Philosophy of Inclusive Instruction

Out of a review of the selected literature, similar themes arose regarding strategies, techniques, and methods to realize the visions put forth in the learning theories and models covered above. Simplified and condensed into suggestions that are practical, digestible, and within the capacity for most any library instructor to implement (whether a graduate student assistant new to teaching, or a full-time, professional librarian with years of experience), the recommendations are as follows. Beneath them are additional sources for reference and inspiration, including ones cited by this author, some in the form of handy checklists and plug-and-play templates for quick, easy implementation. Individual recommendations are loosely grouped into larger categories based on overarching conceptual themes.

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*Note that the principle focus of the best practices in this section is on the cultivation of an inclusive classroom environment. For best practices related to inclusive lesson planning, including universal instructional design, see the Planning Instruction page.

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Appealing to Students' Affective Needs - Cultivating a Warm, Positive Classroom Climate​

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Start Building Rapport Early

• Greet students at the door with a genuine welcome

  • It sets a positive, inviting tone right from the beginning of your session

  • It aligns expectations for what quality and character of interactions students can expect from you (while encouraging them to engage similarly)

  • Consider the reverse - if, as a student, you were to walk into a classroom and see your teacher at their desk, on their computer or hunched over their lecture notes, without a pause to look up to acknowledge or greet you, what would this convey to you personally about your instructor's feelings and priorities? Would you feel a sense of interest or investment in you as a student? What about a connection or the start of a relationship? 

  • Studies even suggest that greeting students at the door can increase the amount of time that students are engaged later during the lesson, as well as decrease off-task behavior (Cook et al., 2018 via Durbin, 2019)

  • This also has the side benefit of putting students at ease that they're in the right place, especially if they're visiting the library for the first time, or one of the first of their class to arrive

• Mingle and interact with students before class starts (as appropriate)​

  • By showing interest in students, their classes, lives, and how they are doing, you have the opportunity to start building some early rapport and get to know some of the class you'll be working with

  • You're also letting students see you outside of your formal role at the "head of the classroom," which has the potential to break down some of the intimidation and anxiety that can come along from interacting with an unfamiliar instructor in a new setting

  • You can also consider having an introduction slide up as students enter with a humanizing bio on yourself (especially if you are teaching remotely, having this up via screen sharing while waiting on everyone to log on is a great strategy)

Demonstrate Genuine Enthusiasm

• Have an enthusiastic but genuine demeanor

  • Your delivery matters more than you think - enthusiasm is contagious and ​can contribute to student engagement

  • "It's authentic, humanizing, amplifying, reciprocal, nurtures, is grounded in reality, and supports risk-taking." (Oakleaf et al., 2012)

• Draw on what makes you passionate, and be authentic about it

  • You don't have to be over-the-top or put on a "performance" (students will pick up if you're faking it)
  • Think about what you find satisfying or meaningful about teaching, being a librarian, interacting with students, or working with the instructional material. Bring that enthusiasm to class, and the authenticity will shine through
  • Presumably, you're reading this because you care about your students - "caring is one of the most effective manifestations of enthusiasm" - so you're already halfway there! (Oakleaf et al., 2012)

Put Students at Ease

• Set the stage with an environment that's conducive to learning

  • Consider playing music to set the tone - quiet, calm, relaxing, or bright, upbeat, inspirational​

  • To the extent possible, minimize distractions and interruptions to class time.

  • Don't try to cram too much material into a tight time frame. Keep track of timing benchmarks within your lesson plan and adjust as needed; ideally, you'll have some buffer time built-in for if certain activities go over. When material feels rushed, comprehension goes down and students are in turn more likely to feel overwhelmed and less likely to speak up with questions that they may have.

  • Come to class prepared, arrive on time, complete pre-class tech checks to ensure things are running smoothly, and don't wing it - structure and intentionality are the keys to student comfort, engagement, and successful learning outcomes. See Planning for help on instructional design to see how to accomplish this

• Provide reassurance when needed

  • Pay attention to the "temperature" or demeanor of the class as you're teaching. Keep an open mind when it comes to your lesson plan- if students are struggling or issues arise, be prepared to stop and reassess what's needed to get back on track. The ability to be flexible and adapt to challenges is an important skill, but it also comes with practice and experience, so be patient with yourself as you develop those aptitudes!

