Teaching with Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion

The University of Rhode Island is devoted to promoting evidence-based teaching strategies and approaches that create more equitable and inclusive environments where all learners can succeed. Every day, we walk together along our collective journey towards educational justice. In any discipline we teach, every day we can each take one little step that will make a difference.

What Is Teaching with Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion?

This section aims to offer a place to start when thinking through how to redesign or create our courses and curricula to be more equitable, intentionally integrate diverse cultures and perspectives, and make teaching decisions that enable all students to achieve meaningful learning. One of the first steps along this process is self-awareness and self-reflection: we grow as critically inclusive educators by engaging in continuous dialogue with our students and ourselves.

The resources below provide a variety of interconnected entry points and possible next steps to consider in fostering justice within our teaching spaces. Please start with one that works for your class, share your stories, and join the conversation.

Strategies & Techniques

Antiracist & decolonizing pedagogy

As educators, we have the opportunity to shape our teaching spaces and the experiences of our learners. We offer these resources to support the work and journey of anti-racism as we all take it together.

Climate & Sense of Belonging

Creating an inclusive classroom begins with acknowledging our students enter your classroom with diverse perspectives, experiences, and approaches to learning.

Difficult Dialogue? Be Brave & Real!

How can we help our students and ourselves engage in honest, courageous, and critically reflective dialogue when engaging complex topics in our classroom?

Diversity and Inclusion in General Education

To help faculty with the design of their courses, ATL provides support for course design and delivery. These resources are to support courses meet the diversity and inclusion general education requirement.

Grading for Equitable Learning

Powerful possibilities open up when considering how we might embrace strategies that reduce anxiety, increase transparency, encourage consistently meaningful learning, and therefore foster educational justice.

Trauma-informed pedagogy

In times of crisis, our role as educators is essential in supporting our students' cognitive abilities, emotional resilience, and motivation.

Deeper Dives

Deeper dives provide opportunities for reflection and transformation around a specific topic for faculty to adapt, implement, and assess evidence-based strategies in their courses. Events include self-paced “courses”, high impact seminars, faculty institutes, and other special programs. Like any focused experience, these provide gains depended upon the time and introspection given to them. The times for self-paced courses are a broad estimate.

ATL Course: Trauma-informed pedagogy

A self-paced ATL Conversation is a collection of resources you can explore and engage with on Brightspace. You will have the option to engage in the creation and information curation process as our learning on the topic and needs of our community continue to evolve. This is a conversation for you and guided by you.

Columbia on EdX: Inclusive Teaching-Supporting All Students in the College Classroom

Inclusive teaching is an issue that has received increased attention on college campuses around the country and around the world. Understanding how course climate impacts students and their learning is increasingly important to faculty and administrators alike across a wide range of educational contexts.

Inclusive Syllabus

Teaching for justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion extends to the syllabus shared with students.

MIT on EdX: Becoming a More Equitable Educator: Mindsets and Practices

Every day, teachers make thousands of decisions: what content to teach, what activities to assign, who to call on, how to respond to a student question, how to react to student behavior. ... In this course, we will investigate these interactions, rehearse responding to difficult scenarios, and develop a set of equity teaching mindsets and practices to support all of our learners, especially underserved students.