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A Charter for Inclusive Teaching and Learning in Higher Education

A Charter for Inclusive Teaching and Learning in Higher Education. Dr. Michael Shevlin School of Education Trinity College Dublin. Developing inclusive teaching. University context for teaching Barriers to developing inclusive teaching How is teaching conceptualized? Reframing the issue

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A Charter for Inclusive Teaching and Learning in Higher Education

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  1. A Charter for Inclusive Teaching and Learning in Higher Education Dr. Michael Shevlin School of Education Trinity College Dublin

  2. Developing inclusive teaching • University context for teaching • Barriers to developing inclusive teaching • How is teaching conceptualized? • Reframing the issue • What needs to change?

  3. University context • Societal demands and expectations • Paradigm shift: • Inputs to outputs • Teaching to learning • Semi-elite to semi-mass (Nunan et al., 2000) • All experiencing greater diversity in student demographics

  4. Responses to transformed context • Common response • Continue teaching courses for semi-elite • Some notion of gold standard of excellence • Demand for university to provide • More learning support • More language and literacy support • Support services expected to • ‘reprogram both students and reality so that courses and methodologies do not need to change’ • (Nunan et al., 2000: 93).

  5. Barriers to developing inclusive practice • Is it lack of knowledge? • ‘Barriers are the barriers one would have if you have difficulties of that nature…I expect most people would be willing to help such a person if they knew how to do it’ • (Loftus, 2008: 61)

  6. Barriers to developing inclusive practice • Is it lack of understanding? • ‘We get a breadth of pressure to cater to individual student needs, all sorts of things occur that could affect a student’s ability to listen and take notes in a lecture like using a mobile phone’ • (Loftus, 2008: 53)

  7. Barriers to developing inclusive practice • Is it fair to other students? • ‘Weighting is given to presentation and is it fair to other students who have to work hard and produce a good presentation and are marked on it?’ • ‘…don’t allow our other students I don’t like the term normal but other students to use the services of a proof reader when it comes to submitting course work that is assessed’ • (Loftus, 2008: 59)

  8. Barriers to developing inclusive practice • Is it equitable? • ‘If you have two students competing for the top place and one is given extra time, how do you identify who is best? Equity of access and equity of evaluation is another thing.’ • (Loftus, 2008: 59)

  9. Barriers to developing inclusive practice • Who is responsible? • ‘The academic department is the weakness…we send these reports and don’t know what happens …What is the responsibility of to ensure academics take ownership but they don’t.’ • (Loftus, 2008: 57)

  10. Teaching • Implicit assumptions • Learning • Ability • Standards • Explicit actions • Curriculum design • Learning outcomes • Assessment • Are we asking the wrong question?

  11. Conceptions of Teaching • Teacher-centered/content-oriented • Imparting information • Transmitting structured knowledge • Student-centered/learning oriented • Facilitating understanding • Conceptual change/intellectual development • Student-teacher interaction • (Kember, 1997)

  12. Developing teaching • Constructivist view (Devlin, 2002) • Students of teaching should be encouraged to discover principles and ideas for themselves through teaching practices that are relevant to their teaching and learning context’ • ‘If we want a teacher to behave in specific, more ‘student oriented ways in a particular context, then we need to arrange for that teacher to practice those specific ways in that particular context.’ (Eley 2006: 21)

  13. Do we need to look at… • Academic identity? • Beliefs about teaching? • Understanding of impact of disability on learning opportunities? • Practical support for inclusive teaching? • University-wide initiatives?

  14. Initiatives • Trinity Inclusive Curriculum project (2008-11) • Embed inclusive practices in mainstream curriculum • Mainstream, not reasonable adjustments • Focus wider than students with disabilities • All students benefit • Establishing context, audit tool, resources – become college policy

  15. Conclusions • ‘Difference is not something that is external to the university; a resource that students bring to the university. Rather it is something that is constitutive of social relations within the university. It is constructed and enacted through the practices of the curriculum. To view difference as simply an external factor to be taken into account in the construction of the curriculum is to treat it in an instrumental manner, to regard it as involving a cultural formation that is somehow external to what goes on within the university. It is to assume that student diversity is mainly relevant to issues of interpersonal relations and not to issues of academic content and pedagogies.’ • (Rizvi and Walsh, 1998: 9)

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