diversity

Community Engagement

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 »

shadow

Making the Most of Student Diversity

Research on what students learn has demonstrated that students in classes dealing with social issues learn and retain more understanding about identities and power relations when they engage with one another, and when they are given the opportunity to connect discussion to their own experiences, identities, and their perception of identities.  That is, students in social science classes learn and retain less than student in dialogue classes.

Moreover, research on learning also demonstrates the value of students' engaging “desirable difficulties.”  That is, students in all classes have higher achievement levels, developing stronger cognitive skills, when the course material attaches to their prior knowledge and when they have to grapple with material that is difficult (but within their reach).  They also do better when their assignments have them apply key concepts in varying contexts and conditions.  Engaging students with one another, using carefully designed short discussion questions, produces this result.  The discussion pushes them to apply their knowledge, to reconcile different perspectives, and thus to hone their abilities to analyze more complex problems. Read more »

shadow

Inclusive Teaching Strategies

“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

Information on course planning

For specific contexts Read more »

shadow

Developing Dialogue Skills

Coming soon.

shadow

Teaching in STEM Fields

Additional content coming soon

CRLT Occasional Papers

shadow