After a year online, our faculty wanted to dive deeper into inclusive teaching practices but weren't sure how to transition those practices into the physical classroom. We will share how we reimagined our programming by inviting faculty to share what they needed most. Bring and share your stories, too!
Summer is often preparatory time for the upcoming Fall semester and most institutions provide wide ranges of faculty support in the forms of institutes, peer learning communities, and so on. In our office of online learning, we are familiar with the concept of providing opportunities for faculty to redesign their face-to-face teaching practices and reimagine them for an online modality in a space where they can share their concerns and apply new knowledge confidently (Eiselein et al., 2019). Transitioning back to campus instruction also necessitated a need to revisit the teaching practices and bring the skills gained in remote teaching into the classroom with more inclusivity, diversity and equity in mind.
Originally, our office of online learning had created a program to support faculty who wanted to create online and blended learning. In the summer of 2020, many of our faculty members were needing support to develop and teach online courses for both fall and spring semesters. The 2020 summer programming focused on online teaching practices where our office partnered with several other units to support this need in the form of workshops, peer learning communities and technology training support. Based on all of this programming, our office had to reimagine and redesign programming to support faculty in a new way.
Through an intentional and participatory design process, the theme of our faculty development programming began to center around supporting faculty in transitioning back to campus teaching with a focus on inclusive teaching practices. The participatory design element, which took into account institutional and faculty voices in the development stage resulted in a one-week semi-unconference style program which we called Summer Teaching Colloquium. Our program accepted 12 faculty members from various departments in the undergraduate college and professional schools.
Prior to the Colloquium week, we adopted a mentality of “going with the flow” by embracing flexibility (Enoch Hale & Lee Skallerup Bessette, 2016) to uncover the concerns of these 12 faculty members and give them a space for sharing their experiences and teaching methods. We did this by asking faculty in their applications what they felt they needed most before coming back to campus to teach. The contents for each day of the Colloquium was developed based on the faculty responses. We then took their most common concerns and made those topics the ones discussed in detail during the colloquium. We then allowed for faculty voices in conversational forms and provided opportunities to learn and reflect on various on-demand resources such as design justice, UDL, trauma-informed pedagogy, and equity and inclusion in digital and face-to-face learning environments.
During the colloquium week, faculty were engaged with peers by reflecting on teaching experiences past and upcoming, and encouraged them to think through a change that they could implement in their classes to reflect inclusive pedagogy. We asked them to think about this in terms of both “big and small moves”(Collier, 2020). Following the colloquium, small faculty groups were assigned an instructional designer from our office to work through their ideas on how they would bring at least one idea on inclusive teaching into their course. Over the coming fall semester, faculty will share their stories with us as they implement these small and/or big changes in their classrooms. We are excited to see where these changes lead them and their students!
In this session, we will:
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Provide historical context and framework of our faculty development program
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Share design and structure of our one-week online design of colloquium
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Share an example of one day’s content focused on Design Justice practices
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Share resources, such as discussion prompts, readings and other materials based on inclusive teaching practices
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Share reflections from our faculty and final project information
We will include resources on the various topics, as well as how we set intentions for each day, pre-session work for engagement with topics, and an outline for the week. We will share how we think we can grow and develop our program and what might be our next steps.
During our session, we hope to engage participants with polling, shared note taking and small group discussion. We plan on providing prompts to engage others in their own faculty development redesigns, what worked/what didn’t and share resources with each other to help promote and grow programs. We hope to gather information so that everyone attending the session (and those not able to attend) will be able to come back and review resources, ideas, and connect with participants. We invite all participants to share their own stories as they support faculty transitioning back to a physical classroom after a year away.