Please join us for the next CELT panel discussion hosted by SBU’s Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching (CELT): Accessibility on Tuesday, April 5th at 1pm.
Carol Hernandez, Senior Instructional Designer, CELT
Jennifer Jaiswal, Instructional Designer CELT
This panel is the third in the Spring 2022 series on Inclusive Pedagogy. You must register in advance to attend this Zoom meeting. Questions? Please email Instructional Designer, Jennifer Jaiswal, jennifer.jaiswal@stonybrook.edu
Join CELT on Wednesday, Oct. 20, 2021 at 1 p.m. ET
Description: In this discussion, faculty members from philosophy, journalism, and physical therapy will talk about how they use authentic assessment in their teaching practice and how that can be an equity approach that helps students to challenge their assumptions. Authentic assessment requires students to apply knowledge to real world situations in innovative and concrete ways.
Panelists:
Jennifer Carter: Lecturer, Department of Philosophy and College of Business
James Pierre-Glaude: Clinical Assistant Professor, Physical Therapy Program, School of Health Technology and Management
Zachary R. Dowdy: Assistant Professor of Practice, School of Communication and Journalism
Facilitators:
Carol Hernandez: Senior Instructional Designer, CELT
Catherine Scott, Assistant Director for Faculty Development – Testing, Assessment & Evaluation, CELT
Attention all Teaching Assistants and Postdocs! The Center for Inclusive Education (CIE) and the Center for Excellence in Learning & Teaching (CELT) is excited to announce the Fall 2021 College Teaching Seminars!
Register below for the Fall 2021 College Teaching Seminars! You can attend one, some, or all of the seminars. All seminars will be held on Wednesdays from 3:30pm – 5pm on Zoom. Please register for each session you plan to attend. The series will continue in the Spring.
Seminar Topics and Descriptions:
10/6: Building a Foundation for a Teaching Philosophy Facilitator: Kimberly Bell, PhD – TA Development Specialist, CELT
In this session, you will reflect on how you teach or how you would like to teach with the goal of building a solid foundation for your Teaching Philosophy. A full Statement of Teaching Philosophy will be a required component of your job applications and a condensed version is often used as part of faculty profiles on department websites.
10/20: Developing Inclusive Pedagogy Facilitator: Kimberly Bell, PhD – TA Development Specialist, CELT
In this session we will reflect on the connections between social identity, privilege, and equity and how these can influence both you and your students. By becoming aware of our own biases and the identities that may be present in our students, we make great leaps in being able to prevent negative influences, and perhaps more importantly develop strategies for open and honest communication to help us when we inevitably make mistakes.
11/3: Overview of the Scientific Teaching Framework Facilitator: Marvin O’Neal, PhD – Director of Introductory Biology Labs
Scientific Teaching is a framework of teaching designed specifically for teaching science in higher education. Drawing on large domains of effective pedagogy practices including Diversity, Active Learning, and Assessment we can reframe how we think of science courses and begin to develop strategies to bring these foundations of effective learning into our teaching.
11/17: The Flipped Classroom Facilitators: Rose Tirotta, EdD – Director, CELT and Bill Collins, PhD – Associate Professor, Neurobiology
Want to know more about LIVER activities? Learn how the hybrid course format is implemented in a large Biology lecture course. A hybrid course is a mix between an online and a face to face course. Lecture material is delivered online, for students to access nearly anytime. During scheduled class time, students participate in activities. In addition, general strategies for putting the flipped classroom into action will be discussed.
12/1: Course Based Undergraduate Research Experiences (CUREs) Facilitator: David Matus, PhD – Associate Professor, Biochemistry and Cell Biology
Course Based Undergraduate Research Experiences, or CUREs are a great way for students to get involved in research. Involving students in authentic research is more engaging than traditional lab courses and encourages deeper critical thinking and analysis. In this session, we will hear about a CURE lab offered at SBU, BIO 327: Developmental Genetics Lab.
