Teaching Academy Retreat: Engaging the Diverse Classroom

January 16th I attended the UW Teaching Academy Annual Retreat. The topic was, “What can I do in my classroom to create a welcoming teaching/learning environment for all students?” This is a very important topic on campus right now, as we’ve learned that students from underrepresented groups are not performing well in many of our large, gateway courses. This is more true at UW than at most of our peer institutions and it is true even for students with high ACT scores.

In preparation for the retreat, we read Can We Talk about Race? And other Conversations in an Era of School Resegregation by Beverly Daniel Tatum, Ph.D. I’ll add this to our office bookshelf. If you’d like to take a look it’s a quick read and we focused on Chapter 2.

At the workshop, we heard some interesting presentations and worked on some challenging case studies in small groups. We also heard from a student panel, which was so enlightening. I learned about some excellent materials developed by CIRTL, in particular their book, Reaching All Students: A Resource for Teaching in Science, Technology, Engineering, & Mathematics, which I’ll place on our bookshelf, but is also freely available online (!!) I plan to go back to this for classes in all disciplines. This is a topic we should be thinking about for future LILI Forums and Retreats.

Access to Public Universities in the Chronicle

After three years working at a large private institutions, I decided I was committed to working at large, flagship public institutions.  I graduated from one of these (UW Madison) and have worked at two (UC Berkeley, UW Madison).  I know that there’s a lot that’s unique to these institutional environments when it comes to information literacy initiatives.  And I’d like to believe that we’re part of an important enterprise to provide a high-quality education to a broad population of students — education as a public good.   There’s a lot of data out there that demonstrates that we’re not living up to this ideal.

This week, the Chronicle of Higher Education includes several articles on this topic.  Universities at Risk: Seven Damaging Myths, is by Christopher Neufeld, who just wrote a book Unmaking the Public University: The Forty-Year Assault on the Middle Class (Harvard University Press, 2008). The other is “Public Universities at Risk: Abandoning Their Missions.”  That article (“commentary,” not a research study) takes a look at equity in access to education at large, flagship institutions like our own.

Referencing an Education Trust report, “Engines of Inequality: Diminishing Equity in the Nation’s Premier Public Universities,” the author writes, “our flagship public universities have become less accessible to low-income and minority students since 1995.”    There has been a decline in enrollment of Pell Grant-eligible students and public universities have become “less representative of the racial composition of the nation’s high-school graduates.”  This challenges some of our assumptions and ideals about the environment where we work.

At our WiscNet presentation about K-20 information literacy, Jo Ann Carr presented some statistics about the UW system that painted an even more depressing picture.  UW Madison, our flagship, fits this picture.  But if I remember correctly enrollment at the colleges is even less diverse than that at UW Madison.  I’ll ask Jo Ann to share those stats with us in a broader forum, because it’s so important for us to have a realistic picture of the characteristics of the students we’re working with.