STEM EDI Summer Series - Session 5 - Building classroom community

Hello everyone,

Thanks again for attending this series and sharing your resources and ideas with the group. It was an amazing exchange of knowledge and I hope some of these tips get implemented in classes within your units. Small changes that you implement can feel very significant especially for students from marginalized groups. As always, all the resources are available on the one-drive. Also, for folks who are in the Faculty of Science prepping the course in the fall, I and other Skylight folks are happy to consult on your individual classes on anything related to these topics.

The topic for next week is about how units can promote more equitable work-load in EDI work. We will be talking about the problems associated with the “minority tax”, how to recruit more people who can do EDI work, how to get more people within your units engaged, as well as different strategies units have used to remunerate EDI work. So far Ninan Abraham (AD of Diversity and Equity, FoS), Donna Seto (Manager Strategic Initiatives and EDI, Civil Engineering, Dana-Lyn Mackenzie (Senior Manager EDI and Indigenization, FAppSci) and Ben Britton (Associate Professor Material Engineering) have agreed to share a few insights about these topics. Please register for the session here. This might be a great session to invite heads of units, folks involved in HR as well as other folks in formal/informal EDI leadership roles.

Here are the resources from the last event.

Google slides are here:
Ashley Welsh’s awesome notes of the event are here.
Prior to the event I also contacted James Charbonneau (Physics/Gateway) and Steve Wolfman (Computer Science) who couldn’t attend but wrote down a number of great tips that I have also shared at the end of Ashley’s notes. I’ve gone through and highlighted some of the tips that did not come up in our discussions.

Additional resources

The short tip-sheet on building community I sent around as pre-reading is here.
Johnmarshall Reeve is the researcher who has developed the idea of autonomy-supportive teaching practices. This is a great paper outlining what autonomy-supportive teaching is and how to do it. This is a useful framework for both mentoring practices and building connection with students. Link here.
Article on how creating learning communities in STEM can help to build social capital (and hopeful retention) within students with disabilities. Article here.
Article on how social capital through close interactions with faculty and peers can help build self-efficacy and belonging amongst female students in STEM. Article here (and attached)
James M Lang has a booked called “Small Teaching” that is a super short, super user-friendly book with tips on small actions you can make to improve teaching practices. There is a ton in this book that relates to the benefits of enhancing group interactions but I’ve just attached the intro to part 3 on “Inspiration” and the chapter on “Motivation” because it provides some tips on practices and also links to the extensive body of research (perhaps this research can help entices folks to take the time to engage in community-building and the interpersonal aspects of teaching).
Jim Sibley (Director of the Center for Instructional Support) has developed this website with great resources on Team-based Learning. I’ve used the “Immediate Feedback Assessment Technique” (AKA Scratch cards) in my classes and they have been hugely effective in engaging students and getting them to work together.
As Jackie Stewart mentioned, one of the challenges to community cohesion is the competition imposed by grades at UBC. Grades can pushes students towards individualistic goal pursuits and away from collective/community learning. Join this slack channel for further discussions. I also wrote a paper on this topic with a colleague and undergraduate student, link here (and attached).