The document discusses the importance of creating inclusive learning environments that respect and support diverse student needs, emphasizing the drawbacks of traditional grading systems and standardized education. It highlights the need for educators to foster human relationships and adapt pedagogical approaches, advocating for student voices in educational discussions. Key recommendations include investing in teachers, addressing structural inequalities, and prioritizing compassion and understanding in teaching practices.

1. Building an Inclusive Campus
Jesse Stommel
@Jessifer

2. “To teach in a manner that respects and cares for the souls of our
students is essential if we are to provide the necessary conditions
where learning can most deeply and intimately begin.”
~ bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress

4. Scaffolding can create points of entry and access but can also
reduce the complexity of learning to its detriment. And too often we
build learning environments in advance of students arriving upon
the scene. We design syllabi, predetermine outcomes, and craft
rubrics before having met the students. We reduce students to data.

5. Photo by flickr user www.GlynLowe.com
Ranking. Metrics. Norming. Objectivity. Uniformity. Accreditation.
Measurement. Rubrics. Outcomes. Quality. Data. Performance.
Averages. Excellence. Inflation. Mastery. Standardization. Rigor.

6. An “objective” system for grading was created so systematized
schooling could scale. And we’ve designed technological tools in
the 20th and 21st Centuries that have allowed us to scale further.
Toward standardization and away from subjectivity, human
relationships, and care.

7. Photo by flickr user in pastel
Prior to the late 1700s, performance and feedback systems in
Education were incredibly idiosyncratic. Throughout the 19th
Century, they became increasingly comparative, numerical, and
standardized.

8. Photo by flickr user Shelly
The first “official record” of a grading system was at Yale in 1785.
The A-F system appears to have emerged in 1898 (with the “E” not
disappearing until the 1930s) and the 100-point or percentage scale
became common in the early 1900s. Letter grades were not widely
used until the 1940s. Even by 1971, only 67% of U.S. primary and
secondary schools used letter grades. (Schinske and Tanner)

9. Google Trends shows increased search volume around the term
“grades” over the last 14 years. It also shows an increasingly
furious pattern of search-behavior centered each year around the
months of May and December, like a heartbeat beginning to race.

10. “Research shows three reliable effects when students are graded:
They tend to think less deeply, avoid taking risks, and lose interest in
learning itself.”
~ Alfie Kohn, “The Trouble with Rubrics”

12. Some Data About Bias in the Classroom:
• Black girls are twelve times more likely than
their white counterparts to be suspended.
• While Black children make up less than 20% of
preschoolers, they make up more than half of
out-of-school suspensions.
• Teachers spend up to two thirds of their time
talking to male students; they also are more
likely to interrupt girls. When teachers ask
questions they direct their gaze towards boys
more often, especially when the questions are
open-ended (In STEM fields).
~ Soraya Chemaly, “All Teachers Should Be
Trained to Overcome Their Hidden Biases”

13. I'm increasingly disturbed when I see compassion, respect, and
equity for students being mislabeled with the derogatory word
“coddling."

14. Three years ago, I wrote a blog post responding to a series of
student-shaming articles published at the Chronicle of Higher
Education.

15. In that piece, I argued everyone working anywhere even near to
education needs to:
• Treat the least privileged among us with the most respect.
• Recognize the job of a teacher is to advocate for students, especially
in an educational system currently under direct threat at almost every
turn.
• Laugh at ourselves and not at those we and our system have made
most vulnerable.
• Rant up, not down.

16. My blog post was read by 50,000 people and spawned articles,
more than two dozen blog responses, and hundreds of comments,
some from the darker corners of the web.

17. The Dear Student articles weren’t the first published at the Chronicle
to demean students. And they weren’t the last. The first sentence of
an article published more recently: “My students can’t write a clear
sentence to save their lives.”

18. Intersectionality is important when talking about power and
hierarchies. Teacher / student is a binary that needs deconstructing
but never at the expense of the other identities in play (race, class,
gender, sexuality, ability, etc.). No binary exists in a vacuum.

19. What I listened to intently during the aftermath of Dear Chronicle
were student voices, some of whom commented anonymously:
• “Part of the reason why I never asked for help was because I saw what
my professors thought of those who did.”
• “I dropped out of college, in large part due to the hoops I had to jump
through to get my disabilities recognized.”
• “It’s a lot easier to stay motivated when you’re not made to feel like
you’re stupid or a liar. It’s a lot easier to focus on studying when you’re
not focused on having to justify yourself.”

26. In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Paulo Freire argues against the
banking model of education, “an act of depositing, in which the
students are the depositories and the teacher is the depositor.”

27. In place of the banking model, Freire advocates for “problem-posing
education,” in which a classroom or learning environment becomes
a space for asking questions -- a space of cognition not information.

28. All of this demands exactly two pedagogical approaches, and these
are what I see at the heart of my pedagogy:
1. Start by trusting students.
2. Realize "fairness" is not a good excuse for a lack of compassion.

