55 Inclusion, Diversity, and Equity
Cases on Social Issues: For Class Discussion
Deirdre Maultsaid and Gregory John (Kwantlen Polytechnic University)
2022
Licence: CC BY-NC
This Open Educational Resource, “Cases on Social Issues: For Class Discussion” includes valuable cases on issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion for student use. The critical events portrayed in the cases are realistic and emotional, and feature the experiences of under-represented and marginalized people. These thoughtful, contemporary cases pose ethical dilemmas about social issues that encourage post-secondary students and instructors to have stimulating, inclusive, and compassionate discussions. Inspired by input from post-secondary students and authored by people usually under-represented in education material, this resource is designed for upper-level undergraduate or graduate students in the humanities, social sciences, business, healthcare, science, agriculture, environmental studies, law and more. Each case is supplemented with modifiable discussion prompts, notes for teaching strategy, and a short reading list. This resource is a work in progress.
Formats: Online, EPUB, PDF, and more
Digital Methods for Disability Studies
School of Disability Studies (Toronto Metropolitan University)
2022
Licence: CC BY-NC
The Digital Methods for Disability Studies course introduces students to a range of technologies and teaches them to think critically with and through media objects, practices, and processes. Through texts, videos, podcasts, games, and interactive activities, students develop their critical thinking, close-reading, textual analysis, platform analysis, visual analysis, and critical game design skills. This course offers students an opportunity to both interrogate the digital realm as a site of inequality and to harness digital tools and methods in addressing complex social challenges.
Formats: Online and EPUB
Diversity and Difference in Communication
OpenLearn Diversity & Difference in Communication (The Open University)
2021
Licence: CC BY-NC-SA
Interpersonal communication in health and social care services is by its nature diverse. As a consequence, achieving good or effective communication whether between service providers and service users, or among those working in a service means taking account of diversity, rather than assuming that every interaction will be the same. This text explores the ways in which difference and diversity impact on the nature of communication in health and social care services.
Formats: Online and PDF
Haunting Our Biases: Using Participatory Theatre to Interrupt Implicit Bias
Kevin Hobbs, Nadia Ganesh, Sheila O’Keefe-McCarthy, Joe Norris, Sandy Howe, and Valerie Michaelson (Brock University)
2022
Licence: CC BY-NC
This project invites learners to deepen their self-awareness about the implicit biases that they hold. In participatory theatre, this kind of invitation for self-exploration can haunt us, leaving a lasting impression that can evoke self-reflexive actions and behaviours.
Formats: Online and EPUB
Humanizing Learning: A Student-Generated Framework
Co-designed by students, recent graduates, educational developers, librarians, and instructors (University of Toronto Mississauga)
2022
Licence: CC BY
This work explores what humanizing learning is – and isn’t – while centering student voices and the student experience. This is a resource meant for instructors, and is filled with quotes from students and instructors alike.
Format: Online
Inclusive Education: Simple Strategies to Improve Equity and Embrace Diversity
Alison Flynn and Jeremy Kerr (University of Ottawa)
2022
Licence: CC BY-NC-SA
The premise of inclusion should be thoroughly uncontroversial. The job of professors, instructors, and educators of all kinds is to offer each student in their classes the same opportunities to learn and expand their horizons. It is part of the basic definition of what it means to do this job. That educators want all their students to succeed is axiomatic, particularly those who are interested in reading a book of this kind. Nevertheless, the challenges of learning can differ enormously among individuals, and many of those challenges align with their identities, cultural backgrounds, privileges, and capacities. None of these characteristics predicts talent in any discipline. Yet, student success nevertheless correlates with individual characteristics [Caballero et al. 2007, Wei et al. 2018]. In other words, characteristics do not predict talent, but characteristics do relate to success. The inclusion gap is the space between talent and success, and it is created, in part, by obstacles to inclusion that we hope this resource might help reduce. While the idea of inclusion – what we refer to as “inclusion by default” – ought to be obvious, achieving an inclusive learning environment can be challenging. Failures to account for diversity in learning environments can lead to systemic exclusion of students for reasons that are unrelated to their ability, effort, or ambition. This outcome is the antithesis of what educators aim to achieve.
