Abstract
The last decade has seen tremendous growth in the proportion of students of color among undergraduates in the United States and yet racial inequalities persist when it comes to enrollment at top-tier universities, college completion rates, and the concentration of student loan debt following college graduation. Accompanying these troublesome statistics is an entire genre of psychological survival stories centering on the struggles of marginalized students in elite spaces of higher education. For instance, in 2014, Dear White People was released. Justin Simien's film documenting the trials and travails of Black students at an Ivy League University garnered much critical attention and even led to a Netflix series of the same title that mines the same themes. In 2016, author Jennifer Capó Crucet published a novel entitled Make Your Home Among Strangers which tells the story of a first-generation low-income Latina accepted into an elite university who similarly struggles to adjust. In 2018, playwright Eleanor Burgess released The Niceties, which focuses on the racially charged confrontation between a Black college student and her white history professor. Most recently, in 2022, Mariama Diallo released her debut film, Master, to capture the horrors of two Black women—a college freshman and a new faculty member—at a fictional elite institution.
In the face of this deluge of statistics and narratives, it's hard not to ask: what is it about higher education that makes it so unwelcoming to students of color? In the face of this deluge of statistics and narratives, it’s hard not to ask: what is it about higher education that makes it so unwelcoming to students of color?
It is by now well-documented that white supremacy has long shaped higher education. To put it simply, four-year institutions—particularly selective historically white colleges and universities (HWCUs)—were built to exclude much of the population, including Native Americans, African Americans, Jews, the working classes, and women. As such, there's a growing consensus that today's campus activism is the logical consequence of those legacies of racist, sexist, classist, and religious exclusions. But in today's atmosphere of headline-grabbing student protests in the main quad, it's easy to overlook how the college classroom operates as a site where unequal power relations are reproduced and thus how poor faculty pedagogical preparation contributes to the present state of affairs. This oversight is troubling considering that, for decades, research has shown that ineffective classroom teaching negatively impacts all students and that it is especially to the detriment of historically marginalized students, many of whom struggle in college classrooms built with their exclusion specifically in mind. …it's easy to overlook how the college classroom operates as a site where unequal power relations are reproduced…
In this article, we join a host of others such as Kevin Gannon and Cate Denial who have begun to point out that the insufficient transformation of the college classroom is one significant factor contributing to poorer outcomes for historically marginalized college students today. As we’ll see, there has been plenty of conversation about the importance of equity-minded curriculum and pedagogy over the last 50 years, but the old way of college teaching remains stubbornly in place. Many faculty still teach the way they were taught, adopting a “sage on the stage” model that emphasizes passive learning and rote memorization in lecture-heavy classrooms. In short, many faculty unwittingly reproduce an academic culture that does not foster student learning. Although who we teach—in terms of racial background, ethnicity, gender, and class—has shifted dramatically, the way we teach has not changed nearly enough. Drawing on new scholarship and recent experiments at institutions around the country, we offer a roadmap for faculty and administrators for how to begin implementing long-needed changes in faculty pedagogical training. While the scale of transformation will no doubt require major cultural and institutional shifts, given their histories of exclusion, selective colleges and universities have a responsibility to help address the myriad social inequalities which riddle our society—and which they had a hand in creating. Although who we teach—in terms of racial background, ethnicity, gender, class, etc.—has shifted dramatically, the way we teach has not changed nearly enough.
Faculty, Pedagogy, and the Evolving College Classroom
It's by now accepted wisdom that most of our nation's four-year institutions are rooted in histories of white supremacy, including settler colonialism, the Atlantic slave trade, and the formal exclusion of women, the working classes, Jews, and other nonwhite people. HWCUs were also central to the manufacture of knowledge that upheld white supremacist ideology. Colonial colleges produced racialized discourse about degraded natives that drove its leaders and alumni to wage war against Native Americans in the 1700s and 1800s. In the nineteenth century, as the science of race entered mainstream US society, faculty from these institutions took on increasingly public roles in the dissemination of proslavery ideas maligning Africans and African Americans as a biologically inferior race. They held public discussions and debates on the subject, bringing their pro-slavery facts and fictions into the public sphere. This pattern was repeated when it came to the construction of knowledge and discourses about women, Catholics, Jews, colonized peoples, and many others. That leading institutions contributed to the construction and reproduction of racist and sexist ideologies is a powerful reminder that the history of higher education is not just about who was allowed to go to college but about what those who went learned when they got there.
