[MUSIC] Hi everyone, and welcome to this teachout on inclusive online teaching. I'm Paul Hocutt, Assistant Dean of Learning Design and Innovation and lecturer with the Johns Hopkins Whiting School of Engineering. In this video, we will explore inclusive pedagogy. Its importance in goals, and look at common barriers to learning. Let's begin. Let's begin by defining inclusion and pedagogy. Inclusion is the practice or policy of including people who might otherwise be excluded or marginalised, such as those who have physical or mental disabilities and members of minority groups. Pedagogy is the method and practice of teaching. Now independently defining these two terms is very easy to understand. But when put together, they often cause a lot of confusion and frustration for instructors and students. I'm sure many of you have experienced difficulties either trying to define broad concepts like, inclusive pedagogy and universal design for learning or implementing them into tangible actions. And so, our approach in this learning experience is to remove any ambiguity around what we mean by inclusive pedagogy. Inclusive pedagogy is an approach to teaching that creates a learning environment that is beneficial to students of all backgrounds. Content and activities consider the varied perspectives of students and engages them in intentional ways to overcome barriers to learning. Okay, so we have now got the often confusing part out of the way. Let's now turn our focus to the importance of inclusive pedagogy. And let's jump into the goals of inclusive pedagogy. Broadly speaking, there are 3 goals of inclusive pedagogy. Number 1, create a learning environment where everyone feels safe to express ideas. Number 2, multiple diverse questions or opinions are considered, and number 3, student experiences of marginalization are minimized. So we've now looked at three broad goals of inclusive pedagogy. Let's now turn our focus to some common barriers that we see in learning. At a high level inclusive pedagogy makes intuitive sense. Why would any instructor not want all students in the course to have an enjoyable and effective learning experience? Aside from the moral obligation inclusive pedagogy is also supported by a growing body of research. First of all, a sense of belonging to an academic community has been shown to be an important predictor of academic success. But meanwhile, many students, particularly those from groups, marginalized because of things like race, class, gender, sexuality, et cetera, do you feel excluded from learning. This experience of exclusion can hamper academic performance in a process that can spiral out of control. Through a negative recursive cycle, where psychological threat and poor performance feed off one another, leading to an ever-worsening performance. Beyond the purely academic, a sense of alienation or exclusion can even lead to negative health effects. So, if we can all agree that inclusive pedagogy is important, shouldn't it be at the forefront of curricula and course design and the way that we teach? Of course it should, but oftentimes there are barriers to learning that we may not know exist, or perhaps not know how to overcome these barriers. In this video we will talk about four common barriers to learning, unconscious bias, lack of motivation, material comprehension, and communication. Let's look at each of these in more detail. Unconscious biases are social stereotypes about certain groups of people that form outside one's own conscious awareness. Everyone holds unconscious beliefs about various social and identity groups. And these biases stem from one's tendency to organize social environments by categorizing. This categorization can lead to barriers including varied interactions with students, categorizing student expectations by stereotypes, and non-objective grading and expectations. Another barrier to learning is a lack of motivation. Now you may be thinking that it is not the sole responsibility of an instructor to motivate students, and this is partly true. Students need to be self motivated to learn, especially those learning in an online environment. But there are things we can do in our teaching to increase motivation for all learners. For example, not understanding the application or purpose of material due to a lack of clarity in learning outcomes and how to achieve them. Difficulty understanding or interpreting the materials, and a willingness to embrace new knowledge influenced by social, economic, political and cultural background. Material comprehension can also be a barrier to learning, including lack of clarity in presentation of concepts, lack of access to course materials in an accessible optimal format for all learners. And a lack of engagement or variability in the content or the assessments throughout the learning experience. And finally communication, emotional barriers can impede a speaker's ability to deliver a clear message or a receivers ability to hear a message effectively. Common emotions such as anger, love, joy, frustration, disappointment and sadness can all create emotional barriers that negatively affect communication. Cultural barriers can hinder developed communication if two different cultures clash. And finally perceptual barriers, these are internal barriers that create the perception that the other person, that they are going to speak with will not understand or be interested in what they have to say. For example, the possibility of words being misconstrued because of one's gender. These four common barriers to learning can impact any learning environment in a classroom or online. But as the title of this teachout suggests, the focus is to incorporate inclusive pedagogical practices in an online learning environment. So at this point, you may be thinking how on earth do I create an inclusive learning environment by incorporating inclusive pedagogical practices, when students are geographically separated from one another? At this point, we certainly hope that this is not you. The good news here is that, my colleague Lindsey will be sharing practical examples of incorporating pedagogical practices in an online learning environment. Stay tuned for the next video.
