Equity-Based Teaching in Higher Education

Policies, Programs, and Practices to Improve Equity-Based Teaching

BOULDER, CO, UNITED STATES, October 24, 2024 /EINPresswire.com/ -- The Equity-Based Teaching Collective has published a new resource titled, Equity-Based Teaching in Higher Education: The Levers that Institutions Can Use for Scaling Improvement, focused on policies, programs, and practices to improve Equity-based Teaching (EBT). The report, published through Every Learner Everywhere, describes EBT as an approach that can support the academic success of Black, Latine, Indigenous, and Low-Income (BLILI) students across disciplines, while emphasizing that equitable student outcomes must be the ultimate goal. The report articulates an ecosystem approach to how different institutional stakeholders can interact to produce equity-based teaching and outcomes for BLILI students.

With an expansive understanding of educational stakeholders and participants, combined with attention to the multiple contexts in which education takes place, an ecosystem approach to equity-based teaching aims both to address the root causes of inequity in education and to effect long-term institutional change.

Key highlights include:
EBT first expands our conceptions and expectations of education and teaching: education includes and goes beyond subject-matter teaching and learning and centers equitable policies, practices, experiences, and outcomes.

Educational transformations must go beyond classrooms: to include the structural and institutional contexts in which they are embedded.

EBT seeks to center and benefit all students, especially those who have been historically marginalized: by representing, recognizing, and advancing students’ own forms of knowledge and lived experiences as well as their diverse identities, communities, and histories.

EBT facilitates relational and reciprocal learning environments: that cultivate caring and authentic relationships, redistribute power in both the classroom and the curriculum, and recognize students, teachers, and communities as education co-constructors.

The report includes a landscape analysis to document the state of the EBT discussion within the research community, understand the lived experiences of those who implement gateway introductory courses, and identify promising policies, programs, and practices for equitable student outcomes. The Equity-Based Teaching Collective states, “If our goal is to make the system work for all our students we have to better understand what in the system needs to work better."

As a result of the landscape analysis, the report highlights 15 recommendations across five stakeholders: Institutional Leaders, Centers for Teaching and Learning, Schools/Departments, Faculty, and Students, and showcases the significant responsibility that each stakeholder ultimately holds in equitable student success. Also included are recommendations for communities, the state and federal landscape, disciplines, higher education associations and related businesses, and funders. This report focuses on policies, programs, and practices to improve EBT, yet equitable student outcomes are the ultimate goal.

The full resource, Equity-Based Teaching in Higher Education: The Levers that Institutions Can Use for Scaling Improvement, is available for download here. To contact Every Learner Everywhere, email everylearner@wiche.edu, or call (303) 541-0208. Follow Every Learner on LinkedIn at Every Learner Everywhere.

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The Equity-Based Teaching Collective (EBTC) is a group of scholars committed to advancing equitable teaching in higher education. We are composed of principal investigators and team members across three institutions: American University, Florida International University, and the University of Connecticut. We collectively study the social context of teaching and learning, faculty development of inclusive practices, and programming in the cultivation of equity in education; college student and faculty experiences, racial equity, and retention, particularly for Black and underrepresented groups; equity-based teaching and learning in racially and ethnically diverse college classrooms; and the organizational contexts that support equity-based teaching improvement. We draw from our own lived experiences with a range of identities that include the populations that we study. We cultivate this work based on our scholarship as well as our practice as educators and education developers in higher education. The EBTC recognizes that to improve the equitable outcomes of higher education and realize the full potential for our democracy, our systems must improve to honor students’ humanity. Higher education has not evolved in a historical context to value and reward equity-based teaching or BLILI students. We come together as a collective to highlight the possibility of transformation on a scalable level to honor these students, their success, and their humanity.

Emilie Cook
Every Learner Everywhere
+1 303-541-0208
email us here

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