Category: GRAD5114

GEDI Post 5: Inclusive pedagogy, diversity and implicit bias

Posted on by Nayara Faria


Inclusive pedagogy deals with creating a supportive and inclusive classroom that ensures all students have equal access to learning, and both professor and student participate in this environment with mutual respect to differences among groups. Inclusive pedagogy is crucial to student’s learning because social identities of both student and teacher have a direct impact on the learning experience. Also, when students feel they socially belong to the academic community, they increase their probabilities of both academic success and well-being.

Creating an inclusive environment in the classroom, involves thinking about six main aspects of your teaching philosophy: content, pedagogy, assessment climate and power (check out more details about this topic in this link).
  • Content: What material have you chosen? In what ways is your curricular design accessible and relevant to your students? Are there any barriers to inclusion?
  • Pedagogy: How are you promoting student engagement in ways that are meaningful and relevant to students?
  • Assessment: How are you asking students to practice and perform what they’re learning? How can we diversify the ways that students demonstrate their growing proficiencies?
  • Climate: In what ways are you creating an atmosphere for learning that is accessible and meaningful for all?
  • Power: How can you craft a learning environment that empowers students and helps to bring attention to or disrupt traditional power dynamics between teacher and student and among students?
Besides these points, I believe it is crucial that we understand the difference between inclusion and diversity. This is important because: a) with inclusion we can be diverse; b) with diversity we might not be inclusive.

Just pay attention in the following images and you will understand what I am talking about:

Exclusion: 


Segregation:



Integration: 


Diversity:


By promoting an inclusive environment, we also can promote a diverse environment in our classroom. Diversity is important because it enhances creativity, encourages the consideration of alternatives even before any interpersonal interaction takes places and it leads to better decision making and problem solving. However, by promoting diversity in our environments, we are also subject to the pyramid of hate:

Source: https://darfurgeno.weebly.com/pyramid-of-hate.html

In this sense, it is crucial that we understand how our hidden brain works (see How 'The Hidden Brain' Does The Thinking For Us for more details) , because we are all subject to implicit bias towards some topics that might prevent us to promote a truly inclusive classroom.

But what is implicit bias?

According to the Ohio State University implicit bias, also known as implicit social cognition, refers to the attitudes or stereotypes that affect our understanding, actions, and decisions in an unconscious manner.

I always thought of myself as being conscious, intentional and deliberate about my actions and behavior. I never thought I was a biased person regarding religion, sex or age. However, when I took an implicit association test, I got shocked! Look at my results:
  • Automatic preference for Judaism over Islam.
  • A moderate automatic association for Male with Career and Female with Family.
  • A slight automatic preference for Young people over Old people.
I am only a MS student going for a Ph.D in the next semester. I do not have classroom experience to share regarding how I have been dealing with inclusion, diversity and implicit bias. After reading more these topics, I can say that I have become much humbler about my views and much less certain about myself.

How about you?
  • Have you taken the implicit association test? Did you get shocked with your results?
  • What have you done to promote inclusiveness in your classroom?
  • How do you deal with implicit bias?





Human Factors view on attention and multitasking

Posted on by Nayara Faria
Many people see multitasking as a way of increasing efficiency in our daily life. However, multitasking is a thread of degrading performance. This is true specially in the classroom environment.  In simple words, when multitasking we are executing two or more tasks that are not equally important: these are the primary and the secondary tasks.

Let's suppose a common example in the classroom environment:
  • Primary Task: Main task a person is concentrating on: paying attention on a lecture and taking notes
  • Secondary Task: Distraction task which has to be executed in parallel: using the cellphone to text
Perfect execution of two parallel tasks is possible but requires learning and depends on several context factors. Usually, automatic tasks that require no attention can have a good time sharing with more difficult tasks. However, being in a classroom involves controlled tasks that require attention. These type of tasks are considered hard and require more attention and cognitive resources. Learning a new subject , taking notes, paying attention to a conversation and texting back are controlled tasks take can not be automate even with practice.  

