Many education systems around the world are struggling. Students are often disengaged even when they are young and it can seem as if they don't care. Often, though, they care a lot, but the material just doesn't come in quite the right form. Including students in the learning process can make a big difference, especially if their unique perspectives are drawn into the room so that everybody learns from each other.
Steps
Part 1
Part 1 of 3:
Understanding the Context of Your Classroom
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Consider your power and privilege. Everyone has some power and some privilege. Some have a lot more of it than others. Also, there are often many different understandings of a given individual’s position and you might not agree with how you are read. You could do some self-exploration to understand your power and privilege in the context in which you are teaching. Ensure you get feedback from others on how you are perceived. This can be a difficult process but it is well worth the effort. This may or may not be shared with students depending on their age and readiness. There are some simple, widely available exercises that you could start with, for example:
- A privilege check aimed largely at the US but applicable with some tweaking elsewhere produced by the popular website Buzzfeed. [1] X Research source
- A diversity conversation toolkit also from the US context that can help facilitate discussions about a difference. [2] X Research source
- A list of prompts from scholars at the University of Cape Town in South Africa suggesting questions that can be asked before teaching begins. [3] X Research source
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Seek to understand your students and colleagues in their own context. This is linked to the section above, but it asks us to go further. Often – not always, but often – students learn from people who have had very different life trajectories to their own. The more effort an educator makes to understand the context of both students and colleagues, the more likely educational initiatives are to stick. This might require almost no work, or it might require a lot, depending on where you are and what you are doing. It will almost certainly require a good deal of listening and observation, but the work pays off.
- An example comes from a training workshop that was orchestrated by some very well-meaning people from the USA. The participants were mostly from different countries in Africa, including the one where the workshop was taking place. One of the activities assumed a working knowledge of a television game show that aired in the USA in the 1980s (in this case, Double Jeopardy). It has become part of US popular culture and those who were familiar with that knew what to do, but for many people, the exercise was completely lost in translation. Immediately, half the room stopped caring about the exercise and switched off mentally. Exasperated messages started flying on private social media channels, and in general, it was awkward and embarrassing when it could have been comfortable and unifying.
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Factor your students’ cultural experiences into your approach and your lessons. A few simple things you can do are listed below:
- Make sure you have a working knowledge of the history of the place you are in, and also the places from which the people around you come (including, and perhaps especially, if you are from there too!).
- Read both local and international news: keep up to speed with what might be affecting the people around you, and ask questions about it.
- Use relevant examples in your classroom environment, that are most likely to resonate with student’s realities. If you’re teaching geography in Angola and the example of a river that you use is the Tagus, in Lisbon, you have a problem. Fix it.
- When you speak about where you live, think about the language you are using. For example, instead of saying you are from Cape Town, you could say ‘I am from the historic lands of the Khoi-san people,’ or instead of saying you teach in New York, you could say ‘I teach in the territory of the Lenape people.’
- If you are working with children be especially aware of what knowledge and/or exposure you can assume, and what you can’t.
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Part 2
Part 2 of 3:
Building an Inclusive Classroom Culture
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Build on ethical foundations. Having a clear set of ethical guidelines allows all of us to act with confidence and compassion. Helping learners develop an ethical code that is conscious rather than received, and adaptive rather than fixed enables flexible, lifelong learning on a solid foundation. There are many ways to do this, for example:
- Get students to write out what they believe to be right and wrong, and what they are unclear about. Have them discuss these in small groups.
- Study the laws of both the nation-state and various religious traditions. Discuss why and how these differ, the limits of enforceability, and how students experience and approach the reality of their own conscience in everyday action.
- Draw on biographies of people who were important in the given context and examine moments where they had to make decisions that were ethically complex, and what they did.
- Increasingly, educators are incorporating tools from the so-called ‘mindfulness movement’ into their classrooms. It is important to acknowledge that these tools have deep historical roots in Asia, where they remain part of living traditions and cannot be reduced to apps or seven step pathways. Similar traditions exist in many indigenous cultural contexts, and in many ways, the ‘West’ is late to the table, though meditative practices abound in the main religions.
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Plan classroom activities that challenge non-inclusive thinking. Do activities in the classroom that help students to perceive their environment differently. For example:
- Make a Classroom Constitution where students suggest the rules the class will follow to function, and everybody agrees to them.
- Ensure your teaching materials come from a diverse group of people (race, background, class, religion, gender, etc.)..
- Create a physical space that showcases many ways of being in the world: include pictures of different kinds of people, local leaders etc. that might be outside of the conventional canon.
- Have students research the maps of their towns replacing male names (of streets, buildings etc.) with the names of women who have shaped local history (e.g Rebecca Solnit’s work on NYC).
- Invite speakers to come to address the students who provide perspectives that may be missing from the curriculum.
- Have students design commemorative monuments of alternative histories and justify their choice of symbols, location, etc.
- Give practical assignments that include making YouTube videos instead of writing essays, or directly engaging with the public.
