Writing Opportunities: Creating an Equitable & Inclusive Learning Community
Writing is a core method for creating opportunities for fostering active learning within a course, while also creating connection and inclusive community. Both in-class and out-of class writing opportunities can guide students in connecting course concepts to their lived experience, and in processing new ideas by applying them in novel ways. The act of responding to student writing can not only support these goals, but also help to create a connection with students (more important than ever in distanced and remote instruction).
Part IV: Using Writing to Create Inclusive Community
Grounding Prompt: How has your experience of integrating writing with your courses changed in the current academic year? Share your response via Poll Everywhere.
In Part IV, Writing@Bates offers guidance on engaging inclusive and equitable community in remote classrooms and instructor feedback, both of which can provide powerful approaches for creating an equitable and inclusive approach to writing for students exemplifying diverse literacies.
Engaging Community in your Remote Writing Classroom
Ethical, Effective, Evidence-Based Feeedback
Using Peer Interaction to Create Active Learning
Reflection Prompt: Of the methods outlined here, what could contribute to creating community in your courses? What other ways have you used writing to do so? Share your response via PollEverywhere.
Accessibility Considerations
In creating the interactive components of this series, we’ve used Poll Everywhere (a tool for gathering and visualizing participant responses) and Google Docs (an interactive platform already familiar to many of us at Bates). We considered Padlet, another tool offering social-media style interactions between users. Ultimately, we decided not to use Padlet due to accessibility concerns, instead choosing tools that allow for keyboard accessibility and better low-vision color contrast. While a variety of tools are available for creating active learning in online environments, accessibility (central to equitable and inclusive education) is one of many considerations in selecting appropriate applications.
Explore This Four-Part Series
I: Hybrid Courses
Practical guidance for instructors in fostering inclusive community among remote and in-person students
II: Pre-course Connections
Tools and strategies for instructors to build inclusive and equity-focused community with students before the first class meeting
III: Anon. Assessments
Creating more equitable opportunities for classroom engagement, metacognitive processing, and low-stakes formative assessment
IV: Writing Opportunities
Using active and inclusive approaches to writing to foster community & engagement in distanced, remote, and hybrid courses
Citation
“File:Noun Project Community icon 627732.svg” by Gregor Cresnar is licensed under CC BY 3.0