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Dr. Viji Sathy — a professor at UNC teaching statistical principles in psychological research studying the impact of new teaching techniques and retention — is an expert in inclusive teaching and innovation education instruction.
“Inclusive teaching is basically a way to ensure that we are working towards equity in our classrooms and helping to build equity by the way we structure our courses,” said Sathy. ” … When we teach inclusively, we’re really aiming to help all of our students, but we find that this is especially helpful for our underrepresented students, our first generation college students. Students are more likely to succeed in these approaches because we’re really taking into the structure of the course good learning strategies and practices.”
According to Sathy, by “not leaving to the chance” when it comes to how students engage in the course and their learning process, instruction by carefully considered design makes for successful students. Some differences, however — such as the resources students have to engage in remote learning — present challenges relatively new to instruction.
“This is a chance and an opportunity, I think, for all of us to recognize our students come to us with different resources and abilities and to be able to use that diversity to our benefit in the classroom,” said Sathy.
Teaching and learning online comes with its own unique hurdles, challenges that are being navigated by everyone in light of COVID-19. Sathy’s efforts to connect herself to students, and students to each other, have taken many forms.
“I wanted to figure out ways to connect with my students as we met online,” said Sathy. “And I’m thinking about the opportunities of meeting online in our own home spaces. I’ve had dogs for a long time, and every now and then I’ll bring them in for office hours on campus and students will come by to visit with my dogs and chat. I thought ‘well, let’s take advantage of the fact that we’re all home, let’s put our pets on screen.’ I made a little invitation to class that was a ‘bring your pet to class day.’ It was a chance where we could connect before class started, if people wanted to show off their pets to tell us who they were, and that was such a fun class because I got to see a variety of pets.”
Sathy has also encouraged students to take their learning outside, allowing her class to take instruction via Zoom outdoors in an effort to “infuse a little fun” into the process of intensive education, and introduced new tools and platforms to pull together a cohesive classroom experience without the classroom.
“An important part of inclusive teaching and something we often talk about [is] structure,” said Sathy. “What we mean by structure is that we’re building in instructions, the ability to understand how to do something. … Really, just trying to make it clear what the expectations are around a new tool and to document important part of structure and inclusive teaching. Not assuming that everybody knows how to do certain things, but rather building in tools and resources so that no one is left trying to figure it out on their own. Because when you try to figure things out on your own, you make assumptions.”
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