It is important that we promote diversity and inclusion in our online courses, especially now that more and more of us are teaching online due to the pandemic. I recently ran across this great article from the Teaching Learning Center Archives group that we belong to. We will also be sharing many of these with you periodically in this blog. Many more are available from the FDC Info Site as well. Here is one with several strategies on how you can promote diversity and inclusion in your classroom. One of the most important strategies is for us to be available to our students. The more available we make ourselves the freer students will feel to come to us when they have problems or concerns or feel excluded in the classroom.
Here is the article I mentioned:
Some Strategies to Promote Diversity and Inclusion in Online Courses
Diversity and inclusion are vital components of contemporary education. When everyone in a class feels accepted for who they are, they may be more comfortable participating and sharing their views. It can be especially important to promote diversity and inclusion in an online setting, where people may feel distanced from each other. Here are some useful strategies:
Work with students in such a way that if a student has a problem or a concern, feels ostracized or otherized for any reason, or feels triggered by something in your course, they will be comfortable discussing it with you. Even if you don’t have a ready answer, acknowledge their humanity by truly listening to what they say. This can go a long way toward embracing diversity and inclusion in this and other courses.
Foster Community Building
Spend some time in building community. Let students get to know each other and you through bio sketches and pictures. Have yours on the course website when students log in initially. Provide instructions for students to add theirs. The pictures can be of something important to the person, like a pet or favorite location. Encourage students to read each other’s bio sketches by assigning a post identifying things they have in common with x number of students.
Some students don’t like turning on their cameras for class due to issues of privacy. Encourage everyone to turn on cameras during class by requiring students to create virtual backgrounds of one or more assigned colors. In this way, everyone will have and use a virtual background, so no one will be stigmatized by their surroundings. This also facilitates putting students into groups, because you can visually see who is in the blue group, the yellow group, and so forth. Moving people from one group to another is also easier with the colors as visual cues.
Thoughtfully (Re-)Consider Content
Our society is dealing with two serious viruses at the moment. One has been a problem for less than a year. One has been a problem for over 400 years. One is COVID-19, and one is racism. Even though you may have used an assignment about mass graves in the past, ask yourself if this semester, you might be able to find another text that achieves the same pedagogical purpose without possibly triggering negative memories. Do the same with assignments using otherizing terminology or scenarios. You may have a stellar module on Huck Finn planned, but is this the best choice to use this semester? Challenge yourself to use content that achieves your pedagogical purposes and affirms each student’s identity and intersectionality.
Increased peer-to-peer interaction can help to close distance and tear down walls of separation. Make a point to incorporate small group work into your course for different things. For example, in a writing-heavy course, each student might have a reading group, a writing group, and a peer editing group. You can use the breakout function of your meeting app to make groups.
Interacting with peers in different ways allows students to know each other differently.
Faculty Developer for Diversity and Inclusion
Center for Teaching and Learning Excellence