Developing Welcoming and Inclusive Classes
This instructional guide will help you articulate how a student, who differs from you in meaningful ways, may navigate your course. You will use those thoughts to articulate how you can ensure a welcoming, equitable, and supportive learning environment for all students in your course through changes in your course policies, the language in your syllabus, etc. so that you can plan to address students’ needs.
Before you begin
Review the following resources:
- The Peralta Equity Rubric for Online Courses and
- Leveraging the Neuroscience of Now: Seven ways professors can help students thrive in class in times of trauma.
What to do
Pick a friend, colleague, former student, or family member - preferably someone you know fairly well - who could potentially be a student in a college class and who also differs from you in one or more meaningful ways. This could be by race, ethnicity, identity as LGBTQ+, able-bodiedness, religion, nationality, socioeconomic status, (including housing and food insecurity), or physical or mental health issues.
Consider the following question: What challenges do you think this person could face taking classes, and what could you do to help them feel more welcome and included in your course?
If you can, please talk with the person you've chosen, listen to their concerns, and see what they might suggest. You can use the criteria from the The Peralta Equity Rubric and the recommendations from the Leveraging the Neuroscience of Now article to help think through your response.
Things to consider
- access to technology and internet connection: Access may be seriously limited for students who do not return to campus. There will be students completing entire courses on their phones, because that's what they have consistent access to.
- trauma-informed teaching and learning: Both higher-order thinking and basic cognitive functioning skills (like paying attention, organizing, planning and prioritizing, staying focused, and regulating emotions) can be limited by going through and recovering from trauma. Even if the pandemic, quarantine, and social upheaval haven't been traumatic for you, they have been for others.
- bias and anti-racism: The recent protests and pandemic have highlighted the institutional racism that people of color experience on a daily basis and the importance of educating ourselves in antiracist practices. The actions we are seeing (and not seeing) from organizations, companies, professional and discipline-specific associations, universities (including IU), and individuals, are being discussed in relation to all disciplines and subjects taught.
After implementing any course revisions, you can gather student feedback to determine the impact of those revisions. For example, if you included campus resources that students may use in your syllabus, then you can ask them what they refer to syllabus for and if the syllabus has helped them identify campus resources.