Lessons we still need to learn on creating more inclusive and responsive classrooms: recommendations from one student–faculty partnership programme

ABSTRACT

This article presents recommendations regarding how to create welcoming and productively challenging classrooms for a diversity of students. These recommendations emerged during the pilot phase of a student–faculty pedagogical partnership programme in 2007 and remain relevant in 2017. To situate the recommendations, we evoke definitions of Whiteness, racism, and culture and briefly review key ideas from literature centred on inclusive and responsive classroom practices. We describe the genesis of the partnership programme at a college in the Mid-Atlantic United States and the methods used to document conversations with students from underrepresented groups on campus and with the faculty and students who piloted the programme, all of whom participated in a research project approved by the College’s ethics board. The majority of the article focuses on the set of eight interrelated recommendations for developing inclusive and responsive classrooms generated by the faculty and student participants in the partnership programme.

KEYWORDS:

• Inclusive and responsive classrooms
• Whiteness
• students as partners

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Alison Cook-Sather is Mary Katharine Woodworth Professor of Education and Director of the Teaching and Learning Institute at Bryn Mawr and Haverford Colleges. She publishes widely on student–faculty pedagogical partnership as is founding editor of two journals on this work: Teaching and Learning Together in Higher Education and International Journal for Students as Partners.

Crystal Des-Ogugua completed an undergraduate sociology major and an Africana Studies minor, was a Mellon Mays Fellow, and worked as a student consultant in the Students as Learners and Teachers (SaLT) program through the Teaching and Learning Institute at Bryn Mawr College.