Integrating Issues of Equity Diversity & Inclusion (EDI) in Teaching: Starting the Process by Exploring the Potential of a Toolkit

How important is student engagement in your courses? If you believe it’s important, is it a challenge to increase the level of participation and encourage greater sense of agency in the learning process? If you’ve answered yes it may not be for your lack of trying. While evidence-based pedagogies (aka active learning) provide strategies to promote engagement, increasingly, attention is being drawn to under-examined structural barriers that discourage and impede full participation. This webinar focuses on this topic and ways forward.

Research tells us that student engagement is critical to academic success and persistent in higher education (Barkley & Major, 2020; Kuh, 2001; Kuh, Kinzie, Schuh & Whitt, 2011). If so, can we design instruction to increase engagement? Increasingly, the educational community is beginning to understand the barriers to participation in school. Some barriers are clearly part of the economic system – i.e., the cost of an academic degree. Others are clearly part of the academic system – i.e., the “gatekeeper” course(s) that control who can enter certain disciplines and careers, particularly in STEM (Science Technology Engineering & Math). Other barriers, however, are not so easily identified but are nonetheless deeply embedded in the structures of our institutions and society making them challenging to tackle. 

Those of us who have tried student-centred instruction (aka active learning) are beginning to realize that while we might provide opportunities for students to become more engaged in the process of learning, we still have a long way to go to make our classrooms more inclusive and equitable. This webinar aims to continue the conversation the SALTISE community has started in the Fall 2021 webinar series. In this session, we will introduce a toolkit produced at Carleton University by Candice Harris, Martha Mullaly and Rowan Thomson, and use it as a launchpad to explore some of the critical questions we have about EDI in active learning. This toolkit is an effort to provide practical suggestions to help instructors integrate EDI into their curriculum and classroom. Join us for this panel discussion as we continue to build a shared understanding of the issues.