Inclusive Teaching Resources

Being a more inclusive teacher involves enhancing your own knowledge and your own practice. There are many things you can do right away to be more inclusive, but I truly believe that if you are committed to this fully, it will require consistent attention over the course of your career.  This page is just the beginning of what I hope will become a robust repository of resources to help you grow. Note: topics here have hyperlinked articles to outside resources.

Enhancing your practice:
The University of Michigan has created an Inclusive Practices Checklist, it may be worth looking it over and seeing how your course can be improved. Here are some additional ideas:

  • Community building – essential to creating an environment in which students genuinely engage with each other on difficult/controversial topics.
  • Learning student names and pronounsMispronouncing a student’s name or not using their preferred pronouns is a microaggression that can cause real harm. Make learning how your students want to be addressed a priority.
  • Diversifying your content – time to review your syllabus, your readings, your slides and build in the voices, images, and experiences of marginalized folx and community members. Here is a Diversifying Content 101 presentation I gave in August 2017, with notes from a faculty brainstorm.

Enhancing your knowledge:
 If you’re white, it is always good to reflect on your own white privilege.  Here are a few places you could start:

In addition, there are many resources that are not just geared for white faculty/adults. Here are some resources that could help us all get started:

Going more in depth:

  • Lynching in America – the Equal Justice Initiative (created and directed by Bryan Stevenson, author of our fall 2017 first year read, Just Mercy) has produced a collection of resources around our history of terrorizing and lynching black Americans in the time between the civil war and the civil rights movement.
  • Yellow: Race in America Beyond Black & White – The author reconsiders many racial conversations of our lifetime with an Asian-American lens.
  • Watch Cultural Transitions, a 40 minute video about the experience of International Students (positive and negative).