Not Just Another Brick in The Wall: Building a Foundation to Support Equitable and Inclusive Courses
Concurrent Session 4
Brief Abstract
Create an action plan to implement a faculty workshop focused on the design and delivery of equitable and inclusive courses at your institution. Identify best practices and learn from a case study to assess the institutional needs, select collaborators, create content, and deliver your workshop.
Presenters
Extended Abstract
In this Express Workshop session, attendees will create an action plan to implement their own faculty/staff workshop focused on designing and delivering equitable and inclusive courses at their institutions. The Express Workshop will discuss best practices to assess the needs of attendees’ institutions and identify potential collaborators within your campus community. The action plan creation process will address content creation planning and pitfalls, as well as options to deliver your workshop content. Your action plan will investigate questions related to institutional buy-in and support, and factors that may incentivize faculty participation. In addition, the action plan will review potential timelines for workshop implementation, from proposal to workshop completion.
Session attendees will engage with session resources to create their multi-phased action plan. Attendees will review examples provided from our institution’s workshop. In addition, attendees will analyze opportunities at their institutions through small group discussion. The Express workshop will be open to dialogue and questions throughout the session.
Burrell et al. (2020) suggest that higher education adapts to changes in global realities more slowly than broader society and note that higher education faculty often must be self-motivated to seek out pedagogical training related to diversity, equity, and inclusion (p. xi). Tomorrow's learners are coming from a multitude of diverse backgrounds where they have growing expectations that their institutions will foster inclusivity and belonging. As instructional technology staff, we have seen faculty encounter difficulties with the design and delivery of online courses that meet the needs of all learners. We hoped to address the phenomenon of equity and inclusion work being supported in institutional equity statements but not in formal instructional technology training. With the challenge of meeting two needs, promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion, and supporting course design and delivery, we sought to address the problem of how faculty might find the support to design and deliver equitable and inclusive courses.
Working as a team, we created a list of workshop objectives and formed a committee of campus partners to shape the idea and bring the workshop to life. Campus partners included staff and faculty from Instructional Technology, the Faculty Development Center, the Office of Equity and Inclusion, Initiatives for Identity, Inclusion & Belonging, Student Conduct and Community Standards, the Office of Student Disability Services, the Women's Center, and faculty partners in the Department of Education.
While we outlined key topics for the workshop as a group, individual committee members offered to create content for the workshop and we, the workshop facilitators and course designers, identified additional campus partners to support content development.
The workshop was designed as a 10-week workshop. Participants were expected to complete an asynchronous module per week and attend five synchronous sessions to explore a variety of topics. Upon completion of the workshop, participants earned a micro-credential to demonstrate mastery of knowledge and skills acquired throughout the workshop.
The asynchronous modules were deployed in a Blackboard course. While campus partners supported content creation and synchronous sessions, we acted as the primary facilitators for the workshop, managing course announcements, responding to participant inquiries, engaging with participants in the online classroom, designing course materials to ensure consistency, and assessing and providing feedback on assignments. In addition, we organized and facilitated the synchronous meetings.
With the pilot faculty cohort recently completing the workshop, our hope is that participants will be able to apply their knowledge to the courses they will teach in the immediate future and continually build more inclusive courses. In addition, our larger aim is to expand the workshop’s scope to include more faculty, add departmental cohorts, and influence the larger culture of equity and inclusion work at our institution. We are using participants' feedback to implement changes and improvements to the workshop content and delivery and soliciting expertise from outside organizations and institutions. While the equitable and inclusive courses workshop is in its early iterations, there is potential for the workshop to impact the work of other instructional technology offices in higher education. We hope the work accomplished through this session encourages others to seek and implement change at their own institutions.