Dr Miranda Melcher from City, University of London gave a recent presentation at the University of Kent’s Digitally Enhanced Education Webinar series. Here are her three key principles for support inclusivity and examples of implementation. You can listen to her full talk Teaching inclusively to improve student engagement and accessibility and see more of her work on her website Mirandamelcher.com.
Who is Miranda?
Dr Miranda Melcher is a teacher, researcher, and author and a Fellow of the HEA. She has PhD on post-conflict military reconstruction at King’s College London’s Defense Studies Department.
What is this session about?
This webinar series brings speakers from across the world who are interested in including technology in their teaching. Miranda teaches lots of controversial topics to a very diverse range of students, gender, nationality, but also in terms of age and background. This requires her to think differently about her approach to meet all of these requirements. Here are her three principles for supporting inclusivity.
The three principles
1. Be specific
Miranda argues that students don’t automatically know what we mean when we ask them to do something. Students from diverse backgrounds, or with neurodiversity will need extra information to know exactly what is required of them.
Being specific is relatively easy to do. Here is an example from the presentation. Miranda had been using Moodle forums to engage students asynchronously during the pandemic where she found that providing just a little more detail in the instructions increased engagement.
Miranda expands “saying (to students) things like ‘forums are an integral part of your learning experience, please make sure to post once a week before your discussions’. Once a week, what does it actually mean, what am I to write about?” By adding a few extra sentences of explanation Miranda found a far higher level of engagement.
2. Be transparent
This is about explaining the norms and expectations embedded in academia that for many will need to be made more explicit. For example;
Being transparent about what is and is not a key learning outcome: The language around learning outcomes and marking criteria can be confusing for staff as well as students. Staff attend training on marking using these tools, and how to standardise them across the curriculum. Students do not.
Miranda explains “as a department we focus on sources, understanding, and structure. Those are the three main areas that really wanted students to demonstrate their abilities.” Making this explicit to the student is important, but more important was empathising what was not included. “We didn’t care particularly about typos or grammatical inaccuracy.” Making this clear to the students helped them to feel more confident in sending in their drafts and engaging. “Students started to come to office hours explicitly saying because they knew I would not be focused on this. And again, this comes from a place of thinking about disability neurodiversity, but had immediate impacts for a much broader student population.”
3. Be mindful
This refers to a more reflective process of making sure you are present and aware of the possible problems any curriculum design might have on of learner’s diversity.
Why using Chat and Icebreakers are great for inclusivity…
One interesting example is the continued use of icebreaker activities at the beginning and end of every live online session. “I will ask a silly question, what ice cream flavour sounds like your mood today, etc. I will ask every single student to pop an answer in the chat. It’s a great way for students to participate. And if they’ve done it once they’re much more likely to continue throughout the rest of the session. It also immediately highlights technical issues”
Benefits of Ice Breakers
- Low-stakes way for students to show opinions without anxiety over the right answer
- It immediately highlight technical issues
- Doubles as attendance taking
Tips for Ice Breakers
- Explain expected length, clarity, and English answers
- Give time to respond (use a timer)
- Keep track of who has responded in order to take attendance and track issues
- Verbally respond to all answers to increase engagement and rapport
Using Emojis and reactions are great too…
Another is the use of emojis and reactions in live online sessions. “This is one of my favourite features of teams, and zoom.” As the students react the system reports on the number of votes. “This enables me to understand that people get something or need to spend more time on it or move on.”
Benefits
- Built in straw poll functionality
- Enables monitoring of pace and depth of explanation
- Equal low effort participation
Tips
- Specify how to use reactions/emojis
- Give time to respond (use a timer)
This blog post is part of our wider accessibility project AIDeD
Resources
Recording of the session: Digitally Enhanced Education Webinar