As authors of this resource, we recognize that we carry our own biases, learned from lifetimes of living in society. Our shared aspiration to eliminate prejudice cannot heal the lived (and sometimes life-altering) experiences of our students and colleagues in being singled out, called out, or labelled because of their identities. A university course cannot wash away such things either. But it is imperative that university courses should never be places where such exclusion is perpetuated. So, the fundamental goal of this book is to suggest ways to do better using a framework that aligns with fairly common approaches to conceiving, designing, and teaching a university-level course. Perfection, which is subjective in this context in any event, should not be the enemy of progress. As instructors, we are uniquely positioned to make a positive difference in students’ lives and careers. It’s worth it.
Formats: Online, EPUB, and PDF
Inclusive Pedagogies
Edited by Christina Page (Kwantlen Polytechnic University)
2021
Licence: CC BY-NC-SA
This resource introduces educators to educational strategies that can foster more inclusive, equitable, and just classroom environments. It aims to create classroom environments that support the needs of diverse learners, while at the same time creating an enhanced learning environment for all.
Topics include:
- Defining inclusive teaching practices
- Applying a systematic approach to making implicit cultural and disciplinary knowledge explicit
- Using the academic literacies model to support student development in reading, writing, and digital literacies
- Supporting multilingual student writing
- Facilitating diverse student teams
- Creating inclusive online learning environments
Formats: Online, EPUB, and PDF
Interculturalizing the Curriculum
Christina Page (Kwantlen Polytechnic University)
2021
Licence: CC BY-NC-SA
Interculturalizing the Curriculum is the third in a series of educator development resources on interculturality. Developed for the KPU Intercultural Teaching Program, this short book engages educators in two main strands of interculturalizing the curriculum: (1) revising curriculum to reflect intercultural learning outcomes, and diverse content from multiple perspectives, and (2) supporting student interculturality development.
In the first chapters of the book, we explore the process of interculturalization. First, the process is placed within its theoretical context(s) with an exploration of the streams of thought that contribute to understandings of how education can support equity and social justice. From there, Leask’s (2013, 2015) model of curriculum internationalization informs the process of considering how our curriculum currently reflects diverse knowledge sources and ways of knowing, and envisioning what changes might be desired.
The second part of this resource focuses on student interculturality development. One of the overarching goals of interculturalizing the curriculum is providing a means by which our students understand their identities, learn to engage with multiple perspectives, relate effectively with classmates, and prepare to advocate for social change. These chapters discuss how student interculturality development can be integrated into the curriculum and assessed, as well as how educators can support the complex and challenging classroom conversations that arise from an interculturalized curriculum.
Formats: Online, EPUB, and PDF
Learning to be Human Together
Student, faculty and staff at OCAD University, Mohawk College, Brock University, Trent University, Nipissing University, University of Windsor, and University of Toronto at Mississauga
2022
Licence: CC BY
This resource explores the importance of, and processes for, humanizing education. We start by exploring what humanizing teaching and learning means: to acknowledge that our relationships are foundational to the work that we do. It aims to make learning inclusive with connection, access, and meaning-making at its core.
Formats: Online, EPUB, and PDF
Making Lab Based Courses Inclusive
Allyson MacLean (University of Ottawa)
2022
Licence: CC BY-NC-SA
This resource is meant to provide general guidance on enhancing the accessibility of lab-based courses, with a particular focus on supporting the learning of students with physical disabilities. Individuals with disabilities are under-represented within scientific disciplines, and students with physical disabilities may even be discouraged from taking science-based courses in part due to concerns about the relatively inaccessible nature of scientific laboratories. It is worth emphasizing that while students with disabilities represent a small minority of the overall student population, the implementation of inclusive teaching practices has the potential to benefit learners of all abilities. Uniquely, teaching laboratories are learning environments in which poorly designed spaces and unsafe practices not only have the potential to adversely impact accessibility and learning but, at worst, may represent danger to a student and others in the class.
Format: Online
Our Lives: An Ethnic Studies Primer
Vera Guerrero Kennedy and Rowena Bermio
2022
Licence: CC BY-NC
This is an introduction or primer to ethnic studies, not a comprehensive review of the literature. We identified and included major concepts, theories, perspectives, and voices in ethnic studies with research from anthropology, history, political science, psychology, and sociology to offer an inclusive approach for critical inquiry.
Formats: Online
Using Open Educational Resources to Promote Social Justice
Kevin Adams, Elissah Becknell, CJ Ivory, and Angela Pashia (ACRL)
2022
Licence: CC BY-NC
OER Is an opportunity to not only save students money but incorporate CRT into the curriculum—both in content and in practice.
Formats: PDF