ColumbiaX: INCLTEACH1x Inclusive Teaching: Supporting All Students in the College Classroom

Terminology around inclusive teaching is constantly evolving. What follows is a non-exhaustive glossary of terms and concepts that appear in the course “Inclusive Teaching: Supporting All Students in the College Classroom” by Columbia University’s Center for Teaching and Learning. 

• The academic protocol refers to “a learning environment characterized by objectivity, rationality, and intellectual thought and inquiry” (Sue 2015, 65). Instructors are often uncomfortable facilitating difficult or sensitive discussions that may elicit strong emotional reactions in students as a result of the academic protocol.
• Accessibility is the consideration of various barriers to full participation in teaching and learning activities. Accessible learning environments allow students with disabilities to “acquire the same information, engage in the same interactions, and enjoy the same services as students without disabilities, with substantially equivalent ease of use” (United States Department of Education, Office of Civil Rights 2011). Components of accessibility could include accommodations for assignments, adjustments in physical space or with classroom technology, or providing alternative assessments.
• Assessment refers to the use of both summative tools that allow the instructor to evaluate students’ learning and formative tools that help students develop targeted knowledge and skill-sets. Assessment can name both the tool and the process, that is, it can designate a particular tool (e.g. exam, rubric) as well as the process of gathering data from one or many tools about the student learning experience. Assignment, on the other hand, has a more limited scope. It refers to the specific task that students are asked to complete to demonstrate their understanding of particular concepts or their mastery of specific skills related to the course goals.
• Asynchronous learning refers to learning that does not occur simultaneously with all members of the class, as opposed to synchronous learning, which takes place in real time for all participants. Each has its advantages and disadvantages. Synchronous learning allows for community-building, but asynchronous learning allows for more flexibility in terms of scheduling and pacing.
• Backward design “starts with the end—the desired results (goals or standards)—and then derives the curriculum from the evidence of learning (performances) called for by the standard and the teaching needed to equip students to perform” (Wiggins and McTighe 1998, 8).
• Bias can be either conscious or unconscious. Conscious bias is prejudice—either for or against someone or something—that one is aware of. For a definition of unconscious bias, see implicit bias.
• Cognitive load refers to the amount of information that can be retained in the brain’s working memory at any given time (Sweller 1988).
• Colorblind ideology is a belief that assumes institutional racism and discrimination have been largely eradicated, and that “equal opportunity, one's qualifications, not one's color or ethnicity, should be the mechanism by which upward mobility is achieved” (Gallagher, 2003, 22). This belief can lead to a dismissal of social and cultural factors still affecting many people of color, as well as a rejection of policies that attempt to address existing inequalities (e.g., affirmative action).
• Contrapower harassment is harassment of those with more organizational or institutional power by those with less (Benson 1984).
• Course climate is the “intellectual, social, emotional, and physical environments in which our students learn. Climate is determined by a constellation of interacting factors that include faculty-student interaction, the tone instructors set, instances of stereotyping or tokenism, the course demographics (for example, relative size of racial and other social groups enrolled in the course), student-student interaction, and the range of perspectives represented in the course content and materials. All of these factors can operate outside as well as inside the classroom” (Ambrose et al. 2010, 170).
• Critical pedagogy requires interrogating which perspectives are dominant in a discipline, canon, or classroom and works to build critical consciousness in students. Critical pedagogical practices encourage students to draw on their lived experiences in order to understand the world and treats students as co-constructors of knowledge. The goal of critical pedagogy is to create more egalitarian learning environments where students and teachers engage in social critique and identify avenues for political action and social change inside and outside the classroom.
• Critical reflection requires that people reflect on their assumptions “through four complementary lenses: the lens of their own autobiographies as learners of reflective practice, the lens of learners’ eyes, the lens of colleagues’ perceptions, and the lens of theoretical, philosophical, and research literature” (Brookfield 1998, 197).
• Cultural diversity can refer to the variety of human cultures in the world, where culture broadly comprises ethnicity, religion, political views, age, and economic status. The term can also be used to describe the variety of individual beliefs and traits among people of one culture (Hall 2005).
• Cultural learning assumptions are often unspoken expectations shaped by affiliation with a broadly stable set of attitudes and beliefs shared by a group of people. These assumptions could give rise to habits of learning and assumptions about the ways teaching and learning are practiced (Gurung and Prieto, eds. 2009).
• Culturally responsive teaching incorporates students’ cultural references into all aspects of pedagogy, recognizing the importance of doing so in order to engage and support all learners (Ladson-Billings 1994).
• Educational diversity refers to the variety of pedagogical and educational experiences people have access to.
• Equity is a goal as well as a process towards achieving justice and inclusion. As a process, it requires interrogating how systems of power and privilege operate in order to challenge them. As a goal, it strives to equip individuals with the tools and resources they need to survive or succeed based on their positionalities and their personal, educational, and professional goals.