In fact, these tasks are considered in nature and therefore, they are harder to execute in parallel than more distinct ones. When tasks are similar, they compete for same abstract cognitive resources. As humans, we have a fixed pool of available resources. In this way, conflicts between tasks occur when more resources are concurrently requested than available. We do not allocate resources evenly between tasks. If a conversation is more interesting than a task, more cognitive resources will be allocated to this task. In this way, a perfect time-sharing is not possible. 

Additionally, most dual tasks require enormous “mental effort”. For instance, if you are trying to learn a difficult subject in class but at the same time you are engaged in a controversial subject with your friends using your cellphone, both tasks require enormous resources. If tasks requirements are greater than your available resources, you start experiencing mental workload. Yes! You can get more exhausted in class by using your cellphone!

What are your thoughts on using cellphones in the classroom vs attention and multitasking? 



Ten years challenge: How did my learning process changed?

Posted on by Nayara Faria
If you are a social media user, you have noticed that in the last weeks many people are posting then-and-now profile pictures: the ten years challenge. Even though many might believe that this is a movement created by Facebook to train their facial recognition algorithm, I think it is a nice opportunity for me to reflect what changed in my learning process in the last ten years.

Before College... 

I got my first computer in 2011 in my first semester in college. Up to that time, learning for me was basically an offline process. In my high school, we did not have PowerPoint classes. If we were lucky, maybe in one of our classes the professor could show some pictures in this old projector. It was the closest thing from PowerPoint that we had:



Old Projector 

Because we did not have PowerPoint classes, some professors did an effort to give us some handouts so that we did not have to copy too much from the black board. However, the handouts were not photocopied. Who does remember this machine? 

What is the name of this machine? 

We did not have books for every class. Even the classes we had books, most of them were borrowed from our school. Therefore, we needed to copy in our notebooks most of the subject taught in class.

Some part of our grade was based in our notebook. We did not have smartphones to take pictures from the board that we would never look back. In fact, we had to practice handwriting a lot. At some extend I believe that this process made me a better writer and I could learn a lot of the subject because I needed to read it while writing. Last semester at Virginia Tech I remember one of my classmates complaining to the professor that we should have extra time in the exams, because handwriting was a slow process, and everybody was used to write using their computers.

Schools did not have electronic resources
Project Cover: written by hand



I had more opportunities for "hands- on" learning. This is an example of a biology homework we used to do at school. 

Example of a biology homework 

Do not get me wrong! We had internet on 2011. However, not everybody had easy access to the internet and the school did not have computers in the classroom. I remember we had to be really creative for presenting projects. Nowadays, I am used to do a nice PowerPoint presentation for any type of project presentation. Not too long ago, we used to create songs, dance, perform or find new creative ways to present something.

The most common way of presenting projects besides PowerPoints

I have made so many cardboard TV's to present project's and homework:

Cardboard TV example

This book collection was my google up to year 2010 or so:

Barsa Collection

In college ... 

When I went to college, everything drastically changed. I went to a good private school and so, they had many resources that I was not used to.  It took me a while to get used to the "PowerPoint class idea".  Even though my whole life I was exposed to the traditional lecture-oriented classroom, the lack of technologies made us to find creative ways to engage students. In college, learning became quite boring. The creative ways were always based on "showing videos" or "PowerPoint presentations".  I had to learn basic rules to write academic documents. I did not even know what a citation was. It was a difficult change and I had to start taking computer classes and start learning more about the idea behind computer programming. However, not everything was more difficult. Doing homework and projects became an easier process. Google came to save my time looking for references. However, I feel that I learnt  more how to Ctrl+c and Ctrl+V. Because I did not have to handwrite anything, I could only scan read most of my references. In fact, with less time, I had more information (But, do students really read the references? ). 

Exchange Program  ...