The Inclusive STEM Teaching Project (edX)

Throughout this six-week online course, we will ask you to engage in deep reflection and discussions around topics of equity and inclusion in learning environments across a variety of institutional contexts. This course is designed to improve our participants’ awareness, self-efficacy, and ability of doctoral students, postdocs, and faculty to create inclusive STEM learning environments for their students. To center the identity of faculty and students and facilitate deep reflection, we employ key features including: embodied case studies, affinity spaces, and an inclusivity framework portfolio. These activities are collectively designed to nurture a transformative mindset and help our participants reflect deeply on key identity-related aspects of each module as they go through the course, and to help them apply these aspects in tangible ways to their own teaching and learning contexts.

What you'll learn

Participants in this course will...

- Examine issues of diversity, equity and inclusion in higher education

- Reflect on their own and their students’ identities and experiences

- Question their assumptions about all aspects of instruction

- Identify and implement learner-centered structures and strategies

- Apply principles of evidence-based inclusive teaching

- Use their student learning data and feedback to inform pedagogical and curricular choices

Syllabus

Introduction: In this welcoming session, participants will be introduced to the concepts, ideas, and terms that relate to fostering inclusive classrooms and learning environments in higher education. The concepts reviewed in this session will be reinforced in the content throughout the rest of the MOOC.

Module 1: DEI in Learning and Teaching in Higher Education: In this module, participants will examine issues of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), especially around power, privilege and positionality, in both their local institutional context (e.g., classroom, laboratory, research group) as well as at a national level.

Module 2: Instructor Identity and Authority in STEM Classrooms: This module will guide participants from a range of backgrounds to reflect upon their individual identities and the ways in which those identities influence their experience as instructors and impact their students’ learning.

Module 3: Student Identities and Experiences in the STEM Classroom: In this module, participants will review social identity frameworks introduced in the Instructor Identity and Authority module and explore how students’ social identities impact teaching practices and student learning. Participants will also explore key theories of implicit bias, growth mindset, stereotype threat and imposter phenomenon and their impact on students’ classroom experience and learning.

Module 4: Creating an Inclusive STEM Course: In this module, participants will explore and apply strategies for designing an inclusive course. Participants will explore the typical approaches to course design and unpack the structures and assumptions related to power, positionality, and privilege that cause those approaches to create barriers for student learning.

Module 5: Fostering an Inclusive Climate in the STEM Classroom: In this module, participants will become aware of, reflect on, and explore how to develop and implement inclusive and evidenced-based teaching practices that are drawn from research and student experiences of learning.