The first major pushback against the traditional content of university education came during the Civil Rights era when students of color and their white allies advocated for a less Eurocentric curriculum that sidelined the histories and achievements of people of color and other historically marginalized groups throughout the world. These efforts led to the establishment of interdisciplinary programs that exist still, from Ethnic Studies Departments and Black Studies programs to Women and Gender programs, Chicano/a Studies, and Asian and Asian-American Studies, among others.
In recognition of an increasingly culturally and racially diverse student body, new theories of education at the K-12 level also began to surface during these tumultuous decades. Proponents of multicultural education recognized that US society was growing steadily more racially diverse and that the traditional Euro-American way of educating left many of our youth behind. Subsequently, numerous educators shifted toward what prominent education theorist James A. Banks once called, in his seminal article on the topic, “the heroes and holidays approach to curriculum reform.” In its worst forms, the multicultural approach was additive, a way for teachers to occasionally add women and other marginalized peoples to the curriculum. But by the 1990s, scholars such as Lisa Delpit, Gloria Ladson Billings, and Geneva Gay had started to advocate for more extensive changes in educators’ collective practice. They reconceived of schools as transformational sites that required paradigmatic shifts not just in the curriculum but also in teacher attitudes, policies, assessment practices, and so on. For Ladson-Billings, that looked like “culturally relevant teaching”—a set of practices that attend to the complexities of culture and views education as a sociocultural process. For Geneva Gay, it was “culturally responsive” teaching, where educators teach to and through their students’ personal and cultural strengths, their intellectual capabilities, and their prior accomplishments. Though distinct, these efforts both facilitated a shift from deficit explanations about the learning potential of students of color and called for changes to curricula and teaching materials, attention to teaching styles, and the creation of empowering school cultures. Proponents of multicultural education recognized that US society was growing steadily more racially diverse, and that the traditional Euro-American way of educating left many of our youth behind.
As critical as these pedagogical conversations were, though, they mostly took place among K-12 educators. It was only in the 1990s that college faculty, primarily in the humanities, began to engage in similar pedagogical experimentation. When they did, they drew on thinkers like Brazilian educator Paulo Freire. Freire's 1968 publication Pedagogy of the Oppressed remains a sacred text for educators. A pioneering figure in the history of educational thought, Freire critiqued what he called a banking model of education that imagined students as empty vessels to whom knowledge was imparted from those on high. As alluded to earlier, this “sage on the stage” model of college teaching is characterized by an all-knowing professor who conveys wisdom to know-nothing students whose task it is to simply absorb information and regurgitate it. It is a teaching tradition that is still all too common in many corners of the academy. By contrast, Freire introduced the notion of critical consciousness which he defined as a transformative process that would help students see social, political, and economic hierarchies and systems of power as well as develop the skills to act against oppression in our societies. In other words, for Freire, developing critical consciousness helped students see that education was not a neutral process and that they, too, have a role in perpetuating or challenging oppression in society. While important for all students, this approach was intended specifically to empower students from marginalized backgrounds and to furnish them with the tools necessary to fight for their own liberation and that of others.
Decades later, others took up and expanded those radical ideas. In 1994, bell hooks published Teaching to Transgress which examines teaching through a Freireian lens. hooks writes of teaching as awakening, as consciousness-raising. She refocused faculty attention on the higher education system writ large, asking what norms, politics, and pedagogy had been built into it. Fast forward to today and a great number of social justice pedagogies crowd the marketplace: feminist pedagogy, intersectional pedagogy, and antiracist pedagogy. This list does not even include the many, many guides to inclusive teaching that call for much, much less in terms of time, energy, and transformation to the college classroom. Fast forward to today and a great number of social justice pedagogies crowd the marketplace: feminist pedagogy, intersectional pedagogy, antiracist pedagogy, etc
Taken together, this set of diverse efforts shift the process of learning away from Euro-centric curricula and pedagogical practices that center on the instructor. Yet, all these decades later anyone can tell you that these efforts are hardly central to, or even part of, faculty preparation before they enter the college classroom. Why?
