7

As described in the Introduction, we structured this guide in three segments to replicate the flow of teaching a college course. Section One proposed an equity-minded approach to designing or refining a course before the term, and the previous units of Section Two dove into what happens while you’re teaching the class. In Section Three, we will propose what equity-minded faculty do after the term has ended. But before proceeding to those important suggestions, we want to help you picture what faculty committed to equity actually do on a day-to-day basis. To that end, this unit looks very different from all the other units in the guide. There’s no “What Does the Research Say?” section, and we don’t end with ideas for getting started.

Instead, this entire unit consists of two extended case studies, enabling us to offer a behind-the-scenes view of the day-to-day teaching practices of two of the coauthors, Flower Darby and Bryan Dewsbury, teaching two distinct courses: a small asynchronous graduate-level online course and a large introductory in-person course. Although the case studies do not (and, of course, could not) describe everything either Flower or Bryan does in their teaching, they provide much more specificity than other parts of the guide. We’ve included these specific examples because faculty have told us time and time again that it’s difficult to picture how to implement inclusive teaching. To truly bring these case studies to life, each author has written them in first person.

Flower’s case study is based on her extensive online teaching experience as well as her work in instructional design and educational development, and it reflects that she’s learned a lot from other compassionate and enthusiastic online instructors. The study highlights one online asynchronous course, CCHE 590: Technological Fluency and Leadership, a course Flower created for a large public regional comprehensive university. The study also includes examples and stories drawn from previous online courses she has taught, designed, consulted on, and been inspired by. We chose to highlight asynchronous online teaching instead of Zoom or hybrid teaching because it looks significantly different than in-person teaching. By weaving together this range of examples and stories (from both faculty and students), Flower demonstrates what she learned through research and experience. She also shows how she took that learning into account to build and teach CCHE 590 in a focused effort to implement evidence-based practices in online course design and teaching. (Spoiler alert: She connects with and interacts with her online students—a lot.)

Meanwhile, Bryan’s case study features BIO 101, a large-enrollment introductory biology course he has taught at multiple institutions. Like Flower’s online teaching practices, Bryan’s approach to inclusive teaching has evolved considerably since his initial experiences teaching an honors section of introductory biology as a graduate student. And a great deal of his growth as an instructor has been informed by deep partnership with faculty and staff colleagues, opportunities to learn with and from faculty from across the country, and importantly, his students: both those who have enrolled in his class over the years and those who support his teaching directly by serving as undergraduate learning assistants and graduate teaching assistants.

You’ll find brief references to the equity-focused planning and design that went into each of these classes, but the focus in these case studies is on what the instructors actually do when teaching a class. We hope these concrete examples will help you imagine what you can do next week or next semester to advance equity in your own classes. We also hope that reading them prompts you to seek out other ways to pull back the curtain and see other examples of equity-minded teaching in action. Perhaps you can take turns with a colleague to visit one another’s class, or ask a peer to enroll you as a guest in their online course. Finally, although these examples come from two very different course contexts, and one may be more familiar to you or more similar to your teaching context, we encourage you to read both with an open and inquisitive mind. We hope you will find inspiration in each to make small changes to your teaching, no matter your institutional, disciplinary, and modality contexts.