Inclusive Teaching. The literature is clear: creating classroom spaces, virtual or in-person, where students feel like they belong is an important step to ensuring students are retained and progress to graduation. Amy Pate , Associate Director for Faculty Support within SOLS, and I ran a session recently, co-hosted by the RISE Center for Research in Inclusive STEM Education , that focused on the frameworks that educators use to evaluate whether a given course or curriculum is designed to create such inclusive spaces. The recording of that session can be found here . The session was well attended and interactive, but perhaps you were not able to attend or you are only now hearing about this topic. Below are the highlights of the ideas presented and the questions we grappled with. We need to start with some definitions Inclusive Pedagogy: A student-centered approach to teaching where instructors create an inviting and engaging learning environment for ALL students with diverse background...

We are excited to announce 16 events this term that all focus on racial justice in biology. These events are open to the School of Life Sciences (SOLS) community.  Please join our suite of virtual workshops, seminars, and discussions to learn and become more self-aware of how we can become more inclusive.  The sessions are for faculty, staff, and students – all of the seminars will be recorded and posted on the  RISE Center website  for viewing afterwards.  For a full description of the events, click the links below: SABER events An initiative sponsored by the Society for the Advancement in Biology Education Research (SABER) focused on promoting awareness, understanding, and commitment to change academic biology environments to be more inclusive and strive for racial justice in STEM Education.  RISE Up events An initiative sponsored by ASU’s Research for Inclusive STEM Education (RISE) Center focused on enhancing awareness, understanding, and commitment to...

Imagine students sitting in a college classroom where attendance is required. The instructor is describing how the body works to maintain homeostasis and then the instructor tells a joke. How would you respond? Well, studies indicate that your response may depend on who you are. Humor as a powerful classroom tool A major objective of educators and instructors is to get students motivated and engaged in their classrooms. One way that instructors can create more engaging spaces for students is through the use of humor. Humor may be particularly helpful for science instructors to engage with students since they have been previously described by students as uninteresting and unfriendly. Humor can help instructors appear to be more relatable and like a “real person” to their students, potentially driving student motivation. However, humor has to be taken as funny for it to be an effective way to actually foster student engagement. A previous study conducted by our lab found that ...

As classrooms are becoming more diverse, teaching practices should become more inclusive toward all groups. Cultural competence, the shaping of lectures to be more inclusive toward different cultures’ beliefs, has become a more common practice in many university classrooms, yet it is routinely ignored when teaching evolution to religious students (Barnes & Brownell, 2017). This negligence can cause religious students to perceive the biology community as hostile and develop an even greater conflict between religion and evolution, but there are teaching practices that can decrease this perceived conflict (Barnes & Brownell, 2017). Hostility of Biology Professors Toward Religion Biology and religion have historically been at odds with each other, and despite their dualistic nature, continue to be perceived as incompatible by some biology professors and religious students (Rissler et al., 2014; Pew Research Center, 2009). There have been reports by religious students that biolo...

How can we act individually to promote inclusive classroom spaces? When the daily structure of classes are up to so many factors, pin-pointing a single source to propagate positive change in educational settings can seem far-fetched. This is because it is. Brazilian philosopher Paulo Freire strongly believed that cultural shifts require equal efforts from both sides of the system. In other words, if marginalized students are putting in the effort for a course then it should follow that those responsible for teaching said course are putting in an effort for the marginalized students. Educators with authority in these spaces can have profound impacts by creating space for others. When creating inclusive spaces, I’ve learned that there are three important concepts that need to first be understood. The Space You Occupy In a classroom, to not only grow your own set of skills but somebody else’s is an amazing opportunity that should not be wasted.  To make sure this doesn’t happen, f...