• Expert blindspots refer to the result of automatization of certain tasks and knowledge gained through expertise (referred to as unconscious competence), wherein experts use their skills and knowledge in instinctive and automatic ways (e.g., “I can do this in my sleep”). For instructors, this mechanism leads to “blindness” of the learning needs of their students, because of the expert’s difficulty recognizing the cognitive processes and learning that novices must undergo in order to become experts. The reference to blindness in this term has come under critique for ableism because of the connotation that blindness and visual impairment is a negative or problematic characteristic.
• Fixed mindset is founded on the belief that aptitudes, abilities, and skills are fixed traits (Dweck 2016). People with a fixed mindset do not believe that they can develop their qualities and skills and prioritize talent over effort.
• Formative assessments are lower-stakes assessments for learning. They are often discussed in relation to summative assessments, which are higher-stakes assessment of learning (see below). Formative assessments allow the instructor to collect feedback on how well students are understanding the material and on how effectively the instructor is teaching it. By giving feedback in real time of how well students are building the required skills, formative assessments offer opportunities to make changes before the end of the unit or course. Examples of formative assessments include in-class activities like think-pair-shares and minute papers as well as quizzes and discussion board posts (see Angelo and Cross 1993).
• Frames of reference refer to individuals’ values, assumptions, and attitudes that influence how they understand, perceive, and interact with their environment and other individuals.
• Gatekeeping is the activity of controlling or limiting who has access or is allowed to lay claim to something. In education, this can involve restricting who is allowed to participate in a conversation or join a discipline.
• Growth mindset is “based on the belief that...although people may differ in every which way—in their initial talents and aptitudes, interests, or temperaments—everyone can change and grow through application and experience” (Dweck 2016, 7). This idea stands in contrast to a “fixed mindset,” characterized by the belief that one’s qualities are innate and unchangeable.
• Hegemonic assumptions are assumptions informed by socially dominant attitudes or beliefs and that are maintained by systems of power and oppression that are not beneficial to all individuals. Thought to be “natural,” unchangeable, or in our best interest, these assumptions actually work to maintain the status quo. An example of a hegemonic belief in higher education is that student engagement and motivation is driven entirely by the instructor’s charismatic personality (Brookfield 2017).
• Implicit bias “refers to the attitudes or stereotypes that affect our understanding, actions, and decisions in an unconscious manner. These biases, which encompass both favorable and unfavorable assessments, are activated involuntarily and without an individual’s awareness or intentional control” (Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity 2015, 61).
• Inequity by design refers to “mechanisms that under-develop students’ cognitive resources and consequently undermine their confidence as learners” (Hammond). Equity by design, on the other hand, requires that instructors work to help students achieve competence in order to build their confidence as learners. An example of inequity by design related to higher education is the recognition that it used to be forbidden to teach communities of color to read in order to undermine and under-develop the resources they could draw on. It is important to recognize inequity by design in order to shift the blame put on underprepared students to the systems that have caused them to be underprepared in order to identify ways to support their growth and learning.
• Intercultural competence refers to individuals’ capacity to respectfully engage and communicate with others, so that they have the benefit of other people’s cultural perspectives.
• Intersectionality is a concept used in critical theory to highlight the interconnected nature of socially constructed categories (such as race, class, and gender) as they apply to a given individual or group. This concept can be key to illuminating overlapping and interdependent systems of discrimination or disadvantage (Mitchell, Simmons, and Greyerbiehl 2014).
• Learner-centered teaching calls for students to actively engage in their learning process and for faculty members to facilitate that process, rather than relying on faculty to do the “heavy lifting” (Weimer 2013).
• Learning objectives specify the knowledge, information, and skills instructors want students to have at the end of the course. Learning objectives are generally student-oriented (i.e., “at the end of this course, students should be able to _____”), focus on concrete actions and behaviors, and should be measurable.
• Linguistic diversity is a subset of cultural diversity (Parla 1994). It refers to the variety of languages, dialects, and speech and grammatical patterns used by people in different cultures as well as within the same culture.
• Marginalization involves relegating individuals or groups of individuals to minor, unimportant, or peripheral positions based on their identities. This practice can refer to the historic exclusion of racial and ethnic minority group members from higher education, as well as contemporary marginalization (e.g., groups of individuals may be marginalized through the content that is included in the course, for instance the voices that are given a platform and the points of view that are represented in the syllabus).
• Microaggressions are “brief and commonplace daily verbal, behavioral and environmental indignities, whether intentional or unintentional, that communicate hostile, derogatory, or negative racial slights and insults to the target person or group” (Sue et al. 2009, 183). While Sue et al.’s original definition specifically indicated race as the focus of bias, the term has since been expanded to apply to a variety of identity factors, such as sexuality, gender, and ability.