There are plenty of historical, cultural, and organizational reasons why this pedagogical orientation is not yet widely practiced in institutions of higher education, particularly HWCUs. In general, the academy is famously averse to change. More to the point, however, social, cultural, and political resistance to change in higher education has long been especially pronounced when it comes to improving access, representation, and/or support for historically excluded populations. In this sense, the history of higher education proceeds much the same as the history of the US—in cycles of progress and retrenchment. Whether expanding college access for white women and Eastern European Jews in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries or for Black people and other minority students in the post-World War II period, each moment of progress in the history of higher education for the last 150 years has been followed by a severe backlash. From this perspective, resistance to Civil Rights-era experiments in pedagogy that aim to mitigate inequality in the classroom and support the academic success of historically marginalized students seems discouragingly par for the course. Indeed, it's hard not to see the recent moral panics over critical race theory, the “woke” university, and DEI in general as simply more of the same—whitelash against anything having to do with supporting the achievement of people of color. In short, our collective inability to rid ourselves of institutional structures and cultures that maintain and reproduce ineffective pedagogical practice looks disturbingly like yet another stubborn legacy of white supremacy.
Certainly, resistance to transformative pedagogies in institutional settings stems from the immense weight of history, but there are other reasons, too. The centrality of research and attention to research productivity at many institutions leaves faculty with less time to attend to the relationship-building work that is a core component of student-centered pedagogy. Relatedly, there is scarce attention in higher education, particularly selective HWCUs, to ongoing professional development for teaching. College faculty are not required to receive pedagogical training, to be certified or credentialed in teaching, or to participate in sustained professional development. The lack of attention to teaching in higher education is related to a host of problems in postsecondary educational institutions that include an overreliance on grades, accompanying grade inflation, and heightened attention to teaching evaluations.
That may sound discouraging, but the fact is that many HWCUs have begun to realize that, if they are serious about racial equity, they must invest time, energy, and money that today's increasingly diverse college classroom demands. In so doing, they have found ways to integrate experiments in equity-minded pedagogy into the structures and systems of the modern university. In this spirit, we offer recommendations, organized by the increasing time, effort, organization, and system-wide effort they will require. Regardless of scope, each of our “next steps” requires that we attend to people and processes at HWCUs and the systems they work within. Regardless of scope, each of our “next steps” requires that we attend to people and processes at HWCUs and the systems they work within.
A Roadmap for Implementation
Building Capacity of Current and Future Instructors
We need to pay systematic attention to faculty pedagogical development that emphasizes student-centered learning. As previously described, this refers to a variety of approaches (e.g., culturally relevant, critical, and intersectional) that move away from a Euro-centric curricular focus and that emphasize classroom practices centering students’ dispositions, backgrounds, and intellectual capacities. We prefer this broad(er) approach because a “one-size fits all” model of student-centered teaching does not exist; rather, it varies by student need, instructor capacity, and educational context, including institutional characteristics. For instance, faculty who’ve been engaged in inclusive teaching practices among colleagues who are doing the same might be prepared and willing to take on the challenge of decolonizing their curricula. For others, this might be a new way of thinking about their pedagogical practice—both for themselves as well as colleagues at their institution and/or discipline.
When trying to bring about change, it's best to start small by turning to resources, relationships, and structures that already exist. HWCUs can begin with smaller groups of individuals on their campuses such as graduate students. As Leonard Cassuto writes, few graduate programs require pedagogical training. What little pedagogical training graduate students receive tends to come from campus centers for teaching and learning (CTLs), and only should they seek it out. Where such CTL training exists, it's hardly comprehensive. Moreover, some or all training located within academic departments tends to focus on content and methodologies and less on pedagogy. As doctoral students, we ourselves received no formal content-based training from our academic departments. Indeed, one author who later obtained a tenure-track position had only her experiences as a K-12 teacher to rely on as well as occasional support from her CLT to plan lessons, assess and grade student writing, and advise students on a variety of academic needs. Our experiences are representative of most doctoral candidates today.
