Engagement Strategies Make student contributions central to the class

The Key to Success with this Strategy

If we remember that students are bringing their lives into the classroom, it goes a long way into considering what they can contribute. Applying transparency when setting expectations for knowledge sharing is key. Formalizing how students contribute will go a long way. And integrating feedback mechanisms to improve upon the safety and comfort of those contributions will foster healthy practices and strong boundaries.

Using this Strategy is Culturally Responsive because...

There is a lot of research and writing on centering students and their contributions in learning environments. Keeping the students in the spotlight encourages us to think twice when we apply our own paradigm and perspective to teaching and learning. While the educators' lives help guide the learning environment, their position of power can easily undermine student experiences and identities.

Centering students by nature welcomes the rich cultural diversity in every learning environment. It addresses and reduces the margins and the marginalization of specific types of students who have historically been at odds with educators and educator power.

How do I Implement this Strategy?

This is far from an exhaustive list on how to center student contributions, and, as always, the ideas behind these strategies remain context specific. Think about how things might be similar and different depending upon your own context and curriculum, and where student voices might be given an opportunity to thrive within your own classroom environment.

Remember Student Experiences

Everyone brings their lives with them when it comes to their community. In a teaching and learning environment, such as the classroom or course, community can be everywhere! The trouble is, educators have an agenda, and often know more about the environment before anyone else. It's easy to center our own experience because we enter the space and hold a role of power and authority. But students still come to the classroom with their own experiences, their own stories, their own lives. Checking your own story as one of many can go a long way in establishing a sense of community and belonging within the environment.

It might be difficult to think about every student's life when you're dealing with a huge classroom or you're managing multiple courses in a single academic term. How do you think you can best understand your students and support their presence when you're feeling overwhelmed?

Here are a few ways to connect to individual students:

Start with the curriculum/theme of the class. Why are students interested in this discipline? What is their previous experience within this discipline?
Most likely the students all live within geographical proximity (even if it's regional) and have some things in common to serve as a foundation.
Avoid diving in too deep early on. Think about simpler qualities to lived experience: what are things your students enjoy doing? What was a positive experience in their life recently?
Students are living their lives as they're in your environment. Experiences and stories are in-process while they're enrolled.
Sometimes sharing experience isn't public. Students can be invited/encouraged to be themselves even if they aren't sharing their stories with you or their peers.

Apply Transparency to Knowledge Sharing

Many classes have fantastic opportunities for educators and students to share what's going on in their life. But how often are these opportunities spontaneous? How often are they "rushed" because students are used to their voices going unheard? Empathy and sympathy need not be risky or sketchy for students. Being forthright and direct when developing the community in your environment goes a long way. Adding language to your syllabus, taking time during your introductory session, and leading by example (integrating some of your own experiences to your learning materials) will make it clearer to the students that one's individuality is important to consider, even in the class context.

The Transparency Framework (and TILT) are ripe with resources in improving communication between educators and students. Explore adding language around the purpose of student work that connects the work to student experience.

Opening up your curriculum (when possible) to include language of reinforcement when it comes to student contributions can be useful as well. Consider integrating principles/values of open pedagogy into your environment and tell students that this is happening. Most importantly, as this is a fluid process and always changing/evolving, students should be made aware that the environment is a process/is iterative (see Feedback section below).

Formalize Student Contributions

Formalization! In education, we formalize a lot of things, often to make it easier for an environment to work, a course to begin (and conclude), and a classroom to keep from falling apart. Formalization begins even before the environment is created--with our frameworks, our outcomes, our curricula dominating the conversation. Often, students and their contributions tend to blur--especially over time, as educators get exhausted and assignments need to get graded. Formalizing (from the beginning, or before the beginning!) how students contribute and where they have the opportunity to contribute is important.

If you're running a class multiple times, consider building in moments of personal reflection so the educator(s) can see where student voice was left out. There is always room for growth and evolution when it comes to integrating student life into the coursework!

Some examples of how to formalize student contributions and make them more regular include:

Discussion boards that include requirements from students' personal/professional life.
Include icebreakers and other introductory activities in synchronous sessions where students have the opportunity to bring their experiences into the classroom.
Design assignments so that they require students to pull topics and ideas from their home (or "near-home") environment.

A note about safety and anonymity

Many students have spent the majority of their formal education not being asked to integrate/share their experiences into their learning. This disconnect can create some discomfort for students who are being invited to build community for the first time. In some cases, students may not be interested in bringing their own experiences into the classroom. They may prefer to contribute in anonymous ways, or ways that don't implicate themselves. It may take some practice, but consider designing assignments and activities to allow students choice in how they contribute. Students might also enjoy activities and assignments where what they contribute is based on their interests more than their own actions and stories. For example, talking about what happens within a favorite childhood film or book rather than childhood itself will still be centering student experience.

Integrate Appropriate Feedback Mechanisms

How often do we, as educators, ask students if they feel valued? How often, as educators, do we ask students to start a conversation about their work (in the context of the class)? For some educators, that might be a daily activity! For others, it might only happen at the end-of-the-term evaluations. We can all do better to think about feedback (by way of conversation, by way of assessment) when it comes to student contributions.

Students often love to talk about what's working and what's not working in the class. Even if a remedy for challenges can't be made immediate (and has to wait for the next time a course runs, for example), being open to and receiving feedback will be beneficial to both you and the students you're working with.

Here are a few questions that might inform how you solicit feedback:

Consider when students are reflecting on the environment (for example: at the very beginning or end of class) and build a brief survey into that time.
Utilize meetings under the Four Connections to discuss how the student feels about the class as a community.
Revisit principles of open pedagogy and participatory design and build feedback into activities, assignments, and projects.
Formalize your own reflections as an educator and be transparent with students that you are reflecting.

Consider Your Context

Every teaching and learning environment is going to be its own community. The strategies described on this page can be used in conjunction with culturally-responsive pedagogy generally, but much of what is described here is going to be nuanced based on your students preferences, your curriculum, and the overall structure of how teaching and learning is occurring.

That being said, starting with your own context can be a ripe way to generate effective results. Consider working with peers in your discipline to reflect more holistically. Think about systemic issues that your discipline is facing. More broadly, you might even consider the local culture of the organization/institution, and how that impacts student voice. At LWTech, for example, there is a shared understanding that educators and community leaders face the "commuter college" mentality--students live off-campus, rush to-and-from campus to get their coursework done, and often have a lot going on outside of the campus. If that is the case for a student, how can their experiences (and their busy life!) be brought into your class in a way that indicates belonging and value?

Your own context goes beyond your discipline as well. Think about your own life and what you have found valuable in supporting your ability to teach. Not every student contribution might be aligned with how you thrive as an educator. Mindfulness around your own practice should balance how your environments are designed, how your communities are fostered and led. This starts with a lot of personal reflection that could benefit from the strategies described above--otherwise reflection might be left out, or left for "summer break" when other restorative processes (like relaxation) take priority.

Reinforcement

On October 19, 2020, Librarian Greg Bem ran an in-service mini-session that covered student contributions. Watch it here: