Teaching & Learning in the Diverse Classroom (edX)

Anchored in the lived experiences of students and faculty, including yours, we invite you to explore strategies for inclusive course design, student-centered pedagogical practices, facilitating learning across difference, and change efforts that support student engagement, achievement, and belongingness. Come with a course of your own in mind, and design for inclusion as you make your way through Teaching & Learning in the Diverse Classroom.

You will explore:

- Your formative experiences as a learner, teacher, and member of a discipline

- Strategies and exercises helpful in communicating effectively, facilitating discussion, and modeling inclusivity when unexpected issues arise

- Research, frameworks, and models that help us understand why and how diversity and inclusion matter in teaching and learning

What you'll learn

If you complete the course, successfully, you will be able to:

- Use a framework for inclusive course design;

- Reflect on the implications of social identities—both students' and instructors'—within the teaching and learning environment;

- Identify evidence-based pedagogical strategies you would like to try;

- Increase your confidence to model inclusivity and facilitate discussion when unexpected issues arise; and

- Assess your curriculum and discipline to identify historical patterns of exclusion and inclusion and discipline-specific approaches to thinking about diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Syllabus

Week 1: Instructors

Reflect on your social identities and lived experiences, and consider how these shape who you are as a teacher and your approach to the classroom.

Week 2: Students

Explore students’ social identities, what the research says about how social identity may become salient in the classroom, and selected, key strategies for supporting student learning, including ameliorating implicit bias and stereotype threat, and fostering a disability-inclusive learning environment.

Week 3: Pedagogy

Examine how to create and sustain an inclusive learning climate, with a focus on strategies useful in facilitating dialogue when unexpected challenges come up and how to prepare in advance for such moments.

Week 4: Curriculum

Evaluate your curriculum—what you teach—at both course and disciplinary levels, from a diversity perspective.

Week 5: Action and Change

Plan for future actions you may take to affect the broader context of inclusion in teaching and learning, when and how you want to make change from the individual (course), to institutional (college), to cultural (disciplinary, community) levels.

This course is meant to foster self-reflection, interdisciplinary exchange, and offer practical, course-based change strategies. These are complex issues that extend far beyond a single experience. Our intention, therefore, is to also lay a foundation helpful in continuing to learn beyond this course.

We are committed to full inclusion in education for all persons. We encourage you to engage thoughtfully and professionally with other learners in the course and be generous in listening. We acknowledge that social identity and issues of power and authority affect everyone, and, based on our identities, some of us are asked earlier and more often to navigate these dynamics as they act to mitigate our progress individually and collectively.