School of Mathematics and Science DEIB Inclusive Curriculum: Sense of belonging

• To start off on an inclusive foot, faculty may share their names (including pronunciation tips) and pronouns with students.
  • Then, ask students to share their names and, if they are comfortable, their pronouns.
• If you are comfortable, include relevant personal anecdotes obstacles you may have faced in school (anxiety, learning disabilities, difficult life circumstances) and how you overcame those.
• Encourage students to ask for help and come to see the instructor during office hours.
  • Explain the purpose of office hours.

Documents, images, videos, and other tools in the courses must use ALT text, include closed captioning, and be readable by text-to-voice software. This not only is necessary to allow all students to properly access learning materials but will also address inclusion and improve feelings of belonging.

Tables need appropriate titles and headings. To learn more, sign up for Digital Accessibility professional development training for MS PowerPoint, Word, and Excel.

Images need equivalent alternatives and decorative images need to be marked as such. Alt text can help all learners, considering that images require more bandwidth, and some students may have slow internet service.

• Set your pronouns and share a “how to” guide with students.
  • Set by step: Go to “account settings” when clicking on your profile photo and name on the top right corner of the LMS.
  • Then select “use different pronouns” to type your choice of pronouns.
  • Once you are done, “save” the changes.

• Preferred names need to be updated through the registrar’s office since that information comes from Banner.
  • Encourage students to do this!

It is important to offer a variety of perspectives and approaches to support feelings of belonging and increase persistence.  Apart from the "diversity in course content” section of this guide, consider a constructivist approach to teaching. It promotes inquiry-based learning which is founded on learners’ natural curiosity about their own experiences. Thus:

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• Conduct a survey to find out about your students’ interests and backgrounds
• Let students suggest themes they can relate to for projects
• Let students create their own review problems for tests
• Honor a student in a test with a problem that relates to an idea he/she had asked you about
• Use culturally diverse examples as much as possible
• Create undergraduate research opportunities for students to have them experience different group dynamics among scientists, professors, and peers.
•  Listen and respond to student questions no matter how small, out-of-context, or unimportant they may seem
• Show them how to give constructive, honest, and sensitive feedback to each other
• Be a good role model to generate that feeling of acceptance and belonging in students