A Classroom for Everyone

Photo by Mikael Kristenson on Unsplash

Megan Sullivan always strives to make sure her students feel like they belong in her classes and that they are set up to succeed. Several years ago, the associate professor of rhetoric learned there was a name for what she had already been doing: inclusive pedagogy, a teaching framework designed to make courses accessible to and supportive of all students. It includes approaches such as balancing the representation of different backgrounds in teaching curricula and making course materials available in a variety of formats so that they are accessible to many learning styles.

“I was interested in inclusive pedagogy before I knew it existed,” says Sullivan, who has worked at the school for more than 25 years. “My desire has always been to reach and get to know every single student in my classroom. I was working on these things that research would later say were inclusive practices, but I didn’t realize then.”

Sullivan is director of BU’s Inclusive Pedagogy Initiative, established in 2022 as part of the University’s Institute for Excellence in Teaching & Learning (formerly the Center for Teaching & Learning), which trains and supports faculty in using inclusive practices in their classrooms. Collegian spoke with her about the benefits of inclusive pedagogy, the work the initiative has done, and how she and other instructors across campus have been using it in their courses.

Collegian: How do you define inclusive pedagogy?

Megan Sullivan: There are many ways to define inclusive pedagogy, but I tend to define it the way many research universities do, which is a way to make sure that all students succeed. More specifically, we want to make sure all students have equitable access to learning, have an equal desire to learn, and have access to equitable practices in the classroom.

What are the benefits of inclusive pedagogy?

We are at the point where we have research on it, and the research shows that inclusive pedagogy helps all students. It’s especially beneficial for those students who have been traditionally underrepresented in higher education. Inclusive pedagogy is part of BU’s strategic plan for 2030, so there was a recognition of research on how it helps all students. We’ve begun to seed inclusive pedagogy throughout all of our disciplines.

How did the Inclusive Pedagogy Initiative come to fruition?

In 2020, BU had a day of engagement after the death of George Floyd. Crystal Williams [BU’s former vice president and associate provost for community and inclusion] knew that I was interested in inclusive pedagogy, so she asked me to put together a panel for that day.

It became clear during that panel that students wanted a more diverse curriculum and more of a feeling of belonging in the classroom. And then it also became clear that faculty wanted to know how to do that.

From there, Crystal Williams created a working group of 15 faculty and administrators, and I was a cochair of that working group. We met for two years to look at what BU was doing with respect to inclusive pedagogy and what our peer institutions were doing, and to write a report. We submitted the report to then Provost [Jean] Morrison, and soon the Inclusive Pedagogy Initiative was announced.

It was something the community wanted. And during that two-year period, we created listening sessions where we talked to students and faculty about what they felt they needed more of.

What does your role as faculty director of the Inclusive Pedagogy Initiative entail?

I coordinate closely with the Institute for Excellence in Teaching & Learning. People will reach out to me or they’ll reach out to the center, and they’ll say they want to know more about inclusive teaching or that they want someone to talk to their faculty about it. So I often give workshops to faculty, to departments and divisions, on what it means to teach more inclusively.

Sometimes I will give workshops to faculty and graduate students about things like having difficult dialogues in the classroom. Sometimes I’ll get a call from someone who needs help creating a more inclusive syllabus, and I’ll help with that or I’ll give them resources. I’ve made four-minute videos on inclusive teaching, designed to help faculty.

Every summer, I also help facilitate an Inclusive Pedagogy Institute. Anybody who’s instructing undergraduates on the BU campus can apply to it. We meet for two or three days with them during the summer and we provide programming on inclusive teaching. Then, during the academic year, they get a small stipend to implement some inclusive practices in their classroom, and I meet with them throughout the academic year to provide additional programming and to mentor them along their inclusive journey. I’m pretty sure we’ve had representation from every school and college, including from the medical school, at the institute. That means we’ve reached a wide swath of people who are teaching our students.

So how can instructors make their classes more inclusive?

I say that there are many ways to do it, but I often talk about how to create a sense of belonging in the classroom. It’s knowing how to pronounce students’ names, knowing what pronouns they use, making them feel like this classroom is somewhere they can succeed. It’s also helping them feel like they have a sense of belonging in the discipline. It’s making sure that all students know how they can succeed and how they can show you what they know.

