Professional Development:

Train to Teach Constructively

Many curricula can be taught with either a constructive or narrow-activist approach. For example, the topic may be color-blindness, inspiring role models of color, or types of civic action to pursue, but training can make the same topic be productive or go off the rails.  

The same is true for pedagogical approaches with the same curriculum: how are questions framed, what assumptions are given rather than investigated and questioned, do assignments encourage student inquiries to investigate or force students to build a case to provide a predetermined conclusion?  

Professional Development Opportunities

Improving Intercultural Communication for an Inclusive Classroom

  • Effectively facilitate an inclusive classroom

  • Build awareness to the diversity of communication styles

  • Practice appropriate responses when miscommunications occur

  • Understand how to apply the tenets of positive intercultural communication to the classroom

Inclusivity in the Humanities: Expanding the Narrative

  • Co-create lessons specific to the discipline of history/social studies

  • Practice expanding the narrative without excluding voices from various communities

  • Understand what is needed to be truly inclusive in history/social studies

Ethnic Studies Professional Development: Constructing Ethnic Studies

  • Create a classroom that encourages kindness, compassion, and truth seeking

  • Acknowledge and celebrate differences and commonalities

  • Facilitate learning that allows students to grapple with competing narratives

  • Explore foundational ideas that are necessary to form heterogeneous societies