the importance of intersectionality in the field of psychology:

Intersectionality highlights the importance of attending to multiple, intersecting identities and ascribed social positions (e.g., race, gender, sexual identity, class) along with associated power dynamics, as people are at the same time members of many different social groups and have unique experiences with privilege and disadvantage because of those intersections. Given its activist roots, focusing on systems of oppression and the need for structural change to promote social justice are central components of intersectionality. (p. 475)

Overall, instructors bring to the classroom their intersecting personal and social identities linked to histories of privilege and exclusion. When approaching teaching, your personal (e.g., “I see myself as smart or kind”) and social identities (e.g., “I identify as a White woman”) matter for students’ perceptions, learning, achievement, and persistence (Carrell et al., 2010; Fairlie et al., 2014; Sorensen, 1989).

Rather than perceiving of and presenting one’s self as a “disembodied mind—a possessor of knowledge and power” (Henderson, 1994, p. 436), a professor, Henderson (1994), suggests an “embodied text—produced by certain personal and historical experiences” (p. 436). Building on this notion of embodied text, Mel Michelle Lewis (2011) considers how her intersecting identities impact her teaching of women’s studies courses:

TABLE 1.2
Worksheet: Personal and Social Identities in the Classroom

What are your identities? These could be single identities or intersecting multiple identities; briefly describe each.	In what ways is this identity important to you and/or to others?	What impact do you think it has on the way you see the world?	How does it influence your behavior in the classroom?	How does it impact how others respond to you?

I teach what I am, I am what I teach: an intersectionality . . . , an interdisciplinarity, a complex epistemology, and pedagogical location. I live and perform my multiple social identities, both visible and invisible, and teach both through institutional knowledge and my own “embodied text” (Henderson, 1994: 436). As I teach through these embodiments, it has become apparent that the methods through which we teach women’s studies must be intersectional and interdisciplinary, while recognizing the body as a site of learning and knowledge. (pp. 49–50)

You too have multiple identities that are significant in the university classroom. In Table 1.2, take time to reflect on identities that you consider important and/or that you think others consider important in the classroom, expanding on the initial work in Table 1.1.

Identities in the Classroom

Research, theory, and application to the higher education classroom often consider a focused set of important social identities. For example, Derald Sue’s (2015) work on “race talk” underscores the centrality of faculty members’ racial or ethnic identities, whereas other explorations concentrate on gender (Miller & Chamberlin, 2000) or the intersection of gender with race (Chang, 2012; Pittman, 2010). I hope this book will be applicable across a variety of instructor identities, including race, gender, sexuality, relationship status, disability, social class, age, religion, political orientation, appearance, non-native English speaker, sexual assault survivor, cancer patient, to name some possibilities. This book provides a framework for approaching not only these identities but also unnamed ones that are or may become important for you while teaching.

I encourage you to explore your own identities and their potential for importance and relevance in the classroom. But identities are not weighted equally, nor necessarily consistently, at different times and in different classroom environments. There is a danger inherent in delineating such a broad collection of self-characteristics, as it may suggest that all are equivalent. I have some discomfort with my choice to include a long list of identities, because I realize that it could have unintended negative consequences. By including a range of diverse identities, individuals may underestimate the impact of some primary ones—such as race—that have an enormous societal impact (Crenshaw et al., 1995; Jones, 1997; Kendi, 2019; Oluo, 2019). For instance, recent research has suggested that when organizations define diversity with a broad range of categories—for example, including categories such as race or sex that are legally protected alongside categories such as personality—rather than concentrating on legally protected ones, individuals pay less attention to the organization’s racial inequality (Akinola et al., 2017). The perceived impact of race is watered down by considering the other identities. To ensure that various social categories are not treated as interchangeable, current conversation has focused on anti-Blackness in particular and centered Black and Indigenous people when describing injustice experienced by people of color....

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• 1 Instructors
• 2 Students
• 3 Context and Content
• 4 Class Dynamics I
• 5 Class Dynamics II
• 6 Conclusion: Bringing It All Together
• References
• About the Authors
• Index
• Also available from Stylus
• Backcover