GEEX Forum

How will you promote equity and accessibility in the online classroom?

To quell my anxiety about teaching online after having been entirely missed the Spring pivot (dirty secret: I was on sabbatical), I signed up for three online teacher trainings at UW. One of them, the Discussion Project, focused specifically on cultivating high-quality discussion in the online environment. It was an awesome course, and I'm so so lucky my Art Dept. is in a School of Educaiton. Several of the examples focused on simple timed structures for facilitating equitable discussion in small groups (vs. the pattern that happens all too often when a few voices do all the talking in large groups). Here are links to the one I liked the best—The Last Word process:

General Directions: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1vHO ... ImBiI/edit
(Note: This looks not that interesting as a set of directions, but I strongly encourage you to TRY IT; as I was totally convinced after being in the student situation and trying it with real content.)

More details: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1mg4m_t ... RhpC_/view
(includes sources)

If people are interested, I have more styles of different protocols, but they all operate on the same principles of small groups, structured time to think about responses (makes the silence not awkward at all cause everyone's doing it together), and timed turns for speaking.

This is a great resource Helen, I think guiding groups/classes in the Hollywood squares format is an art in an of itself. Another resource I have found along similar lines is called liberating structures http://www.liberatingstructures.com/.