Inclusion & Accessibility

Building Inclusive Classrooms

Inclusive teaching invites, engages, and supports all learners equitably. To develop an inclusive teaching practice, we recommend:

Drawing from research on teaching and learning that tells us how learning works.
Learning more about how social identities and lived experiences come into play for us as teachers and learners,
Practicing strategies to increase participation and academic success for learners, in difficult moments and across a range of differences.

From introductory approaches to more sustained engagements, the following resources offer a range of strategies for creating an academically serious, inclusive, and accessible learning environment.

You may also want to consider incorporating an inclusive teaching framework into your course and teaching approaches. Inclusive teaching frameworks are useful for organizing and systematizing a career-long commitment to inclusive teaching. Accessibility an Universal Design for Learning (UDL), for example, help us understand the importance of making sure every learner is able to access materials in a course, no matter what their particular needs might be. Relatedly, the Universal Design for Learning framework offers an approach to help mitigate needs for individual accommodation through course design in such a way that supports the learning of all students.

To learn more, and to develop your inclusive teaching practice, we invite you to explore the following resources, which offer ideas on how to better create and sustain inclusive learning environments, from the learning climate to pedagogical, curriculum and course design decisions.