29. (1) Recognize students are not an undifferentiated mass.
5 things we can do to build inclusive spaces in education

30. “Today’s college students are the most overburdened and
undersupported in American history. More than one in four have a
child, almost three in four are employed, and more than half receive
Pell Grants but are left far short of the funds required to pay for
college.”
~ Sara Goldrick-Rab and Jesse Stommel, “Teaching the Students
We Have Not the Students We Wish We Had”

31. “The reason we are talking about basic needs today is because the
students brought it to our attention. A student spoke up, ‘the reason
I am not succeeding in college is because I haven’t eaten in two
days.’ In fact, 1 in 2 of your students are experiencing food
insecurity. In the last 30 days.”
~ Sara Goldrick-Rab, Dream 2019

32. This means we can’t presume to know the reasons students are
distracted. Or craft laptop policies that make it impossible for
disabled students to receive accommodation without their disability
made visible to an entire classroom. Or throw students (with
nowhere else to go) out of their dorms over the holidays.

34. “We need to design our pedagogical approaches for the students
we have, not the students we wish we had. This requires
approaches that are responsive, inclusive, adaptive, challenging,
and compassionate. And it requires institutions find more creative
ways to support teachers and prepare them for the work of teaching.
This is not a theoretical exercise — it is a practical one.”
~ Sara Goldrick-Rab and Jesse Stommel, “Teaching the Students
We Have Not the Students We Wish We Had”

35. (2) For education to be innovative, at this particular moment, we
don’t need to invest in technology. We need to invest in teachers.
5 things we can do to build inclusive spaces in education

36. Tools are made by people, and most (or even all) educational
technologies have pedagogies hard-coded into them in advance.
This is why it is so essential we consider them carefully and critically
—that we empty all our LEGOs onto the table and sift through them
before we start building. Some tools are decidedly less innocuous
than others. And some tools can never be hacked to good use.

37. A discussion of pedagogy needs to include a critical examination of
our tools, what they afford, who they exclude, how they're
monetized, and what pedagogies they have already baked in. But it
requires we also begin with a consideration of what we value, the
kinds of relationships we want to develop with students, why we
gather together in places like universities, and how humans learn.

40. “It is urgent we have teachers, it is urgent we employ them, pay
them, support them with adequate resources; but it is also urgency
which defines the project of teaching. In a political climate
increasingly defined by its obstinacy, anti-intellectualism, and
deflection of fact and care; in a society still divided across lines of
race, nationality, religion, gender, sexuality, income, ability, and
privilege, teaching has an important (urgent) role to play.”
~ Sean Michael Morris and Jesse Stommel, An Urgency of
Teachers: The Work of Critical Digital Pedagogy

41. (3) Staff, administrators, faculty, and students need to come
together, across institutional hierarchies, for inclusivity efforts to
work. At many institutions, a faculty/staff divide is one of the first
barriers that needs to be overcome.
5 things we can do to build inclusive spaces in education

42. We can’t get to a place of inclusivity if some of our community don’t
show up to the conversation because we’ve excluded their voice in
advance by creating environments hostile to them and their work.

43. 62% of higher education faculty/staff stated they’d been bullied or
witnessed bullying vs. 37% in the general population. People from
minority communities are disproportionately bullied. (Hollis 2012)
51% of college students claimed to have seen another student
being bullied by a teacher at least once and 18% claimed to have
been bullied themselves by a teacher. (Marraccini 2013)

44. Teaching is always a risk. Learning is always a risk. But that risk is
not distributed evenly. A gay male administrator experiences the
classroom differently from a black teacher, a disabled staff member,
or a female student.

45. What I see as most essential is a willingness to be human with
humans, talk things out, and learn every second.

46. “Critical formative cultures are crucial in producing the knowledge,
values, social relations and visions that help nurture and sustain the
possibility to think critically, engage in political dissent, organize
collectively and inhabit public spaces in which alternative and
critical theories can be developed.”
~ Henry Giroux, “Thinking Dangerously: the Role of Higher
Education in Authoritarian Times”

47. 5 things we can do to build inclusive spaces in education
(4) The path toward inclusivity starts with small, human acts:
•Walk campus to assess the accessibility of common spaces and
classrooms. An accessible desk in every classroom doesn’t do much good
if students can’t get to that desk because the rooms are overcrowded.
•Invite students to share their pronouns, model this behavior, but don’t expect
it of every student.
•Make sure there is an easy and advertised process for students, faculty, and
staff to change their names within institutional systems. Make sure chosen
names are what appear on course rosters and ID cards.
•Regularly invite the campus community into hard conversations about
inclusivity. For example, a frank discussion of race and gender bias in
grading and course evaluations.

48. “You cannot counter structural inequality with good will. You have to
structure equality.”
~ Cathy N. Davidson

49. (5) Stop having conversations about the future of education without
students in the room.
5 things we can do to build inclusive spaces in education

51. “We often ignore the best resource for informed change, one that is
right in front of our noses every day—our students, for whom the
most is at stake.”
~ Martin Bickman, “Returning to Community and Praxis”

52. “We need more, not fewer, ways to listen for the voices of students
reflecting on education. We need more, not fewer, ways to include
students in conversations about the future of teaching and learning
in college. These conversations cannot begin by sending a signal to
students that their voices don’t matter.”
~ Sara Goldrick-Rab and Jesse Stommel, “Teaching the Students We Have
Not the Students We Wish We Had”

53. “Let your life be a counter-friction to stop the machine.”
~ Henry David Thoreau, “Civil Disobedience”