Teaching for Inclusion Workshop Series

Effective communication is vital for healthy, engaging, and accessible teaching and learning interactions. This workshop will discuss how acknowledging and welcoming neurodiverse communication styles benefits relationships among neurotypical and neurodivergent people. Participants will explore tangible strategies for communicating with students in the classroom through a neuro-affirming lens.

In increasingly diverse classrooms, teaching that recognizes and values students’ cultural backgrounds is essential for fostering inclusion and reflective learning. In this interactive workshop we will overview the principles and practices of culturally responsive teaching across disciplines. We will also explore how culture shapes learning, examine strategies to connect course content to students’ lived experiences, and reflect on our own positionalities as educators. Through guided discussion and hands-on activities, we will practice adapting lesson plans and teaching approaches to create inclusive and engaging learning environments.

By the end of this workshop, you will be able to identify the key principles of culturally responsive teaching and their importance in diverse classroom settings; analyze your own teaching practices for potential cultural biases and opportunities to increase inclusivity; and apply culturally responsive strategies to lesson design and teaching practices to foster inclusive classroom cultures.

Educators and learners alike are feeling the impacts of stressors and uncertainties in and beyond higher education. Because we come to our learning spaces as whole people, and do not shed our identities, goals, values, and experiences at the classroom door, these stressors may manifest in the classroom as difficult or disruptive conversations. In this session, we will reflect on our own experiences with difficult conversations, explore the ways that difficult conversations arise in the classroom, and identify proactive and reactive strategies for facilitating challenging, respectful, and caring conversations.

Although we live in an information-rich society, what counts as legitimate knowledge in higher education classrooms is shaped by those with socially privileged positions. This workshop introduces the concept of epistemic injustice –harms related to whose knowledge is recognized, valued, or excluded– and explores how such injustices are reproduced through curriculum, pedagogy, and even everyday technologies like Google or AI. Because epistemic injustice is often absence or exclusion, rather than overt bias, it can be difficult to recognize within everyday teaching practice. This session supports instructors in identifying these patterns and reflecting on their implications for teaching and learning.

By the end of the session, attendees will be able to:

1) Define epistemic injustice, including the concept of epistemicide

2) Identify how epistemic injustice shapes curriculum, course materials, and teaching tools commonly used in higher education

3) Reflect on how epistemic injustice may influence their own teaching context, discipline, or curriculum design

Have you ever experienced a lesson where storytelling was the modality used to deliver the content? If yes, have you ever wondered how you might be able to craft your own lesson using this pedagogical tool? This hands-on workshop will allow you to work through the how and why of using storytelling pedagogy in your own teaching practice. Starting with an overview of the historical and cultural roots of storytelling circles, digital stories, and discipline-specific narratives, this workshop explores how we can ethically and responsibly use storytelling pedagogy to deepen student understanding, foster belonging, and help complex ideas resonate in the classroom.

By the end of this session you will be able to identify key characteristics of storytelling pedagogy, practice storytelling techniques in different learning contexts (using case studies), and apply strategies in your own teaching context.

What do our learning outcomes and assignments teach students –not just about content, but about whose knowledge and perspectives are valued? This workshop invites instructors to critically examine how our course expectations may unintentionally reinforce epistemic exclusion and narrow definitions of expertise. How do our requirements to only use ‘peer-reviewed sources,’ for example, perpetuate the exclusion of Black and Indigenous knowledges? How might we partner with students to disrupt Eurocentric thinking with our curriculum? Using a knowledge justice lens, we will explore how to design learning outcomes and assignments that balance multiple ways of knowing without discarding the unique strengths of your field.

By the end of this workshop, participants will be able to:

1) Identify how epistemological traditions contribute to the perpetuation of systemic and knowledge-based harms.

2) Apply the principles of epistemic justice to revise learning outcomes or assessment strategies in ways that invite dialogue across multiple ways of knowing.

3) Reflect on their role in modeling epistemic humility.