Despite the challenges involved in moving to a remote teaching environment, Dr. Fouron displayed grace under pressure as he adapted to teaching over Zoom where he demonstrated compassion and empathy for his students while maintaining academic rigor and teaching effectiveness. In referring to the educator John Dewey, Dr. Fouron remarked that teachers “shouldn’t be strangers to the realities of students’ lives.” Teaching during the pandemic taught him that students are resilient in the face of difficulties, and often says that he is not interested in having students agree with his views, but rather he wants students to be able to articulate their own perspectives as both teachers and learners. His calm and determined demeanor throughout a difficult semester was inspiring not only to his students but to all of us here in CELT.
I had the opportunity to sit in on two of Dr. Fouron’s courses and was impressed by the way he facilitated his courses. Dr. Fouron consistently asked for student feedback and, most importantly, asked students to share their stories. Dr. Fouron also had many interesting and powerful stories, which addressed race, gender, and class, among other issues. Any questions that were asked were addressed positively and I felt like his class formed a strong community with each other, overcoming the challenges that COVID pressed upon them. Starting each class he also addressed the students saying that this class was for them, that every student had a voice, and that voice had the right to be heard.
What I think was the most powerful is that Dr. Fouron, after being a target of some horrible “Zoom-bombing” experiences, was able to accept me (and others) into his class for the semester and meet synchronously. He continued to teach Socratically and support his students during this difficult time (COVID) which provided them a sense of community.
This year CELT introduced a new award, the David L. Ferguson Award for Inclusive Teaching.
The inaugural awardee is JosephM. Pierce from the Department of Hispanic Languages and Literature. Dr. Pierce focuses his teaching on transparency and invites students into a conversation where they can engage critically with difficult topics. In doing so, it allows students to situate themselves in relation to an author, a body of work, a canon, or a discipline. In his Decoloniality and Queer Studies course, he challenges students to question some of the disciplinary boundaries that he learned in graduate school. Dr. Pierce stated that, “the knowledge that is taken as standard and normative has often been produced through violence and erasure, and by questioning intellectual standards, it opens up the possibility to ask questions that students haven’t had the opportunity to ask, but that brings students into a more ethical relationship with the scholarship.”
Dr. Pierce is Associate Professor of Latin American and Indigenous Studies. For his course, SPN 405 Issues in Hispanic Cultural Studies/SPN 532 Interdisciplinary Approaches to Hispanic Studies, he demonstrates all of the criteria for this award. Beyond the content, which focuses on Hispanic Visual Cultures/Decolonial Visuality in Latin America, he demonstrates a commitment to inclusive teaching and learning in his practice both inside and outside the classroom. For example, in the syllabus for this course. He is explicit in his own self-reflection on the choices he makes in the course content. He explains why he is choosing to assign readings in Spanish rather than the English translation as a way to address privilege in the academic publishing industry. He provides metrics on gender, race, and ethnicity of the authors assigned. As a way of helping students to feel ownership and a sense of belonging in the learning process, he assigns them to grade their own participation based on written expectations. His assignments include a variety of activities for students to read, annotate, write reflections, study images, and create cognitive maps. He provides an opportunity to submit one late assignment and calls it a “life happens” exception that students can opt for without needing to provide an explanation. In addition to the evidence in his syllabus, Dr. Pierce is a generous public scholar who works to inform the SB community on issues related to diversity, underrepresented populations, and white privilege in the academy.
This award was named after the late David L. Ferguson, who was a Distinguished Professor, former Chair of Technology and Society, and the founding director of Stony Brook’s Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching. Dr. Ferguson was a leader in and out of the classroom, driven by his lifelong interest in building diversity in STEM disciplines, and in securing the federal funding to achieve that goal.
Did you attend our Inclusive Teaching Panel: Antiracist Pedagogy in Action, on Monday, February 22? If not, you can watch the recording or the recording of any of our past Inclusive Teaching panels on our Inclusive Teaching website. It was a great discussion and as our panelists shared, college is an opportune time for students, faculty, and staff to have these types of paradigm-shifting conversations!
Some other takeaways presented at the panel:
Read authors coming from a critical theory perspective
Self-reflect on positionality in relation to systems of power and privilege
Look at course design, curriculum, representation, research activities
Collaborate to design new systems at organization levels
Join us for our next CELT Panel discussion coming up on Tuesday, March 16 at noon ET: A Case Study in Organizational Change: SB School of Health Technology Management Addresses DEI.