One way to create a culture that values good teaching in the academy and prepares future professors for their profession is to make graduate pedagogy courses a regular part of graduate requirements. Academic departments can collaborate with CTL leaders to establish clear learning objectives and decide on a rhythm that works best for students. In many corners of higher education, those partnerships are now well-established as a result of the pandemic. That is, in their response to the teaching shifts induced by COVID-19, many CTLs rose to the occasion, offering valuable faculty training in what amounted to a global shift to online learning. In so doing, they demonstrated that they are able to support instructors by showing them how to become more flexible, thoughtful, and inclusive at creating learning experiences and opportunities for their students. One way to create a culture that values good teaching in the academy and prepares future professors for their profession is to make graduate pedagogy courses a regular part of graduate requirements.
Even before the pandemic, there were many precedents for CTL support of graduate pedagogical training. Some CTLs offer graduate teaching certificate programs that include content on how to improve college success outcomes for historically marginalized students (e.g., Columbia University's CTL Teaching Development Program or Princeton University's Teaching Transcript Program). In addition to equipping doctoral students with basic teaching skills, such programs help graduate students prepare for the increasingly diverse undergraduate student body they will teach. After all, those who find academic jobs will likely spend the bulk of their time teaching at institutions whose student bodies are comprised predominantly of historically marginalized students.
There are also changes to be made to the faculty hiring process. As part of each position description, departments, and hiring committees could advertise their interest in applicants with knowledge of, practice in, or willingness to gain expertise in pedagogies that support student learning in their classrooms. Teaching philosophies could be read for evidence of and/or the willingness to develop student-centered practices. Such statements about interest in continued professional development are far more valuable than empty diversity statements that many committees still ask of candidates.
Finally, during interviews, hiring committees could ask candidates to describe specific examples of student-centered teaching. Many universities ask candidates to provide teaching demonstrations. Hiring committees could invite a diverse range of students to attend and ask for their assessment of the candidate, from the clarity of content presented to the ways in which the candidate fostered engagement. We suggest including a CTL staff member or similarly qualified individual to help evaluate the candidate's strengths and areas for growth. Significantly, these suggestions for shifts in the faculty hiring process do not aim to automatically disqualify candidates. Rather, they aim to help recognize where faculty candidates might benefit from ongoing professional development once hired as well as their willingness to do so.
These simple changes in graduate training and the hiring process will allow colleges and universities to gradually create a pipeline of faculty who are competent in student-centered practices. But what about existing faculty? As it turns out, there are implementation opportunities that build upon already established processes and structures for today's faculty. There are, of course, DEI compliance models, most of which originated in the corporate, managerial world. Some universities have gone this route, requiring that faculty and staff take mandatory DEI training to meet legal requirements. We do not favor this model when it comes to teaching and pedagogy, mostly because it is out of alignment with the philosophy and purpose of learning. Moreover, existing institutional DEI trainings rarely address pedagogy and tend to focus more on workplace issues like sexual harassment. Compliance models treat cultural competency through disciplinary mechanisms. They imagine learners as passive subjects to whom knowledge is imparted. It is not, in other words, engaged learning and does not foster a learning environment that views pedagogical development through the prism of a growth mindset (i.e., a set of skills and competencies that one augments over time and continues to develop). These simple changes in graduate training and the hiring process will allow colleges and universities to gradually create a pipeline of faculty who are competent in student-centered practices.
Once we approach DEI work from the perspective of faculty education as opposed to employee compliance, there are multiple “points of delivery” that pose little additional burden to faculty. In the last decade, many universities have implemented faculty welcome orientations to onboard newcomers. These sessions offer a perfect opportunity to introduce new faculty to the institution's student body and make them aware of inequitable student success outcomes that fall along with the lines of race, class, gender, and English proficiency. Institutionally speaking, it is also relatively easy for universities to provide discipline- or department-specific data. With this context, institutional leaders might introduce new faculty to tools that allow them to begin or continue working and reworking their curricula and pedagogy.