It’s also about creating a coherent curriculum that makes sense to students, creating structured and transparent activities and assignments, and practicing equity-focused assessment. It’s also really paying attention to your curriculum.

I don’t want instructors to assume I am asking them to do anything with their curriculum. I’m asking them to think about how it affects their students. For example, I recently talked to the Faculty of Computing & Data Sciences about what it means to create problem sets that all students feel like they can understand.

What is equity-focused assessment?

It means thinking carefully about your assessment. Are you assessing student learning or are you assessing whether or not a student can memorize something? There may be places where they have to memorize something, but generally, we want to know how students are learning, so we want to create assessments where they can actually show us what they’re learning.

It might mean not always having high-stakes exams like a midterm and a final. It might mean breaking that up to more lower-stakes, smaller exams. It might mean giving exams in different ways, or at least allowing people to show you what they know in different ways. Maybe multiple-choice exams aren’t for everybody. Maybe you want to keep some multiple choice, but then you have some short essays. Maybe you even have some sort of drawing component to show what they know. If you’re teaching an anatomy class, maybe your exam is that you’re going to set up a lab and students are going to have to go around and show you what they know on each lab table. You want to test what you’ve taught.

I’m not Pollyannish. I know that some students are going to have more trouble than others, but I think we can make a more equitable playing field for all students.

How do you incorporate inclusive pedagogy in your teaching, and how have you observed other faculty approach it?

I use it to create a sense of belonging in my class, to make my students feel like they belong and that they can succeed in my class and in college in general. I also use it to create a structured course syllabus, where students know what is expected of them. I give them models for success; if I give them an assignment, I show them a sample good assignment. I’m not asking them to try to figure out what I want. I’m asking them to succeed at a particular task, whether it’s writing an essay of a certain page number or being succinct in a memo they write.

I create a curriculum where I’m pretty sure most, if not all, my students feel comfortable in it. That means reaching out beyond canonical white writers. It means recognizing that there are students who have diverse learning styles.

BU now has access to what is called Blackboard Ally. This means that if faculty post a PDF copy on Blackboard, students can download it in a manner that is most accessible and helpful to them. Commuter students can listen to an MP3 of an assigned article on their way to class. Students who get easily distracted can download it in one format, and students who want to annotate as they learn can download it in another one. This ensures all students succeed.

I’ve seen people restructure exams. I’ve seen other people work hard to make sure that all students participate. A lot of folks are widening the scope of what we think of as participation. As a personal example, at the beginning of my career, I felt like I wanted to reward students for participating in class. Now I know that what I was doing was rewarding those students who knew how to participate, who had gone to high schools that taught them that it was okay for them to speak up, that it was okay for them to engage in dialogue. But what about those students who never learned it? Now, I teach what it means to—and how to—participate meaningfully in class. I teach more of the skills that I want students to have, rather than assuming they have them. And I see other people doing that.

You mentioned how you consider inclusivity even when developing a syllabus. What are some of the considerations you take when building your syllabi?

At the beginning of my career, I used to think that I was inclusive because I showed my excitement to my students, like, “Welcome to Rhetoric 101!” But now I know that students need more than that. That’s why in my syllabus I now start by telling students why I like teaching this course. I am very transparent in the syllabus about when things are due and what they need [to complete each assignment]. I even put the assignments in there, so they can start thinking about them and planning them. Students are busy, and giving assignments at the last minute doesn’t recognize that some people need different timelines to process things.

I used to just put a statement in the syllabus about BU’s Disability & Access Services. And now my syllabus explains how I believe in a principle called Universal Design for Learning—I don’t expect my students to know that term—which I say basically means that there are many ways we can allow students to show us what they learn. I add that, while I practice it, a student might need more than that, and if so, I can introduce them to Disability & Access Services.

Student evaluations must play a role in how you’re assessing the inclusivity of your courses, right?

Yes, for the first time in my over 25 years at BU, our course evaluations now ask if students feel like they belong in the class. I think there’s been a shift in course evaluations, moving away from the personality of the instructor to what the student learned. And I think that’s an inclusive strategy—to think about what a student put into a course and what they got out of it.