Online assessment is an equity issue. Right now, the majority of us are doing some, if not all, of our teaching and learning online while at the same time, all of us are living through a global pandemic. But we are not all facing the same barriers. COVID-19 is disproportionately affecting people in low income groups and those who are members of racial and ethnic minorities (Center for Disease Control and Prevention, 2020). In addition to facing an increased risk of becoming ill, and experiencing job, food, and housing insecurities, these circumstances have also exacerbated the digital divide–the gap in technology and internet access that already existed between wealthy and poor households (Ramsetty & Adams, 2020).
What does this have to do with assessment? Everything. Oftentimes we hear the word assessment, and immediately think of multiple choice exams and grades. This may lead to assuming that exams must be synchronous, proctored, timed, or otherwise “controlled” to prevent cheating and to ultimately ensure academic honesty (Hubler, 2020). However, we may not be aware that these approaches could also place extra burdens on already marginalized students. How? If a student does not have access to technology, Wi-Fi, and other resources, such as a private, dedicated workspace with a video camera and an open schedule that does not include working or caring for family members, a synchronous proctored online exam could be out of reach (if not impossible). A recent Pew Research study found that low-income parents of school-aged children expect to experience at least one of these three digital obstacles: having to complete schoolwork on a cell phone, having to use public Wi-Fi, and not having a computer in the home (Vogels, 2020).
When designing assessments, it’s important to remember that the types of controls that can be enforced in a physical setting may not be ideal for an online setting. This challenges us to think in new ways about how to conduct assessments that take into consideration not only the online environment, but also the associated factors that result in COVID-19 disparities in the lives of our students. Earlier this year, Montenegro and Jankowski (2020) discussed the need to embed equity into the assessment practice. Now that we are all living through the pandemic, this concept has taken on a greater sense of urgency.
According to Singer-Freeman, Hobbs, & Robinson (2019), “timed tests that use closed-ended questions and are completed in groups [synchronously] have the greatest potential to reveal false achievement gaps,” and fail to reflect a student’s true competence (p. 15). This points to less equity for students. However, assessments that use open-ended test questions and projects with real-world applications, such as reflective writing, ePortfolios, and research experiences, increase equity for students.
One way to bring equity into the process of designing assessments is to reframe them as a way to see how students have transformed as a result of learning what we are teaching (Ambrose, Bridges, DiPietro, Lovett, & Norman, 2010). In doing so, we open the door to more creative ways to document student progress. Furthermore, in an online environment, there are arguably an increased number of opportunities for students to show or demonstrate their newly acquired knowledge, attitudes, and skills. Students can create, present, write, problem solve, and collaborate via the tools that are already available to them through Blackboard or Google Suite.
Here are three approaches to keep in mind when designing equity-minded assessments for the online classroom.
Asynchronous. This avoids having students all try to take the same exam at the same time (Cohn & Seltzer, 2020). Is there a way to keep it open for a period of days so students are able to log in when they have the time and access to Wi-Fi or the technology they will need? Better yet, is there a way to randomize the questions or provide choices of assessment questions or types so that students are not all taking the same assessment?
Open-ended, reflective, relevant to real-world applications. This option takes into account the different challenges that students may be facing and invites them to make the course concepts relevant to their own professional or academic goals. For example, students may interview a practitioner already in the field, may create a plan for addressing a case study, or work with a partner to solve a problem or create a presentation for their peers.
Frequent, low-stakes, iterative, scaffolded. Is it possible to break up a project into a series of low-stakes chunks that students submit steadily throughout the semester? In this way, both you and your students can see their progress increase steadily rather than waiting for one or two high-stakes exams that may not reflect their true competency.
Ambrose, S. A., Bridges, M. W., DiPietro, M., Lovett, M. C., & Norman, M. K. (2010). How learning works: Seven research-based principles for smart teaching. Jossey-Bass.
Ramsetty, A., & Adams, C. (2020). Impact of the digital divide in the age of COVID-19. Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, 27(7), 1147-1148.
Singer‐Freeman, K., Hobbs, H., & Robinson, C. (2019). Theoretical matrix of culturally relevant assessment. Assessment Update, 31(4), 1-16.
On May 6th, 2021, Dr. George Fouron won the 2020-2021 COVID Teaching Hero Award at 
