The L&S Teaching Network provides interactive online materials and structured discussion guides to help departments, teaching teams, cross-disciplinary groups, and individuals explore timely and relevant teaching topics.
While individuals are welcome to explore our online materials, the most complete Teaching Network experience includes group discussion. If your group would like more information or to sign up, please fill out our request form below. Our team will provide more information and help your group get started.
Defining Inclusive Teaching: Choose a Focus Area to Get Started
Identify attributes of inclusive teaching.
- Consider the language and terminology that describe inclusive teaching.
- Reflect on or discuss how you and your discipline define inclusive teaching.
- Develop your syllabus with student-centered inclusive strategies.
Examine opportunities for inclusive teaching.
- Identify teaching strategies that are more inclusive.
- Reflect on or discuss inclusive teaching strategies for your discipline and classroom.
- Observe strategies in action or apply new strategies to your context.
Consider social identities.
- Discover the intersecting social identities of L&S students.
- Reflect on or discuss how your social identity and the social identities of your students influence classroom learning.
- Apply strategies for getting to know your students.
"We have students for whom this is the most diverse place they have seen. We have students for whom this is the least diverse place they have seen. All of those students are walking into our classroom. All of those students are here to get a world class education. We have to make sure that our teaching allows all of those students to be successful."
Dean Eric Wilcots, as heard on the L&S Exchange Podcast Episode 1
Facilitator Resources for Groups
Every group needs a facilitator to lead their discussion. Choosing a facilitator from within your group will allow you to have a discussion that better leverages your collective expertise, disciplinary context, and existing relationships. The resources below will help facilitators effectively use their time and energy to plan and facilitate a discussion. We are also happy to meet with facilitators to help you get started with your group.
“Resources from the Teaching Network allowed me to run a productive and rewarding departmental workshop on inclusive teaching strategies, even though I am not at all an expert on the topic. The guidelines and materials made it easy to prepare and implement in a reasonable amount of time. Both faculty and graduate students appreciated the opportunity to learn from and with each other.”
-Professor Nils Ringe, Associate Chair for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion & Robert F. and Sylvia T. Wagner Chair, Department of Political Science
About the Teaching Network
This resource is sponsored by L&S Teaching and Learning Administration and created and maintained by the L&S Instructional Design Collaborative with partnerships from across the college.
- Provide a structure for exploring teaching topics featuring current evidence-based practices and expertise from L&S.
- Serve as a catalyst for conversations about teaching among communities of L&S instructors.
- Support instructors in intentionally integrating teaching practices.
- Inclusively co-create a responsive and evolving resource that reflects L&S ideas and values.
We recognize that our community already has a wealth of expertise and experience to share and from which we can all learn. As such, the L&S Exchange Teaching Network aims to support learning via discussion among new and existing communities of instructors and reflection by individual instructors.
To support learning through conversation, it is important to begin from a basic shared understanding. The Teaching Network presents background information on inclusive teaching to help form a shared understanding, but we acknowledge that this information is not comprehensive. Rather, we hope that our L&S community will contribute to and build from this foundational content. We also aim to expand on this content over time.
A note from the curators, Molly Harris and Laura Schmidli:
Curating and editing the L&S Exchange Teaching Network is by turns fun, challenging, enlightening, and inspiring. We have been enjoying discovering new ideas and sharing them with a wider audience, and we’ve also found the process to be one of learning and growth for ourselves as educators, collaborators, and people. We are complex individuals, each with some aspects of our identities that are privileged and others that are marginalized. Our identities and perspectives are likely present in this work; however, as curators we strive to explore a diversity of perspectives beyond our own and to amplify voices from across the college and campus communities. We hope that this spirit of collaboration and your continued contributions will keep the Teaching Network alive, relevant, and inclusive.