  • Try not to let frustration or impatience bleed over to the class. When issues come up, be frank and transparent about how they're affecting you (shared vulnerability cultivates empathy and models emotional regulation for students), but don't let it derail class. Give yourself permission to regroup, get back on track, and then set aside some time and space for reflection after class (see the importance of self-reflection in Assessment).

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Learner-Centered Instruction: Teaching as Facilitating Learning

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Emphasize Cooperative, Participatory Learning

• Remember "sage on the stage" vs. "guide on the side"? Think of yourself as the latter- a facilitator of learning 

• You've already begun by exhibiting warmth and setting a positive, inviting tone from the beginning of the session. Build on that rapport by explaining that the session will be a cooperative one where ​you are all equal partners in learning

• Be explicit that you're there to learn together

  • ​Set the expectation that their contributions will be recognized and valued on equal footing with the material that you will be presenting, and that the process of engaging with the material is as important as if not more than the product.

• Encourage them to participate even if they're not 100% sure of the answer.

  • Fear of getting something wrong and being chastised by the teacher is something that many students bring into the classroom from negative past learning experiences, and while you can't erase that in one session, being clear about what you will or won't penalize them for can relieve some of the pressure and anxiety that stymies participation and engagement​

Shift the Power Dynamics

• *If you're able, moving around the room can be one strategy to break down the physical delineation between teacher (front of the room) and student (facing the teacher from the back of the room).

  • ​If the room and furniture allow, an alternate class arrangement could serve the same purpose while potentially allowing you to sit, as well. Keep in mind accessibility concerns, ensuring that you remain fully visible and audible to the entire class. 

• Allow for student agency and investment

  • Whenever possible, leave room for student choice in topic selection and class activities

  • Student autonomy and authentic engagement support better learning outcomes

• Shift the focus away from lecture, or direct instruction, toward student contributions.

  • Employ active learning strategies that foreground student engagement and participation. It can feel uncomfortable at first ceding over space and control of the classroom, but students who are doing something are more likely to gain and retain new knowledge (Brown, Roediger & McDaniel, 2014)

Reconsider Notions of Expertise

• Acknowledge that while you have expertise in some areas and their instructor has expertise in others, so do they - and there are areas in which none of you will have expertise!

  • This is a normal fact of life that they might not have ever had a teacher explicitly come out and say, and the elevation of their personal background and experiences is validating. It can help mitigate uncertainty and anxiety surrounding the research process, and help boost confidence and motivation. 

  • If you run into a question that you can't answer, let them know and be up front about that fact. Instead, model best practices for handling uncertainty and exploration in the research process. How would you use your skills, strategies, and resources to find the answer? 

• If something goes wrong during the session, embrace it as a learning opportunity.
  • Students will see you handling the situation, realize that they're not alone when they struggle or feel overwhelmed, and may not be so quick to judge themselves when they, in turn, encounter issues of their own.

Welcome Questions & Contributions (and really mean it)

• Check the language that you use when soliciting feedback and engagement

  • Instead of asking "Are there any questions?," ask "What questions do we still have?."

  • Pause for at least 10-15 seconds to wait for a response (consider waiting longer if you're teaching virtually, where lag time and delays can make syncing up more difficult).

  • If you're concerned about comprehension (which we all should be!), instead of asking things like "Did that make sense?," be more specific. "Which parts of what we just covered made the most/lease sense?."

  • Students may also be more likely to contribute if the perceived "fault" isn't on them. Redirect "responsibility" for understanding using simple changes in the language of check-ins, like "Which parts could I have done a better job explaining/clarifying?"

• Reconsider how you assess comprehension entirely​

  • Better yet, build in comprehension checks during lesson planning using active learning strategies, which give students the opportunity to show you what they've learned, rather than putting the onus on them to identify and tell you what's not clear (which they may not be aware of yet, in the moment). 

  • By building in low-stakes, formative checks, you'll have a better ongoing sense of how students are moving through the lesson, which will give you the opportunity to be proactive rather than reactive in addressing stuck points in the lesson (for more, see Assessment)

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For more on learner-centered pedagogy, see:

1. Klipfel, K. M., & Cook, D. B. (2017). Learner-centered pedagogy: Principles and practice. Chicago: ALA Editions, an imprint of the American Library Association.

