TEACHx 2021

Becoming an inclusive educator takes more than simply implementing strategies or best practices; it requires a deep understanding of the challenges learners face and how instructors can actively support them (Danowitz & Tuitt, 2011). The Inclusive STEM Teaching Project is an NSF-sponsored massive open online course that advances the awareness, the self-efficacy, and the ability of faculty, doctoral students, and postdocs to cultivate inclusive STEM learning environments for all their students and to develop themselves as reflective, inclusive practitioners. Local learning communities met weekly to deepen and reinforce the learning they began through interaction with asynchronous online content. We used active listening techniques and incorporated the larger social-cultural-political events that were going on in the U.S. and on our campus into our sessions. Attendees demonstrated a shared sense of ethical responsibility and inclusive teaching competence among the community members to both understand and counter messages and structures from our own institution and higher education in STEM that threaten the sense of belonging among our students of color. In this session, the panelists will reflect on how the Northwestern team cultivated connectedness in our virtual learning community while supporting personal growth. We will discuss and answer questions regarding this socially conscious blended learning model.

The pandemic has traumatized all students and faculty, some much more than others. Instructors should teach with empathy to connect with these students. Teaching with empathy lets instructors do more than just teach the subject matter and skills our universities hired us to teach. It also allows us to impart hope. To address this urgent need, this session will demonstrate how to apply the principles of trauma-informed pedagogy to establish trust between students and instructor, build an in-class community, and build students’ resilience.

Participants will hear from an instructor who used trauma-informed pedagogy to connect with her students in a fully online Northwestern law school course in the Fall 2020 semester, as well as a student from that class. The instructor will offer practical guidance for teaching with empathy and offer some ideas for how to manage the emotional labor required to do so. Participants will also hear from a neuroscientist and teaching expert on what neuroscience research tells us about what happens when we impart hope to others.

Open educational resources (OER) are free, openly licensed teaching and learning materials that lower barriers to access and learning. This panel will discuss an ongoing collaboration among the Cook Family Writing Program (Weinberg College of Arts & Sciences), McCormick School of Engineering, and the Libraries to create, adapt, and implement OER in Design Thinking & Communication, a required undergraduate course. With support from Northwestern’s Affordable Instructional Resources Initiative, this collaboration reduces course costs and lowers gatekeeping around who may author and who may benefit from expertise.

Panelists will provide an overview of our OER initiative and reflect on our experiences with OER. We will discuss the implementation of OER within the context of a course for which over 30 faculty and 500 students share a common syllabus across 60 annual sections. Librarians will discuss support available for OER and how OER can be published by the Northwestern Libraries. We will outline next steps in the initiative, which we consider an iterative, dynamic process of teaching and learning that represents a variety of voices.

Attendees will engage in short activities that consider their course materials, and they will be welcome to ask questions throughout the session. We hope that learning about our experiences will empower participants to develop and work with OER.

This session is being sponsored by Atlas Systems.

This panel will focus on strategies for teaching the writing workshop in an on-ground, online, or hybrid format. We'll discuss techniques we've used to keep students engaged and productive and how we've worked around the challenges of the remote or asynchronous graduate writing workshop. Workshops by their nature generally favor in-person instruction and weekly contact that is as much social as pedagogical in nature.

We'll also touch on how more traditional, lecture-based courses both resemble and differ from workshop courses and will suggest methods instructors might use to begin a classroom session regardless of the subject matter or lecture-based course structure.

Lastly, we'll address strategies for overcoming challenges that can arise with Zoom workshop discussions and asynchronous critiques.

Due to COVID-19, Northwestern University’s Global Learning Office (GLO) has pivoted its Global Engagement Studies Institute (GESI) program to a virtual framework that builds upon a tradition of hands-on, critical, community-based learning. By doing so, GLO was able to replace lost opportunities for students; prioritize equity of access to global learning experiences; and maintain continuity in its international partnerships. “Virtual GESI” offers students a critical skill set for our emerging global reality through online coursework and remote internships with nonprofit organizations in various countries. In addition, the course utilizes a flipped classroom approach, involving weekly activities, such as simulations and role-plays, to foster critical thinking, identity exploration, team-building, and ethical stakeholder engagement. The program brings together students from multiple campuses, countries, and disciplines to analyze and participate in development contexts from a global perspective. This panel presentation will share key takeaways from an inclusive pedagogy, collaborative teaching and learning model, among other innovations leveraged using technology to create a community of students, faculty, and site partners from around the world at a critical time. The panel will include representatives from across GESI’s multilayered educational partnerships, including faculty, staff, peer facilitator, site director, and host organization supervisor.

To enact antiracist teaching, we must carefully examine the texts we teach and the ways we teach them. The use of culturally sustaining pedagogies that affirm and empower students of color and disrupt traditional curriculum for White students is a starting point for change. Based on our experiences teaching in culturally and linguistically diverse 9th-grade classrooms in New York City, a teacher and a pre-service teacher share our experiences using a White canonical text, “Animal Farm,” and how we include diversity of texts to support culturally sustaining pedagogies. We highlight our use of texts representing marginalized perspectives to push back on dominant social narratives, including whiteness, patriarchy, and heteronormativity in digital spaces.

Through examining real examples of students’ conversations, personal writing, and assessment products, attendees will have the opportunity to discuss how each of us and all of us can navigate the canonical framework in relation to our own contexts and the students that we teach. Multiple media including pertinent instructional materials and resources, relevant common core learning standards, classroom artifacts, suggested text lists, and student reflections will be used to complement this conversation on inquiry as part of our ELA curriculums.

The inclusion of hands-on instruments in many science courses is limited by significant technological and financial barriers. An equally significant challenge is growing students’ confidence so that they can meaningfully address local and global problems. The need for “sense of agency” is greatest in minority-serving institutions and communities facing environmental injustice. To address these challenges, the Cave Pearl Project developed an open-source datalogger system from inexpensive components that work within the practical limits of STEM courses. In EARTH 360 at Northwestern University, students with no prior electronics or coding experience assemble, program, and gather data. Variants of the course are now offered at Nevada State College and Indiana University South Bend.

This panel brings together our collaborating faculty dedicated to empowering students as knowledge creators from these wide-ranging U.S. institutions – R1 (NU), satellite campus of a large state university (IUSB), and small state college (NSC). These educators will discuss their successes, along with ongoing challenges overcoming institutional, personal, and pedagogical barriers to running problem-based courses that combine aspects of engineering and environmental science. Student personal growth has been phenomenal, with often uncomfortable development of troubleshooting skills that are hard to teach with commercial lab equipment.