4.0 Conclusions
The 2020 COVID-19 pandemic brought a sudden transition to online
teaching, upending many educational practices and causing considerable
stress for both instructors and learners. However, in this manuscript,
we reframe this transition from a loss of in-person instruction to an
opportunity to build inclusive digital spaces from the ground up. We
have highlighted a number of considerations for faculty, such as
culturally-competent pedagogy, universal design for learning, and
trauma-informed pedagogy, that can help learners and instructors
establish a positive classroom community, even from a distance. We have
also highlighted a number of active learning interventions that can be
adopted with varying levels of effort.
Although instructors may be unable to address societal inequities in the
course of a year, we believe that we can intentionally design our online
classroom to draw in students who are often excluded from traditional
in-person classroom participation. This is especially important for
Ecology and Evolutionary Biology (EEB) as these fields have
traditionally been dominated by white individuals and have lower
diversity than other STEM fields (Leslie et al, 2015). From 2008-2018,
individuals identifying as white, non-Hispanic/non-Latino earned 81.5%
and 86.5% of PhDs in evolution and ecology, respectively (NSF survey
data;https://ncses.nsf.gov/pubs/nsf19301/data).
Given these data, it is not surprising that Black, Latinx, Indigenous
and other non-white individuals are also underrepresented at the faculty
level in EEB (Graves, 2019; O’Brien et al, 2020). Various reasons for
these disparities in EEB, and across STEM fields, have been proposed,
but racism, sexism, and lack of inclusion are driving factors (Kent et
al, 2020; Miriti, 2020; North, 2020; O’Brien et al, 2020; Tseng et al.
2020; Wanelik et al, 2020). The history and narratives of EEB have been
primarily shaped by white men as they were the ones who had access to
resources and held positions of power, and this holds true across STEM
fields (Zuberi & Bonilla-Silva, 2008; Carter et al, 2019; Lee, 2020).
The first step to inclusive teaching echoes bell hooks’ ideas of
self-actualization (hooks, 1994) and is to develop self-awareness around
one’s implicit biases and relationship to established power structures
(Asplund and Welle, 2018; Dewsbury and Brame, 2019;). Instructors must
be willing to devote mental energy to introspection and acknowledge
their role in perpetuating oppression in the classroom. This work is
uncomfortable and time-intensive, which may be impediments to widespread
implementation of inclusive teaching across institutions (DiAngelo and
Sensoy 2010; Lombardi et al, 2011). Additionally, many science
instructors hold the assumption that STEM fields are somehow
“unbiased” and immune to societal injustices (Smith and Scharmann,
1999, Wheeler et al, 2019), making inclusive teaching challenging.
Lastly, traditional STEM curricula tend to promote racist, sexist, and
Eurocentric ideas (Smedley and Smedley, 2005; Peters, 2015; Hayssen and
Orr, 2017; Vakil and Ayers, 2019; Black Lives Matter in Ecology and
Evolution, 2020; Hayssen, 2020). Disparities start early, as a recent
study found introductory biology textbooks were more likely to highlight
men scientists, and none of the books analyzed highlighted a Black woman
scientist (Wood et al, 2020). These biases impact students’ first view
of the field and can shape the ideas of who belongs in science; these
disparities are something instructors can actively address in their
individual syllabi and curriculum.
We acknowledge that our recommendations alone will not create an
equitable, inclusive, and socially just learning experience for our
students. The pandemic has highlighted the broad systemic inequities in
higher education, and it will take much more than active learning
strategies or mindful attention to course design to address the ongoing
issues of who we center and who we exclude from education. But we
believe that this paper can serve as an entry point and we hope it will
inspire instructors to start the long journey of personal and
pedagogical transformation. We encourage readers to think critically
about their own courses and syllabi, and to make a pledge to change at
least one thing to increase inclusion in their classroom. We challenge
readers to truly reflect on their own views and behaviors as well as
those of their department and institution. We also challenge readers to
critically examine what is meant by inclusive teaching, in their own
mind, and in their institution and classrooms. Lastly, we hope readers
will determine actionable steps to increase inclusion going forward.