   1. For a brief snapshot of learner-centered strategies from these authors, see: 10 Ideas for Making Your Teaching More Learner-Centered

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Develop Self-Awareness through Reflective Practices

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Take time for critical self-reflection

• Not everyone has had the opportunity to sit and reflect on their personal and professional identities and the power structures that come into play surrounding those identities. Issues of privilege, power, oppression, marginalization, and vulnerability can be difficult to process and come to terms with. Some may be further along in this process than others. ​

Challenge assumptions about yourself and your students

• All of us hold certain unexamined beliefs about the world from our backgrounds that we don't think twice about. However, when we move through life taking those beliefs for granted and allowing them to influence the way that we interact with others, we are responsible for the impact that they may have, especially when they can harm (regardless of intention). In order to be proactive in examining, questioning, and re-assessing these beliefs, or biases, we must first become aware of them.

• Implicit Bias Awareness: One place to start is taking the implicit social attitudes test. Put together by researchers who are interested in implicit social cognition ("thoughts and feelings outside of our conscious awareness and control"), the goal is to educate the public about hidden biases. Without awareness and intervention, implicit bias has the power to shape classroom interactions in a way that can lead to serious negative outcomes for students.

Familiarize yourself with the ways in which bias can manifest

• Microaggressions are "the everyday verbal, nonverbal, and environmental slights, snubs, or insults, whether intentional or unintentional, which communicate hostile, derogatory, or negative messages to target persons based solely upon their marginalized group membership." (Sue, 2010). While they're often shrugged off as minor, or considered harmless when they're unintentional, their impact is what matters, and they're reflective of larger patterns of bias in society. They're hostile, invalidating, perpetuate stereotype threat (see below), negatively effect productivity and problem-solving abilities, decrease sense of belonging (Strayhorn, 2012), and even create very real physical health problems for people of color (and other targeted persons). (Sue, 2009, p. 183). In addition to the self-reflective strategies already covered, additional strategies instructors can use include:

  • Resist the myth of color blindness​

  • Believe the stories of people from marginalized groups

  • Assume groups you are talking about are represented in the classroom

  • Remain open to learning about microaggressions and yourself (Saunders & Wong, 2020)

• Stereotype threat is "the notion that members of any group about whom a negative stereotype exists can fear being reduced to that stereotype." (Tran & Higgins, 2020, p.10) It's important to avoid reinforcing the very real phenomena of reducing individuals to stereotypes.

  • Do not ask students to speak for their entire racial or cultural group​

  • Do not make assumptions about students based on their membership in a particular community or identity group 

  • Take care that the examples that you use in class don't reinforce stereotypes

• Othering is "treating the history and experiences of white, middle-class, heterosexual, cisgender, able-bodied people as universal or the norm, while presenting the history and experiences of other groups as unusual, exceptional, or only of interest to members of those communities." (Saunders & Wong, 2020)

  • Examine the examples that you use in class, particularly visual representations in presentation materials - for example, stock photos are often predominately white. Are you representing only a narrow idea of what a student looks like? ​

  • The language we use without thinking often implicates this kind of bias - when we use male as the default gender, like saying scientist vs. female scientist, or getting the class' attention by saying "hey guys" (try "hey folks" or some other variation instead), address audiences as "ladies and gentleman" (presenting gender as a binary and erasing individuals of other gender identities), using ableist language like "crazy" or "insane" to describe unusual experiences, etc.

  • Another example is the difference between referring to racial "minorities" (which centers whiteness as the default or norm), and more accurately referring to "minoritized" people, which focuses on systems and institutions as the actors that enact oppressive policies and processes that lead to minoritization. 

  • Language is subject to change, so keeping an open mindset and staying on top of 

• Deficit-based thinking is "rooted in a blame the victim orientation that suggests that people are responsible for their predicament and fails to acknowledge that they live within coercive systems that cause harm with no accountability." (Davis & Museus, 2019)

  • Transitioning to an asset-based model moves away from viewing people as problems, and instead focuses on improving systems and institutions that currently fail certain groups. 