• Microintervention strategies are “concrete action steps and dialogues that targets, allies, and bystanders can perform” to address microaggressions. These steps have four goals: to “(a) make the invisible visible, (b) disarm the microaggression, (c) educate the perpetrator, and (d) seek external reinforcement or support” (Sue et al. 2019).
• Monocultural education is “an education largely reflective of one reality and usually biased toward the dominant group” (Ginsberg and Wlodkowski 2009, 25).
• Peer review involves drawing students into the process of evaluating the work of their classmates in order to develop skills in analysis and collaboration.
• Positionality is the way one’s social location or position is assigned and negotiated as the result of combining various social factors or identities (e.g., race, sex, class, gender, ability, sexual orientation) (Hearn 2012).
• Power-sharing in the classroom refers to when the students are given agency in the classroom to make decisions pertaining to aspects of the course, including its environment, policies, content, and assessments. This technique involves the instructor sharing authority, accountability, and responsibility with the students.
• Process observations focus on the feelings of an individual to unveil the beliefs and attitudes behind them, rather than on the content of what the individual is saying. This is a strategy that Sue (2015, 239) recommends to facilitate discussions on race and other difficult topics.
• Rhetorical incoherence refers to “difficulty in articulation, barely audible speech, voice constriction, trembling voices, and mispronunciation of common words associated with race” (Sue 2015, 22).
• Rubrics are “scoring tool[s] that lay out the specific expectations for an assignment. Rubrics divide an assignment into component parts and provide a detailed description of what constitutes acceptable or unacceptable levels of performance of each of those parts” (Stevens and Levi 2013, 3).
• Scaffolding refers to the practice of adding supports for students to build skills and improve comprehension. These scaffolds are temporary and are removed when no longer needed. Scaffolding often involves breaking a large task into smaller ones. For example, a final research paper can be split into the various tasks required to complete it. These tasks may include a proposal, annotated bibliography, and presentation, all of which ultimately build up to the paper.
• Social justice education "reflects a central and essential purpose of teaching in a democratic society, wherein the teacher is an advocate for students whose work supports larger efforts for social change” (Cochran-Smith 2009, 349-350). It involves recognizing inequalities in society with respect to how opportunities and resources are shared among minority/low-income students and white/middle-class students and committing to addressing these disparities as educators (Cochran-Smith 2009).
• Stereotype threat is defined as “being at risk of confirming, as a self-characteristic, a negative stereotype about one’s social group” (Stroessner and Good 2011, 1). Stereotype threat can occur in relation to many different facets of identity, including race, ethnicity, and gender. In educational settings, research has demonstrated students’ performance may be negatively impacted “by the awareness that one's behavior might be viewed through the lens of stereotypes” if those identities (or stereotypes related to those identities) are highlighted prior to the performance (Stroessner and Good 2011, 1). Situations that highlight one’s social identity factors (e.g., asking demographic questions before an assessment) can activate stereotype threat.
• Summative assessments are higher-stakes evaluations of student learning. They are usually produced at the culmination of a unit or course to measure student learning. Examples of summative assessments include final papers, midterms, final exams, portfolios, presentations, and final projects.
• Tokenization occurs when someone is approached, befriended, questioned, or included because they are a member of a particular identity and to act as a representative of that identity (Utt 2010). For example, tokenization can involve an instructor or peer asking a student to act as spokesperson for a certain identity group. Tokenization also refers to the practice of making insincere or symbolic efforts to give the appearance of fairness. An example of this is when an instructor includes perspectives from an underrepresented group in an arbitrary way (i.e., only in the last week of the semester, or once during the entire course) to assuage criticism about diversity and inclusiveness in the classroom.
• Underrepresented groups or individuals have been shown to be underrepresented nationally in their fields relative to their number in the general population. In the United States, this term primarily refers to (but is not limited to) people who identify as members of racial/ethnic minority groups (African-American or Black, Hispanic or Latinx, American Indians or Alaskan Natives, Native Hawaiians and other Pacific Islanders); as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender; and individuals with disabilities.
• Universal Design for Learning (UDL) “is a framework to improve and optimize teaching and learning for all people based on scientific insights into how humans learn” (CAST 2019). UDL recommends providing multiple means of representation, engagement, and action and expression to include all students in the learning process.

References

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“Articulate Your Learning Objectives.” Eberly Center For Teaching Excellence and Education Innovation, Carnegie Mellon University. Accessed on October 19, 2017. https://www.cmu.edu/teaching/designteach/design/learningobjectives.html.

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Sue, Derald Wing, Annie I. Lin, Gina C. Torino, Christina M. Capodilupo, and David P. Rivera. “Racial Microaggressions and Difficult Dialogues on Race in the Classroom.” Cultural Diversity and Ethnic Minority Psychology 15, no. 2 (2009): 183-190.

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