Here, again, it would be useful to partner with CTL staff to design and deliver this initial session, and then think of ways to maintain touch points throughout the year with faculty. For instance, new faculty could begin by using a pedagogical approach in one course with scaffolded support before they shift their pedagogical practice across their teaching and advising responsibilities over their first few years. In addition to pedagogy, coaching sessions might also offer junior faculty other supports and resources, including the opportunity to add their voices to the scholarship on teaching and learning in higher education, support for assembling teaching artifacts for tenure dossiers or grant applications, and membership in a community that values attention to and growth in pedagogical practice.
Robust support for all types of instructional staff would also go a long way toward addressing that other major obstacle to the implementation of equitable pedagogies—faculty fear, hesitation, and sometimes outright resistance. As Pat Donachie documents, some faculty live in terror that they will be the subject of the next social media witch hunt, that something they said carelessly or ignorantly will be captured for all of posterity. They worry about their jobs, reputations, and legacy. They are, in other words, motivated by fear of saying or doing “the wrong thing” and getting swept up in a storm that can ruin their careers. However, as hooks writes in Teaching to Transgress, “There must be training sites where teachers have the opportunity to express [their fears] while also learning to create ways to approach the multicultural classroom and curriculum” (p. 36). In the capable hands of pedagogical coaches and a supportive, growth-oriented community, there are ways to transform faculty fear into a positive motivator driven by a genuine investment in student success.
Institutional Shifts to Foster Pedagogical Training
In addition to attending to people, our roadmap for implementing equitable pedagogies calls on institutions to attend to processes. The tenure process, for instance, poses a formidable bottleneck. Given both the history of white supremacy that shapes higher education and the changing demographics of our student populations, appropriate and effective application of equitable teaching should factor into the tenure process. It does not need to be the overriding criteria, but it should serve as one among several factors that demonstrate faculty commitment to the success of all their students.
There are a few experiments underway that seek to modify the traditional tenure process. In the University of California system, faculty are now required to demonstrate excellence in two areas for advancement. Faculty must show proficiency in their research as well as teaching and/or service responsibilities. At Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, faculty have a similar option. They may pursue tenure not just by pointing to their research and publication record, but through “a balanced case” that considers their success “across an array of integrated scholarly activities aligned with diversity, equity, and inclusion.” Making these shifts is especially important in light of emerging evidence that faculty research is negatively associated with student learning. In short, to support student academic success we must first support faculty learning. Such changes would be especially easy to implement at small liberal arts colleges that already place a strong emphasis on teaching. In short, to support student academic success we must first support faculty learning.
Changing the incentive structure of career development in academia is another effective way that an institution can push higher education in the right direction. For colleges and universities with robust CTLs, centralizing and streamlining faculty training into a certificate program that comes with even a modest stipend goes a long way. This is, for example, what Lafayette College has implemented through its Inclusive Instructors Academy. The Lafayette model offers other food for thought, including its program requirement for faculty certificate enrollees to partner with a student who provides feedback throughout the year. Indeed, why wouldn't we collaborate with and solicit feedback from the real experts—students? There are other benefits: most faculty will eventually undertake the cumbersome task of compiling tenure dossiers, and those certificates come in handy as tangible evidence of a commitment to ongoing professional development.
Many institutions offer teaching awards. What if colleges and universities factored in a DEI component, and considered the success of historically marginalized students? For example, we might ask STEM faculty about their retention rates for students of color in introductory courses. Or institutions might systematically collect data about the opportunities and barriers for engagement and learning that first-generation students face in their classes, using that information to reward instructors who are teaching to and through students’ backgrounds and strengths. Institutions could also tie pay raises to those faculty who demonstrate excellence in teaching. Additionally, institutions could tie equitable teaching practices to access to research grants. Already, the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health require STEM faculty to describe how their projects will contribute to diversity in the field. The list goes on and on.
Such efforts should be bolstered by the very recent precedent to adjusting tenure expectations. The COVID-19 pandemic fundamentally altered the process by accounting for the care responsibilities that suddenly fell to faculty, and in particular to female faculty. This happened rapidly, in response to a frightening global crisis that lives with us still. Imagine if we could thoughtfully and intentionally plan a smooth transition to altered tenure expectations that would improve student success outcomes and faculty health and well-being?
