Information and digital literacy in education via the digital path

What does it mean to infuse equity, inclusion, and diversity into your classroom? Most importantly, what does it mean to your students to provide them with a sense of belonging? These questions aren’t easy, but they are necessary to foster an inclusive classroom and to diversify your content. From culturally responsive teaching, inclusive classroom strategies, teaching diverse learners, gender diversity, and more, we’ll cover an array of topics and strategies you can learn about and start implementing in your own courses to help students feel seen and heard. From articles, free reports, programs, seminars, and courses, this resource guide will present ideas, tools, and techniques that you can start using right away.

Being culturally responsive is a critical and necessary feature of our interactions with one another. It is also vitally important in the context of education. Culturally responsive teaching is an approach that “empowers students intellectually, socially, emotionally, and politically by using cultural referents to impart knowledge, skills, and attitudes” (Ladson-Billings, 2014). The following practices provide five essential strategies for how educators can make their learning environments more culturally responsive.

What is your tolerance for failure in education?

Jess Mitchell, senior manager of research and design at the Inclusive Design Research Centre, posed the question on Wednesday to a group of around 850 educators, librarians and other open-access enthusiasts at the OpenEd conference in Niagara Falls, N.Y.

Even as movements like open access gain momentum and increase access to learning materials for more students, Mitchell said, “the so-called playing field is not equal.” Determining where educators draw the line for failure, whether that’s with students of color, low-income students, immigrant students or some other group, determines educational outcomes and equity opportunities for the future.

Making learning accessible through an inclusive learning community is crucial for all students to feel seen, valued, and to maximize their potential by implementing a safe space (CAST, 2018). Ensuring that all students feel included is especially vital in remote learning, where they are likely to feel less connected to others to begin with. Universal Design for Learning (UDL), which maximizes student performance and success, argues that inclusion is a prerequisite for academic success (CAST, 2018). This manuscript offers recommendations to combat prejudice and implement an inclusive learning environment by bringing equity to the forefront to better support minority students and improve their academic experiences and outcomes. Though this paper mainly focuses on supporting students of color, many of these teaching strategies can also benefit students of different marginalized identities, such as LGBTQA+ students or international students navigating North American culture.

In many courses, the days after the first exam can be stressful. Some students might feel worried about the results, or even doubt their abilities. So at the end of one challenging exam, a professor took a few minutes of class time to reassure her students. 

Her brief remarks led to the kind of email that every faculty member should want to receive: “The speech you gave post-exam was something I needed to hear. Thank you for reminding me that I belong here and have the potential to succeed.” The student’s words tell you a lot about the instructor’s teaching style.