  • Examples of deficit-based thinking and attitudes include the ways that first-generation college students are seen as having character flaws or inherent shortcomings, rather than celebrating the unique strengths of these students. (Whitley, Benson & Wesaw, 2018)​

Consider the broader context of teaching and librarianship

• How do your personal identities fit within the larger field of librarianship? What is the educational context of your university, your academic library, the departments that you work with frequently, or the classes that you teach? You'll find more on this in the Planning section where we'll discuss environmental scans and community analyses, but for now, take a look at some of the following resources to become more familiar with librarianship as a field:

  • Inclusion, Diversity, and Equity: Members of the Association of Research Libraries - Employee Demographics and Director Perspectives (Schonfeld & Sweeney, 2017)

  • Teaching While White: Where Whiteness Intersects with Antiracist Teaching & Learning - Assumptions & Actions

Develop cultural competency & humility

• Cultural competency is the ability to work effectively with people from varied cultural backgrounds. (Saunders & Wong, 2020)

• Use culturally relevant course material

  • Include materials written and created by people of different backgrounds and perspectives

  • Use materials that represent and depict a variety of people, especially those who are typically underrepresented in course materials

  • Include multiple perspective on a given topic​

  • At the same time, be aware of stereotypical and harmful representations of certain groups

• However, cultural competence should not be misunderstood as suggesting that there is an endpoint to be attained in "reaching" a state of cultural competence, which could lead to over-confidence, stereotyping and bias in interpersonal interactions.

• Cultural humility "describes a set of principles that guide the thinking, behavior and actions of individuals and institutions to positively affect interpersonal relationships as well as systems change."(Chavez, 2012)

  • Principles include: lifelong learning and critical self-reflection; recognizing and changing power imbalances; developing institutional accountability.

  • Cultural competence and humility ultimately need not be in opposition to one another, so long as the foundational principles of self-reflection, personal critique, and acknowledgment of lifelong learning are present.

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Additional Inclusive Teaching Resources

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1. Creating Inclusive College Classrooms (Saunders & Kardia, 1997) - Cultivating inclusiveness in the classroom through culturally responsive interactions

2. Western Washington University – Inclusive Teaching Toolkit

3. Inclusive Pedagogy for Library Instruction Project (IP4LI) - The Inclusive Pedagogy for Library Instruction project (IP4LI) is a collaboration of librarians from several small, liberal arts colleges to discover resources and best practices for applying inclusive pedagogy in library instruction settings, particularly one-shot sessions. It is supported by a grant from the Associated Colleges of the South.

4. University of Michigan – Inclusive Teaching Toolkit

5. Brown University – Sheridan Center for Teaching & Learning – Inclusive Teaching Resources

6. Monash University – Inclusive Teaching Toolkit (note that cultural context may differ as this university is based in Australia)

7. Dewsbury B, Brame CJ. (2019) Evidence Based Teaching Guide: Inclusive Teaching. CBE Life Science Education. Retrieved from https://lse.ascb.org/evidence-based-teaching-guides/inclusive-teaching/

8. Teaching While White Resources: Where to Start and The Role of White Teachers in Antiracism

9. Saunders, L., & Wong, M. A. (2020). Critical Pedagogy: Challenging bias and creating inclusive classrooms. In Instruction in libraries and information centers. Windsor & Downs Press. https://doi.org/10.21900/wd.12 

Extend Your Learning – Equity in Teaching Institute – 2-Day Course at UNC

• About: “During those two days, we will reflect on who our students are, how our courses can equitably meet our students’ needs, and what equity in teaching means to us. We will center the needs of students marginalized because of their race, sexual and gender identities, disability, religion, language, and/or immigration status and re-envision our courses so that we are prepared to meet the learning needs of all our students.”

• "Along with time for individual work and reflection in small groups, we will offer practical tips for implementing more equitable course design, with an emphasis on remote teaching."

• "Along with space for reflection and discussion, we will offer practical tips and ways to start implementing a more equitable course design, touching on areas such as:"

  • Syllabus design

  • Culturally responsive course content

  • Content delivery, explanation, and lecturing

  • Active learning

  • Student group formation

  • Assessment and feedback on student work

  • Creating an inclusive classroom community

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*Author Note – This master’s project was influenced significantly by the author’s participation in the very first, beta-launch of the EqTI at UNC-CH in Dec. 2019 and the exercise of applying the institute’s principles to the one-shot library instruction context, followed by participating as an Equity in Teaching Fellow during the Spring 2020 semester. The course concepts and materials were invaluable as the COVID-19 pandemic hit and we made the transition to remote teaching, and as a research & instruction assistant at the R.B. House Undergraduate Library one of our most important institutional priorities was supporting faculty and students during that transition. Throughout Summer 2020 I was tasked with investigating and creating inclusive online teaching resources, including the following guide, and in Fall 2020 I co-presented a virtual webinar for NCLive, also shown below.