In order to accomplish the above, institutions must substantially change the culture and environment in which faculty operate. In our view, this is the heaviest lift. At present, institutions offer a reward structure that favors research not teaching, a tenure process in which student mentorship does not count, and a relentless “publish or perish” mindset that keeps junior faculty chronically overworked, frazzled, and exhausted. Against this background, many faculty must take the initiative to develop their own learning communities. In many cases, university departments, programs, and even academic professional organizations sponsor reading and learning groups in which faculty reflect on and develop their pedagogical practice. As laudable as these developments are, they are scarcely comprehensive. For all the difficulties it will involve, it is our institutions which must implement structures, policies, and practices that recenter and recommit to effective pedagogy. And there is no shortage of incentives that departments and institutions can offer faculty who commit to improving their pedagogy. What's more, the institutional policy and programmatic shifts suggested above could be more easily accomplished with organizational restructures that move at least some of CTL faculty development responsibilities toward the faculty affairs divisions. This is just one example of how institutions must be fundamentally restructured to pursue the more ambitious recommendations outlined above. For all the difficulties it will involve, it is our institutions which must implement structures, policies, and practices that recenter and recommit to effective pedagogy.
Finally, though faculty at HWCUs remain disproportionately white across the board, the “demographic divide” between faculty and students is slowly closing. Despite the considerable obstacles to success that first-generation, low-income, and/or students of color face, enough of these students successfully make it into the academic profession and thus have not just a professional but a personal stake in these issues. As a result, they have shown themselves quite open to the prospect of student-centered teaching. Even those who do not have personal experience with these issues are showing more and more interest. Younger generations of faculty are more likely to crave professional development and coaching because they recognize that our students come with a variety of different experiences, backgrounds, and prior access to enrichment opportunities. That's a hunger that institutions should capitalize on.
Changes wrought by the pandemic in 2020 put paid to the myth that institutions move slowly. Overnight, it seemed, universities recreated themselves online. It was, of course, a chaotic and unpleasant process, to say the least. But it happened, and quickly at that. What if we approached the importance of enhancing college success for all our students with the same sense of urgency? What if we could do so with the foresight we were denied by a sudden global pandemic?
Conclusion
The above recommendations promise to be especially effective if they are undertaken systematically within and across HWCUs, translating into broader shifts in curricula, teaching practices, and administrative policies. Support for enhanced pedagogical training should come both from the top-down and the bottom-up. We are not so naive as to expect this process to be easy, quick, or inexpensive. Indeed, what we are calling for is a fundamental shift in our collective mindset about the work that HWCUs are meant to do. But just because something is hard is scarcely a reason not to at least try, especially when it is our students who suffer from institutional inertia. Indeed, what we are calling for is a fundamental shift in our collective mindset about the work that HWCUs are meant to do.
There are more and less effective ways to implement the recommendations we have provided here. And, undoubtedly, there are versions of culturally competent teaching that recreate the inequities it seeks to mitigate (e.g., an instructor modifying their reading list to include Black people in negatively stereotyped ways; asking students of color to share, represent, or defend aspects of their identity in class discussions; providing inadequate or nonactionable feedback on assignments in the spirit of “ungrading,” etc.). To glean the benefits of inclusive teaching, we cannot “enforce” it through added bureaucratic hurdles (e.g., additional observations for CTL staff or department chairs to complete) or by requiring faculty to implement a standard set of practices across all their courses. Rather, we must create a culture in which faculty feel comfortable to embrace pedagogical learning with a sense of curiosity, to approach their teaching practice with the same sense of wonder and excitement that brings them to their research endeavors, and with the same long-term trajectory in mind.
This last point is crucial: instructors and institutions need time, space, and resources to develop into their student-centered practices—and to continue making refinements and adaptations as the student composition and interest demand. If we all take responsibility for implementing good teaching and see it as work that is critical for current and future students, we can make HWCUs the kinds of welcoming, inclusive learning spaces that we see in glossy promotional materials that colleges send to potential students—and make the statistics and narratives that we highlighted at the beginning of this essay relics of the past.
