The Future of Education

Students enter university classrooms with a number of different social identities including gender, race/ethnicity, socioeconomic status, mental and physical disAbilitiy status, religious affiliation, and LGBTQIA status.  Recent research has shown that students from these underserved or underrepresented identity groups have more negative experiences than majority students in university classrooms, which may influence student retention in their major.  In these studies, students have identified instructor behaviors and pedagogical choices that may inadvertently affect students’ experiences, especially in active learning classrooms where students engage in their own learning.  By identifying personal biases, recognizing potentially problematic pedagogical choices, and making subtle changes to instruction, instructors can work to create more fair and inclusive classrooms.
In this paper we describe an interactive workshop that we have presented six times that builds off of recent research findings from our lab.  In the workshop, we help participants recognize ways to create more inclusive and fair classrooms.  Specifically, this workshop will help participants identify bias in exam questions that have been created to highlight problems associated with exclusive language, irrelevant information that could be offensive to groups of people, and social norms that may make students from underserved or underrepresented backgrounds feel as though they do not belong in the classroom.  This workshop was developed to provide participants with specific teaching resources that could help them create more inclusive classrooms for students who have social identities with which instructors may be less familiar: LGBTQIA identity, religious identity, and disAbility identity.  Finally, we present a framework for inclusive teaching, highlighting how unique aspects of an active learning environment present both challenges and opportunities for creating an inclusive classroom.

Keywords: Equity; Invisible identities; gender; active learning; inclusive teaching; workshop;