This site provides examples of instructional resources created in the Humanizing Online STEM Academy, a professional development program funded by the California Education Learning Lab and administered by the Foothill DeAnza Community College District.
I was already a huge fan of Humanizing online learning before joining the Academy. Michelle Pacansky-Brock's open course on Humanizing was the first online course I didn't hate. I read her books and recommended them to our faculty. I taught Humanized faculty development courses at San Francisco State before and during the pandemic.
I was also actively seeking antiracism education for myself. As a faculty developer, I wanted to learn more, but no trainings were being offered by my institution. Meanwhile I was curious: How does antiracist pedagogy relate to social justice and the inclusive teaching practices that are part of the daily practice of teaching at San Francisco State?
I learned so much in the Academy. What was most valuable, to me, was experiencing the way that Humanizing has continued to evolve and strengthen its concern for and mission to "equitize higher education" making it more relevant than ever to our teaching practice.
I appreciate how the developers and facilitators of this course skillfully weaved together antiracism with more familiar threads like culturally-responsive teaching. I value the deep dive into the affective domain of learning and the cognitive underminers (imposter syndrome, stereotype threat, and belongingness uncertainty) that get in the way of learning.
One of the most powerful personal moments for me came through the Cultural Inventory Reflections. Completing the Cultural Context Inventory and reflecting on my scores taught me something new about myself. I had high scores in both low and high context, but I am a more skillful practitioner in low context settings. So one of my professional goals is to develop my skills at facilitating learning in a way that integrates everything I already intuit about high context culture, but don't necessarily know how to put into practice.
Thank you for giving me so much to think about and for the best professional development learning experience of my career (so far). I look forward to continuing my own journey, and to seeing what Humanizing will have to teach us next.
For me, the most compelling reason to create a Liquid Syllabus is that over 25% of students on our campus access our LMS through their mobile devices and the Liquid Syllabus is designed to be mobile-friendly. So this tech tool enables me to reach out to students with a warm welcome before class begins, and to meet them with a user-friendly hello, regardless of their choice of device.
I chose these images of the life cycle stages of a butterfly as a metaphor for teaching during a transitional year and also as a metaphor for learning itself. We're all in different stages of learning all the time. We may an expert in one area and a novice in another. I wanted to convey the idea that wherever we are, we're all right. Learning is a natural process.
My humanized homepage includes several kindness cues: a warm welcome; a banner image that conveys that learning is a process, and that wherever you are in that process is not only okay, but beautiful; and photos of the course facilitators so faculty participants know who will be responding to their forum posts and hosting office hours.
This survey is the first activity in the course. Two of the most important questions we ask that impact how we facilitate the course include:
How do you feel about teaching in Fall 2021? With the goal of reaching out with offers of support for faculty who express anxiety or nervousness.
What are you hoping to learn from this course? Which allows us to continually iterate the depth and breadth of this course to better fit faculty needs.
I love this idea of creating a self-affirming icebreaker to immediately begin to undo the cognitive underminers we humans can sometimes enter a new classroom carrying. By asking faculty to reflect on their new online teaching expertise gained during remote teaching, I hope to set the tone for a celebratory and affirmative learning experience where whatever they wish to share will be warmly acknowledged and held together, in community.
Asking students to reflect on their learning is a powerful -- and pleasurable -- practice. By reflecting on how emergency remote teaching has changed our teaching practices or pedagogical approaches, we acknowledge that teaching and learning is always a work in progress. At the same time, we are also gleaning something worth bringing with us, a spark of light, out of the darkness of a global pandemic.
In this brief video, I explain the purpose and focus of the course I'm developing to help faculty decide if this course will be helpful to them in thinking about and preparing for their Fall 2021 semester. This video would appear on the Center for Equity and Excellence in Teaching & Learning's website when the course is announced to help faculty decide which course offering to choose from among our many offerings.
A microlecture is just what it sounds like, a brief lecture on a single learning objective. In this case, our Learning Objective was:
Understand the similarities and differences between the bichronous, hybrid and hyflex learning modes and why they are able to flex to meet the demands of a transitional year.
We covered the same material in text, but it remained abstract and opaque -- even to me and my co-developer! The process of carefully crafting a microlecture -- and translating those words into graphics -- really helped my own understanding and I believe that the simple graphs will help faculty see what we mean much more quickly.
In our faculty development course, this microlecture also serves a secondary purpose of modeling multimodal content for our faculty participants and choosing the best medium for your message.
