Overview of Dr. J. Luke’s keynote at the Online Teaching Conference 2018
By Una Daly
Last month I was fortunate to hear Dr. J Luke Wood’s opening keynote, Reaching Underserved Students through Culturally Responsive Teaching and Learning in the Online Environment, at the annual California Online Teaching Conference. Wood’s research at San Diego State University focuses on factors affecting the success of boys and men of color in education, with a specific focus on community colleges. He co-directs the Community College Equity Assessment Lab (CCEAL), a national research and practice center at San Diego State University.
Being Equity-minded
Wood started by defining equity as “a heightened focus on groups experiencing disproportionate impact in order to remediate disparities in their experiences and outcomes.” This runs counter to current practice which suggests that we should treat everyone exactly the same in order to be fair. Equity means recognizing that some students will need different interventions to be successful. He provided four ways that equity-minded educators can enhance their teaching practice:
- be cognizant of exclusionary practices and systemic inequities that produce outcome disparities in educational contexts
- attribute outcome disparities to breakdowns in institutional performance rather than exclusively to student deficits or behaviors
- continuously reflect upon their roles in and responsibilities for student success
- challenge their colleagues to be equity-minded educators
He pointed out the paradox that most faculty use the same teaching methods they experienced as students since many receive no instruction on how to teach, and as the statistics show, these methods are unlikely to help underserved students. This is compounded by the fact that teachers often don’t see the diversity in their classrooms, particularly in online classes with no synchronous interaction. In the online environment, teachers often default to teaching to the mainstream population because they don’t see or interact in relational ways with their students.
Research on Equity
When looking at statistics from CCEAL’s research on student retention and success from over 150 institutions across the nation, disaggregated by gender and race, a stark contrast between men of color in online vs. in-person classes emerges. Statistics for underrepresented women also show a disproportionate lower success rate in asynchronous courses such as most online courses. Wood points out some common challenges faced by underserved students and which are often invisible to administrators and faculty: racial micro-aggressions, campus racial-gender climate, environmental pressures, prior schooling experiences, and structural racism in preparation experiences. In addition to those factors, research shows that nearly one-third of community college students experience housing insecurity and greater than 12% experience food insecurity on a regular basis further undermining a student’s ability to focus on their academic work.
Equity Presence
The mission of our community colleges and commitment to social justice demands that we develop an “equity presence” for supporting the success of underserved students. Changing the traditional community college goal of “expanding access” to “expanding equitable access” for high-quality, low-cost education for all students clarifies the aim. The key to helping underserved students achieve successful outcomes is embedding an equity presence in the classroom and Dr. Wood shared five key equity teaching practices for instructional and counseling faculty in both face-to-face and online environments. More details on these practices are available in the slides and video below:
Five Equity Practices for Teaching Underserved Students of Color
- Be Intrusive (e.g. early performance monitoring, encouragement to persevere)
- Be Relational (e.g. online office hours, find out what/why students want to learn )
- Be Relevant (e.g. culturally relevant reading materials, images, assignment choices)
- Be Community-centric (e.g. discussion forums, shared perspectives)
- Be Race conscious (e.g. monitor forums for micro-aggressions, pose questions that address issues of race and racism in society)
Black Minds Matter Course
Helping faculty and other student services professionals effectively support the success of underserved students requires transforming perceptions and professional development for best practices. Fortunately, the Black Minds Matter course, developed by Dr. Woods and CCEAL is being offered for the second time this fall to help educators who are seriously considering how they can integrate culturally aware teaching practices into their online work. CCEAL is currently looking for institutions and organizations that will become replay sites for the course and facilitate the local interaction. You can find more information about registering as a replay site for the Black Minds Matter course here. https://bit.ly/2JXp5ra