diversity

Situating your work

Teaching through community engagement is a powerful exercises for all involved. Thinking through the purpose of a community collaboration, forms of engagement, and desired student learning outcomes helps faculty members clarify the many decisions they make in creating or revising a course with community connections. This page helps instructors become more aware and explicit about the framework of their course, as well as discovering questions and resources that others have found useful.   

Purpose

U-M students, like the faculty, have a broad range of purposes as they explore courses on community engagement. Some are seeking basic information; some want to engage critically with the ideas like community, equity, and power; some are advocates for social justice; and others want to hone skills for activism. These different motivations overlap, and they can lead to one another over time. Being explicit about the different kinds of purposes a course can serve helps students locate their own development, and can generate valuable discussion. Talking about the different kinds of skills that instructors and community members have cultivated also helps students locate themselves on a trajectory toward future work.  Read more »

“Multicultural teaching” means different things according to one’s course goals and one’s discipline. The following links provide useful information for a wide range of college teaching contexts. If you want to suggest other web-based sources for this page, please email crlt@umich.edu and put “Multicultural Teaching” in the subject line.

Key teaching strategies that help engage students from a range of academic or social backgrounds

• Interactive lecturing
• Active learning
• Using cases
• Sustained small group work and team research
• Rapport on the first day of class

Information on course planning

• Recommendations
• Key principles

For specific contexts Read more »

Additional content coming soon

•  Resources for Using Groups and Teams

CRLT Occasional Papers

• Undergraduate Women in Science and Engineering: Providing Academic Support
• Teaching for Retention In Science, Engineering, and Math Disciplines: A Guide for Faculty