- Consider giving students training in forums such as the Op-Ed Project. [4] X Research source
- Assign texts in non-Roman script such as Hindi, Arabic, Thai or Amharic. Let students use online tools to translate them. This helps students experience other ways of knowing that Roman-script learning - especially in English - often precludes.
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Flip the Classroom Carefully. Flipped classroom pedagogy has become popular in many educational circles, and when done well, it can be a wonderful tool. As the name suggests, flipped classrooms are classrooms where expertise is understood to lie with the student, and not with the instructor. In a flipped classroom learning environment, the teacher’s job is not to be a “sage on a stage,” but rather to bring out of the students what they already know, and to help them shape that knowledge into action. In flipped classrooms, the students talk much more than the instructor, and there is usually a great deal of time allocated for application and exercises. Flipping the classroom can be a very powerful way of building inclusive classroom cultures, helping ensure students see the relevance of what they are learning and retain it, and enabling students to learn from one another. Badly orchestrated, however, it can result in confusion and a feeling of having wasted time. Before ‘flipping’ the classroom, instructors can ask themselves a few simple questions:
- What do I want the students to leave this class knowing, and what is the best way for them to learn that information?
- Are there things to do with the subject at hand that students themselves know more than I as an instructor do? How can I create activities that will elicit this knowledge from the students, without them becoming sidetracked or distracted?
- What, if any, is the information that I am the only person able to give the students? Might they learn more from researching it themselves? If so, do they have the skill sets and relevant materials to research it themselves, or are these things that we are still working towards? If we are still getting there, is there something I can do to help them become accustomed to working with original sources from right now?
- How can I ensure that students leave my classroom confident in their own knowledge, even if that knowledge is still in the process of being formed?
- What can I learn from my students?
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Part 3
Part 3 of 3:
Committing to Ongoing Improvement
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Make commitments of your pedagogy, and ask the students to do the same. If possible, work at an institutional level to ensure support, follow through, and institutional memory.
- Good teaching is iterative and should be constantly changing. One can teach one year fifty times, or teach for fifty years, and those are very different processes. To enable iterative teaching, it is often very helpful to make commitments of one’s pedagogy, to guide classroom activities and objectives and to give coherence to one’s broad activities.
- At one experimental university in Mauritius, seven commitments were made in the social science curriculum. [5]
X
Research source
These are stated here as examples, with others listed that could have been included for more general purposes.
- By 2019 everything assigned was to be open access.
- At least one text was to be assigned each week that was not in English.
- At an institutional level, the commitment was to have a 1:1 student exchange ratio so that the students, who were predominantly African, were not the colourful background for experiments of global citizenship of students from privileged countries.
- Text alone could not be enough and more was needed - the commitment was to teach with objects, music, artworks and more so that history does not begin with colonization.
- Partnerships with real world organizations were critical.
- Students were to quickly become producers, not only consumers, of knowledge.
- Ethics above all – the curriculum was to grounded in ethics.
- Other commitments might include:
- A commitment to gender inclusivity, both supporting students as they learn to recognize structures of power that privilege certain voices, and to widen how gender is conceptualized.
- A commitment to in-depth training in financial systems to ensure that students are literate in the global economy and ability to make informed choices pertaining to finance.
- A commitment to supporting students as they learn one or more new language(s) in the course of their degrees.
- A commitment to ensuring the classroom is accessible for people in wheelchairs or whose movement is otherwise different to those of other students.
- A commitment to including many different styles of information transmission (aural, visual, kinetic etc.) to accommodate different learning preferences.
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Read widely. There are many brilliant educators working around the globe to change the ways in which people learn. Keep up with their work, and keep learning. Here is an inconclusive list of names to get you started:
- Aimé Cesaire; Arturo Escobar; Cathy Davidson; Angela Davis; Franz Fanon; Paulo Freire; Stefano Harney; Harry Garuba; bell hooks; Miles Horton; Rosalba Icaza; Sara de Jong; Audre Lorde; Xolela Mangcu; Nelson Maldonado-Torres; Walter Mignolo; Fred Moten; Francis Nyamnjoh; Oludamini Ogunnaike; Shailja Patel; Olivia Rutazibwa; Boaventura de Sousa Santos; Gayatri Spivak; Ngugi Wa Thiong’o; François Verges; April Warren Grace; Sylvia Wynter
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Remain humble, flexible, and curious. There’s no one way to bring more inclusivity to your classroom – these are just a few ideas. Teachers need to keep learning as much as their students do, and rather than feel overwhelmed and paralysed, it's important to make small changes wherever one can. Stay adaptable, and listen to your students to try to meet their needs.Advertisement
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References
- ↑ https://www.buzzfeed.com/regajha/how-privileged-are-you
- ↑ https://msw.usc.edu/mswusc-blog/diversity-workshop-guide-to-discussing-identity-power-and-privilege/
- ↑ https://theconversation.com/questions-academics-can-ask-to-decolonise-their-classrooms-103251
- ↑ https://www.theopedproject.org/
- ↑ https://theconversation.com/what-a-new-university-in-africa-is-doing-to-decolonise-social-sciences-77181?platform=hootsuite
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