Optional Texts: aligned content

Hammond, Culturally Responsive Teaching & the Brain: Epilogue

Hammond offers some final thoughts about culturally responsive teaching as a practice, including practical implementation approaches, finding peace with the discomfort of learning and change, and becoming a public advocate and leader in the quest for equitable education.

Hogan and Sathy, Inclusive Teaching Strategies: Chapter 7 (Reflecting and Documenting Your Inclusive Practices)

Hogan and Sathy advocate throughout their book for the use of structure in the creation of an effective and inclusive learning environment for students. In this chapter, they invite the reader to create a structure for evaluating and documenting the effectiveness of teaching practices as well. Their suggestions range from keeping a reflection journal to track your experiences, to collecting feedback (both formal and informal, solicited and unsolicited, from students and peers), to using rubrics or existing data as evidence of effectiveness. They also acknowledge the importance of evaluation, not just for the primary purpose of greater inclusivity in your teaching, but also for professional development purposes.

Readings

Anne Alkema, A Tertiary Practitioner’s Guide to Collecting Evidence of Learner Benefit

This CC BY-NC-SA licensed resource from Ako Aotearoa provides a practical middle ground between making pedagogical decisions based on your personal “spidey sense” and engaging in a formal, SoTL-style research project. As they note in the preface, “This publication is not about researching tertiary teaching and learning: it is about supporting professional, reflective practice.”

Media and Other Resources

Video: Sara Ahmed, The Institution As Usual: Diversity Word as Data Collection (55 minutes)

Ahmed argues that diversity work in higher education (if it’s effectively challenging our “used paths”) is often met with extensive opposition and personal challenge. She advocates for the use of data collection, not just to render visible the foundational inequities of our institutions’ systems, but also to protect ourselves as we do this work.