Creating equity in the digital classroom involves intentionally designing learning spaces where all students have equal opportunity to succeed (The Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning, 2020). To effectively initiate equity as an online instructor, there are three simple strategies you can use to successfully promote equity and build a sense of classroom community where every student feels included, involved, and heard. These strategies entail communicating equity in your syllabus, building community through classroom collaboration, and considering all modes of communication.
1. Communicating Equity in Your Syllabus
Initiating equitable spaces in your classroom can easily be achieved by adding a diversity statement to your course syllabus. Diversity statements not only establish your commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion, but also allow you the opportunity to welcome all students from a range of diverse backgrounds to your course. Diversity statements can also be used to establish classroom norms regarding dialogue of conflict prone topics and can help you communicate the value all students’ unique perspectives bring to the course. For more information on diversity statements, the Yale Poorvu Center for Teaching and Learning has several excellent examples of Diversity Statements used in actual syllabi (Yale Poorvu Center for Teaching and Learning, n.d.).
In addition to a diversity statement, it’s also important to consider if your syllabus is communicating the right resources for your students to be successful. For example, does your syllabus include information about your campus’ Writing Center, Tutoring Center, or Accommodations Department? If not, you may want to consider adding this information in your syllabus so that all students have an equal opportunity to succeed (University of Denver Office of Teaching and Learning, 2019). If student resources were not originally included in your course syllabus, you can always add addendums to your syllabus by attaching a file as supplemental content in your Coursework section or adding an updated syllabus in the Files section of your digital learning platform.
2. Building Community Through Classroom Collaboration
Building a classroom community includes the intentional practice of collaborating with students in the planning and organizational process of your course. As we know, adults learn best by taking charge of their own learning, so it is good practice to strategically hand over the reigns to your students. For example, you can have students volunteer to facilitate (or co-facilitate with another student) an asynchronous discussion on a shared cloud document, your course Wall, or your online discussion forum.
It is also a good practice to actively involve students in the process of building a community agreement together. To initiate a community agreement discussion, you can have students respond to a simple question such as “What does respectful behavior in an online classroom mean to you?” You can have students collectively brainstorm and answer this question using a virtual whiteboard or have them type their answers in a collaborative cloud document (Buddie, n.d.; Columbia Center for Teaching and Learning, 2020; The Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning, 2020). Their responses to this simple question can quickly be converted into a community agreement for your class and posted in your course wall or announcement board.
You can also build classroom community by designating group roles. For example, in small group breakout sessions, you can have students take on assigned roles (Cornell University Center for Teaching Innovation, 2020). One such role could be The Encourager, whose responsibility is to help facilitate each group member’s contribution (“We have not yet had the opportunity to hear from Leon.”). Similarly, in live sessions, chats can often be challenging for faculty to monitor and address while juggling many tasks at once. In order to ensure questions asked in chat are addressed by you or the group, it could be a beneficial practice for students to volunteer and help facilitate the chat box during weekly synchronous sessions. If deciding to use assigned student roles for the classroom or small group work, it may be possible to use assigned roles for students’ course participation grade. However, make sure to check with your course lead in order to see if participation grades can be inclusive of these types of activities and roles.
3. Considering All Modes of Communication
When initiating classroom activities and discussions, simply relying on oratorical responses in the classroom may not be the best way to ensure all students feel included and heard. There is a wide variety of modes for participation available to your students in the modern day class. Moving beyond the traditional student-to-teacher Q&A participation pattern, in an online classroom students can now engage through asynchronous discussions, live session chats, small group breakout sessions, and collaborative cloud documents. Effectively harnessing the power of these tools means creating spaces for engagement where they previously did not exist, thereby hearing the historically unheard (Cornell University Center for Teaching Innovation, 2020).
For example, quieter students may feel drowned out of the conversation by the more dominant voices in the room, and international students or students who learned English as a Second Language (ESL), may feel intimidated by expressing themselves in English to a room of native speakers. As a result, it is a good practice to give students a variety of opportunities to engage in classroom conversations. As an example, for a discussion activity, you can ask students to write their responses on a whiteboard or in the chat box.
Sending students into small group breakout room discussions is another way you can be more inclusive of your quieter students in an online classroom. Small group discussions serve the dual purpose of creating safer spaces for quieter students to engage and creating greater classroom rapport between your students.
With these strategies in mind, initiating inclusivity and building rapport between students in an online classroom are important practices towards creating equitably engaged classrooms. Especially in a global pandemic environment, initiating and nurturing a sense of classroom community is more important than it’s ever been before. These inclusive practices not only help students’ emotional well-being, but are excellent pedagogical strategies to create equitable environments so that all students have the same opportunities to succeed.
In the next article of this Toward A More Equitably Engaged Class series, we will build on the concepts we discussed in this article and consider ways instructors can assess their equitable practices and actively involve students in the process.
Read the entire series:
- Intro to Creating a More Equitably Engaged Classroom
- Step 1 - Evaluate
- Step 2 - Initiate
- Step 3 - Involve
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