Student pedagogical partnerships to advance inclusive teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract

The current health crisis brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic not only had a global impact, it also exacerbated the inequalities experienced by students of diverse backgrounds in the United States. Implementing inclusive and anti-racist pedagogical practices has gained a heightened and overdue sense of urgency, especially during the period of emergency remote teaching. At Lafayette College, a small liberal arts college in Pennsylvania, USA, the Inclusive Instructors Academy is a semester-long program aimed at supporting faculty from all disciplines to develop and incorporate inclusive practices that promote equity and belonging in their teaching. A critical aspect of the Inclusive Instructors Academy is its employment of student fellows under the Student-as-Partners model. The student fellows who participated in Fall 2020 and Spring 2021 provided feedback to their faculty partners on inclusive teaching approaches. This case study highlights how student-faculty partnerships can be a highly effective strategy for fostering more socially just learning environments.

Quality doesn't matter: Educational development as a young science

“…Checklists and tools like the Protocol for Advancing Inclusive Teaching Efforts (PAITE) (Addy et al., 2022), Practical Observation Rubric To Assess Active Learning (PORTAAL) (Eddy et al., 2015) and the Reformed Teaching Observation Protocol (RTOP) (Sawada et al., 2002), on the other hand, make a stronger attempt at providing evaluative responses to bureaucratic questions about teaching quality, and as such, may be used to assess what Bass calls “minimum standards of responsible professional practice” (2020, 22). However, because these tools share the core method of breaking inherently dynamic environments down into discrete pieces of “observable behavior,” they are just as poorly suited to offering insightful descriptions of dynamic classrooms.…”