4.0 Conclusions
The 2020 COVID-19 pandemic brought a sudden transition to online teaching, upending many educational practices and causing considerable stress for both instructors and learners. However, in this manuscript, we reframe this transition from a loss of in-person instruction to an opportunity to build inclusive digital spaces from the ground up. We have highlighted a number of considerations for faculty, such as culturally-competent pedagogy, universal design for learning, and trauma-informed pedagogy, that can help learners and instructors establish a positive classroom community, even from a distance. We have also highlighted a number of active learning interventions that can be adopted with varying levels of effort.
Although instructors may be unable to address societal inequities in the course of a year, we believe that we can intentionally design our online classroom to draw in students who are often excluded from traditional in-person classroom participation. This is especially important for Ecology and Evolutionary Biology (EEB) as these fields have traditionally been dominated by white individuals and have lower diversity than other STEM fields (Leslie et al, 2015). From 2008-2018, individuals identifying as white, non-Hispanic/non-Latino earned 81.5% and 86.5% of PhDs in evolution and ecology, respectively (NSF survey data;https://ncses.nsf.gov/pubs/nsf19301/data). Given these data, it is not surprising that Black, Latinx, Indigenous and other non-white individuals are also underrepresented at the faculty level in EEB (Graves, 2019; O’Brien et al, 2020). Various reasons for these disparities in EEB, and across STEM fields, have been proposed, but racism, sexism, and lack of inclusion are driving factors (Kent et al, 2020; Miriti, 2020; North, 2020; O’Brien et al, 2020; Tseng et al. 2020; Wanelik et al, 2020). The history and narratives of EEB have been primarily shaped by white men as they were the ones who had access to resources and held positions of power, and this holds true across STEM fields (Zuberi & Bonilla-Silva, 2008; Carter et al, 2019; Lee, 2020).
The first step to inclusive teaching echoes bell hooks’ ideas of self-actualization (hooks, 1994) and is to develop self-awareness around one’s implicit biases and relationship to established power structures (Asplund and Welle, 2018; Dewsbury and Brame, 2019;). Instructors must be willing to devote mental energy to introspection and acknowledge their role in perpetuating oppression in the classroom. This work is uncomfortable and time-intensive, which may be impediments to widespread implementation of inclusive teaching across institutions (DiAngelo and Sensoy 2010; Lombardi et al, 2011). Additionally, many science instructors hold the assumption that STEM fields are somehow “unbiased” and immune to societal injustices (Smith and Scharmann, 1999, Wheeler et al, 2019), making inclusive teaching challenging. Lastly, traditional STEM curricula tend to promote racist, sexist, and Eurocentric ideas (Smedley and Smedley, 2005; Peters, 2015; Hayssen and Orr, 2017; Vakil and Ayers, 2019; Black Lives Matter in Ecology and Evolution, 2020; Hayssen, 2020). Disparities start early, as a recent study found introductory biology textbooks were more likely to highlight men scientists, and none of the books analyzed highlighted a Black woman scientist (Wood et al, 2020). These biases impact students’ first view of the field and can shape the ideas of who belongs in science; these disparities are something instructors can actively address in their individual syllabi and curriculum.
We acknowledge that our recommendations alone will not create an equitable, inclusive, and socially just learning experience for our students. The pandemic has highlighted the broad systemic inequities in higher education, and it will take much more than active learning strategies or mindful attention to course design to address the ongoing issues of who we center and who we exclude from education. But we believe that this paper can serve as an entry point and we hope it will inspire instructors to start the long journey of personal and pedagogical transformation. We encourage readers to think critically about their own courses and syllabi, and to make a pledge to change at least one thing to increase inclusion in their classroom. We challenge readers to truly reflect on their own views and behaviors as well as those of their department and institution. We also challenge readers to critically examine what is meant by inclusive teaching, in their own mind, and in their institution and classrooms. Lastly, we hope readers will determine actionable steps to increase inclusion going forward.