CLAS Acts February 2022
Monthly newsletter of the TT faculty of CLAS
A Note from Dean Drake
January has been busy. We have had the opportunity to engage on campus with three candidates for the provost position, and we are actively interviewing for several faculty and staff positions. We have all been navigating omicron’s disruptions. And it’s been cold! But below normal temperatures do often bring clear skies, and February 3 is the halfway point of winter.
As we open the nomination season for faculty governance, I want to give a shout out to all of you who are involved in committee work: thank you for giving faculty perspectives voice. I encourage everyone to join these colleagues by nominating yourself or others for the committees that shape our work on so many fronts. You can do so at Faculty Governance & Elections - College of Liberal Arts and Sciences - Grand Valley State University (gvsu.edu). Your elected CLAS Faculty Council will very much appreciate having your nominations and acceptances by 5 p.m. on Monday, February 7. And please make it a point to vote February 14-21.
As you will have heard, Faculty Senate voted to affirm the new Reach Higher 2025 plan, available for viewing at Values, Vision, Mission & Strategies - Reach Higher 2025 - Grand Valley State University (gvsu.edu). Thanks to our colleagues in CLAS and across the university who worked hard on the language and brought us to this positive outcome. Our CLAS planning is moving along well, and the revised document will come before the unit heads in mid-February. If you speak with colleagues in other colleges, you’ll find we are ahead of the curve. I am excited by the way our shared vision and commitments are coming together.
None of this has been easy. There is added challenge everywhere you look and that has been the case for a few years now. As your dean, I want to express appreciation for you and the amazing work you do. You are lifting the load of colleagues who are dealing with their own or a family member’s illness, adapting to changing policy as conditions change, assisting your students with their complex needs, and perhaps battling cynicism and compassion fatigue. I am inspired by your research and creative activity—I read a wonderful round of sabbatical proposals last semester—and by your teaching expertise. In the article that follows, we highlight our colleagues Debbie Herrington (Chemistry), Lauren Keough (Mathematics), Dwayne Tunstall (Philosophy), and Laurel Westbrook (Sociology), and learn how they define and enact inclusive pedagogy in their classrooms.
Wishing you health and the uplift of longer days,
Jen
Designing Grace
Universal Design for Learning (UDL) is a powerful approach because from the very start of your lesson, it helps you anticipate and plan for all your learners. It can help you make sure that the greatest range of students can access and engage in learning — not just certain students. ~Understood website
Whether faculty characterize it as decolonizing the classroom or making their courses more universally accessible, many are in the market for inclusive pedagogical strategies that work. At the heart of many of these efforts is what Jason Arday et al. call “developing a pedagogically inclusive learning space that fosters a sense of engagement and belonging.”[i]
A number of CLAS faculty were invited to provide comment on their recent efforts to reach their increasingly diverse students better than ever before.
Chemistry chair Deborah Herrington said, “I found myself continually looking for some concrete things that I could or should be doing to make my classroom more inclusive.” This included a 7-week course on inclusive pedagogy offered by the Inclusive STEM Teaching Project. Debbie needed techniques that would work in a 100-person chemistry course with many first-year students. She is happy to report that the techniques she implemented led to the best course evaluations she’s had and higher student success on the three term tests. “Inclusive pedagogy is really just good, student-centered, research-based teaching, and there are lots of smaller things that we can easily implement to make students feel more included.”
Debbie began by asking students about themselves via a Google Form survey that she is happy to share. With this information, she was better able to connect chemistry to their interests and connect students who were less confident with appropriate support. At the beginning of the term she also grouped students with classmates and these groups generally remain together throughout the term, giving first-year students their own network within the class. She found that they became accountable to each other for attendance and helped make sure materials made their way to anyone in the group who was absent.
She also found that being transparent and asking for feedback helped.
"Making sure students know why you have structured your course in a certain way or why you are asking them to do certain things goes a long way to getting their buy in. For example, I always tell my students on the first day why I put them in groups and why group work is such an important part of my class. I explain that I ask them to watch short videos or do short assignments and answer pre-class assignment questions prior to each class so that they have an introduction to the topic and so that I can see what areas they are struggling with so we can spend more time talking about that. About 5-6 weeks into the course I always give a Start, Stop, Continue survey and then make a point of reviewing in class all the things that people said and indicating what I am able to do based on their suggestions as well as what I am not able to do along with why it is not possible."
