Welcome!

Thanks for taking the time to think critically about what you teach, how you teach, and who you teach. This guide has been developed as a resource for faculty who are just beginning to think about inclusive pedagogy as well as those more advanced in the process of decolonizing their courses. This work for faculty is never done, but rather an ongoing commitment to continue looking at our curriculum and learning environment through a lens of inclusion. We also realize that this learning takes time, so there is no need to do everything at once. Wherever you are in the process of rethinking your courses, find whatever in this guide can support your development and take advantage of opportunities for engaging in this work with colleagues. Our collective work can help us move Antioch University toward being the anti-racist and inclusive learning environment our mission dictates.

This guide is an ever-evolving, living document. Check back frequently for "What's New"!

Antioch's Mission 

Antioch espouses a learning environment that aligns well with our social justice mission, promising students a safe and inclusive space for developing skills and knowledge. In order to fulfill on that commitment, we must provide faculty with tools for providing such a learning space that welcomes all students and opens doors into our disciplines. This guide is designed to support instructors as they build courses and other activities that move students toward their goals in a way that acknowledges them as unique individuals.

Syllabus Considerations

The first experience of a class is often the syllabus so as faculty we need to interrogate that document to see if we are truly welcoming students into our classroom community, treating them with equity and respect through our tone, and ensuring access to all of the course resources and opportunities. Some faculty begin their classes by inviting students to co-create the syllabus, making modifications to an initial draft and finding a way to share in the crafting of everyone’s responsibilities within the class. Faculty also need to consider whether their syllabi reflect who they are as human beings and how they want to be seen by the students in the class. All of this reflection shows good consistency with our university mission and the collaboration that is an integral part of the Antioch learning environment.

Inclusive Learning Environment

A successful instructor will also recognize the intersectionalities of their students and honor all who walk into the learning community. Providing an inclusive environment means making space for the complexities of students and offering multiple ways to learn and demonstrate that learning. Course materials should reflect the complicated and diverse voices that contribute to our disciplinary fields rather than focusing on singular identities or perspectives. Within this guide, we have attempted to offer guidelines for evaluating what we teach and how we teach so that we provide opportunities and access to all.

Your Participation

Finally, we encourage you to “get on board” because there is tremendous value in being part of a collaborative faculty that shares its expertise and supports each other in our progress toward antiracist and inclusive pedagogies. Without judgment, anyone can share where you are and join us in this venture to build a welcoming and supportive learning environment for our students by modeling it within our faculty community. We invite you to jump in and we’ll meet you there.

We welcome your contributions and feedback!

We invite all AU faculty to give us feedback on the content you'll find in this guide, and to contribute additional resources, content, examples, or sample syllabi or syllabi sections! Please reach out to  Andrea Richards, Kathryn Pope, Abigail Pasley, or Rachel Kunert-Graf with your input.

We also want to honor those who have done initial work on this guide as part of the Inclusive Course Design group: Allison Adelman, Kat Bell, Kate Evarts Rice, Katherine Fort, Najla Hrustanovic, Rose Johnson, Richard Kahn, Rachel Kunert-Graf, Angel Martinez, Hays Moulton, Abby Pasley, Andrea Richards, and Sue Woehrlin. 

How does Inclusive Course Design Align with Academic Freedom?

Inclusive teaching practices align well with academic freedom. Some have argued that expecting faculty to transform their approaches to curriculum and pedagogy in accordance with current understandings and demands for socially-just educational practices (DEI) infringes on their academic freedom. Academic freedom can be seen as a form of "negative liberty" (or "freedom from" prevention) and it has been considered a benefit methodologically to the ongoing democratization and innovation of education and wider society thereby. However, academic freedom should also be interpreted as a form of "positive liberty" in which freedom is not simply an individual's freedom from unjust constraint upon their inquiry, but rather also involves the "freedom to" engage in inquiry by ensuring that those making inquiry have been appropriately resourced to maintain the internal capacity for teaching and learning on relevant topics of study. We would like to emphasize that as a social justice institution, appropriately resourcing our students and faculty is a priority, and therefore a way that we express our academic freedom.