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Pathway 2 Conclusion

Postsecondary classrooms are often built on a number of traditional hierarchies, so ingrained in higher education that they may be difficult to notice at first. Change won’t happen overnight, but continually reflecting on the questions and issues raised in this pathway can help you create a more equitable classroom that centers learners, values all knowledge, and welcomes historically underrepresented voices. In this pathway, we learned a variety of instructional moves that help you challenge different hierarchies endemic to higher education classrooms. These include:

  • Positioning yourself as a learner and highlighting what you learn from your students
  • Positioning students as knowledge holders and knowledge creators
  • Arranging your classroom space to physically de-center the instructor
  • Stepping back during discussions to place student voice at the center of classroom discourse
  • Intervening selectively in student discussions to highlight important contributions 
  • Building in activities that give students leadership and ownership of course material, and providing the scaffolds students need to succeed in these roles
  • Using technology to invite students to share their knowledge with the group
  • Welcoming misconceptions into classroom discourse and positioning “wrong answers” as learning opportunities
  • Providing counternarratives to traditional Eurocentric narratives
  • Encouraging students to share their knowledge of counternarratives, particularly students from traditionally excluded or underrepresented groups
 

As you decide which moves to try in your classroom, think about which hierarchies are particularly prevalent and problematic in your discipline. Consider which instructional moves in this pathway can help you tackle the inequities that feel most urgent to you. 

 

We hope you’ll take some time to peruse the research and resources linked here to help you decide which moves you want to use and how to adapt them for your own classroom context. And when you’re ready, our next pathway will help you find new ways to expand participation in your classroom so that students from all backgrounds and all experience levels feel comfortable contributing to classroom discussion. 

The Eberly Center for Teaching Excellence & Educational Innovation at Carnegie Mellon University provides valuable considerations for Teaching Across Cultures, which can be helpful as instructors reflect on the ways that their identities influence their teaching. 

The Harvard Graduate School of Education has created an Inclusive Syllabus Tool to help you gauge whether your curriculum is inclusive of multiple perspectives, voices, and experiences. 

“Teaching with Discussions” from The Teaching Center at Washington University in St. Louis offers tips for instructors before, during, and after discussion, including how to create a comfortable non-threatening environment from the first class onward. 

This Harvard article explores ways to disrupt classroom hegemonies, including emphasizing to students that they are “intellectual peers with the professor.”

Published in 1994, bell hooks’ Teaching to Transgress remains a seminal work for educators seeking to create equitable classrooms where students learn to examine and challenge injustice. 

Paolo Frieire’s influential Pedagogy of the Oppressed critiques the traditional “banking” model of education and proposes an alternative: education as the practice of freedom. 

This guide from BU on teaching the hidden curriculum helps instructors analyze the ways that unquestioned norms and assumptions on postsecondary campuses cause some students to struggle and explores how instructors can help bring the hidden curriculum into the light for their students. 

This lesson plan for critiquing dominant narratives from the University of Michigan offers two options for structuring the discussion, along with specialized tips for STEM educators. 

Kishimoto argues that to create anti-racist classrooms, instructors must engage in critical self-reflection about their own social position (2016).

Wrong answers and student misconceptions can be used to design effective learning experiences (Tanner & Allen, 2005). 

Surfacing student misconceptions and errors enhances learning and promotes engagement when instructors provide corrective feedback and explanation (Metcalfe, 2017).

A study shows that when afforded opportunities to lead as instructors or discussion facilitators, students report rates of higher satisfaction and emotional investment in their learning processes (Kurczek & Johnson, 2014).

Corbett and Wilson argue that literature promoting educational reform should consider students as partners and educators should think of students as “participants,” suggesting student ownership of the classroom can advance educational reform (1995).

In one study that examined partnerships between postsecondary students and instructors in course development, researchers found that when the instructors positioned themselves as learners, the students developed more confidence as “knowers” (de Bie et al., 2019, p. 40).