Her transparency extends to acknowledging her own struggles in everything from running a hybrid class to what she found difficult as a young chemistry student such as being the only female student in a large chemistry course. This helped students engage in conversations about how best to achieve the course goals. Debbie found some of their suggestions worked better than the initial strategy.
Debbie is also making use of the materials in her in-person course that she developed for an online section, effectively flipping the course by using pre-class activities to introduce concepts. “Students come into our classes with different backgrounds and need more or less time on material to master it. I will also add, if students are struggling, it is really easy for me to look and see if they are actually putting in effort on the pre-class or post-class activities, or attending class and participating in the group work. This allows me to do some more targeted outreach than I have been able to do in the past.”
This year Debbie live-streamed her classes using Blackboard Collaborate and recorded them. This helped students in quarantine without becoming extra work for Debbie and it proved a benefit for other students wanting a review. There were issues with using a document camera or with some things she wrote on the board, but the recordings were still useful.
Philosophy’s Dwayne Tunstall (who will become Associate Dean for Inclusive Excellence in June) grounds his inclusive pedagogy in the importance of a diverse curriculum to create a feeling of belonging.
"In my home discipline of Philosophy, I have worked to diversify the curriculum by including philosophers from underrepresented populations (e.g., women, racial minorities, ethnic minorities, LGBTQ+ people, people with disabilities) in my courses. This is particularly the case in the introductory Philosophy courses I teach (Introduction to Philosophy and Ethics) and American Philosophy. If one’s discipline does not lend itself to diversifying its curriculum content-wise, one can still show students that people from underrepresented groups are successful practitioners in that discipline. This can be enough to increase underrepresented students’ interest in that discipline."
Laurel Westbrook (Sociology) notes how important it is to consider what that representation entails.
"Make sure that you aren’t just focusing on discrimination and marginalization. A classroom is not “inclusive” if the only time a group is mentioned forces members of that group to relive group trauma. Instead, inclusive pedagogy must include material that celebrates oppressed groups and helps students look at them in a new way.
For example, this semester in Sociology of Sexuality, I’m asking students to rethink the belief that what it is to be LGBTQ+ is to be “wounded” and we are doing readings that question the belief that certain groups, such as people with disabilities and the elderly, shouldn’t be sexual."
Dwayne is making use of technology to implement universal design principles to make material more accessible.
"Course content should be accessible to a range of students. For example, I use either YouTube videos with closed captioning or record lectures using software that transcribes the audio and then embeds it in the media file. For videos without closed captioning, I either try to find transcripts for them or use software to transcribe them. I am not always successful in finding transcripts for those videos or producing a transcription of those videos."
Viewpoint diversity is another of Dwayne’s goals, and he is the first to admit that this is not easy.
"One way to do this is to create a classroom environment where instructor and students alike feel like their views are respected, even when others disagree strongly with them. This is hard, especially when the class involves people having uncomfortable conversations about controversial issues.
To foster a community where this sort of respect is possible, one of his techniques is to have students provide video responses to prompts or to talk to other students in person in order to build community especially in asynchronous class environments."
Lauren Keough of Mathematics says she doesn’t feel like an expert in this area but has been reading[ii] and trying some techniques such as working collaboratively with students to set class norms and providing students with some “tokens” to extend deadlines or get an extra attempt at a quiz. These are “no questions asked” forms of grace. “It's one of my ways of showing, not telling, that I see them as humans.” She adds this note, “I always make clear that if they need additional grace they should let me know, and that I can connect them to university resources[iii] when in need.”
Lauren also shared her top tip for any colleague just getting started in inclusive pedagogy:
"Be clear about your expectations and policies, but think about what you can be flexible about (deadlines? how students can demonstrate their learning? how students are expected to participate in class?)."
Some who responded to the invitation to contribute to this article have been participating in FTLC teaching circles on universal design and inclusive pedagogy. In fact, another FTLC course called Inclusive Teaching for Equitable Learning starts May 16, 2022.[iv] There will be other upcoming occasions to learn and contribute in this area. As the CLAS vision implementation planning unfolds later this term and during the summer, faculty with particular interest in this area will play an essential role in our efforts to move the college forward.
[i] Attempting to break the chain: reimaging inclusive pedagogy and decolonising the curriculum within the academy
[ii] Asked and Answered: Dialogues on Advocating for Students of Color in Mathematics by Dr. Pamela Harris and Dr. Aris Winger (Dec. 10, 2020)
[iii] Check out this CLAS webpage that aggregates links to many resources for Supporting Students.