Category: inclusion

Gender governance and the global grammar of illiberal inclusion

by Ourania Filippakou

Across global higher education, the terms of justice, equality and inclusion are being rewritten. In recent years, the rollback of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives in the United States (Spitalniak, 2025) has unfolded alongside a global resurgence of anti-gender, ultra-nationalist, racialised and colonial politics (Brechenmacher, 2025). At the same time, the rise of authoritarian and far-right ideologies, together with deepening socioeconomic inequalities fuelled by an ascendant billionaire class (Klein and Taylor, 2025) and the growing portrayal of feminist and queer scholarship as ideological extremism (Pitts-Taylor and Wood, 2025), signal a profound shift in the rationalities shaping the politics of higher education. These developments do not reject inclusion; they refashion it. Equality becomes excess, dissent is recast as disorder, and inclusion is reconstituted as a technology of governance.

This conjuncture, what Stuart Hall (Hall in Hall and Massey, 2010, p57) would call the alignment of economic, political and cultural forces, requires a vocabulary capable of capturing continuity and rupture. It also reflects the deepening crisis of neoliberalism, whose governing logics become more coercive as their legitimacy wanes (Beckert, 2025; Menand, 2023). As Hall reminds us, ‘a conjuncture is a period when different social, political, economic and ideological contradictions… or as Althusser said ‘fuse in a ruptural unity’’ (Hall in Hall and Massey, 2012, p57). A conjuncture, in this sense, does not resolve crisis but produces new configurations of ideological coherence and institutional control. In my recent article, ‘Managed Inclusion and the Politics of Erasure: Gender Governance in Higher Education under Neoliberal Authoritarianism’ (Review of Education, Pedagogy & Cultural Studies, 2025), I theorise these developments as a global grammar of illiberal inclusion: a political rationality that appropriates the language of equity while disabling its redistributive, democratic and epistemic force. The article develops a typology of symbolic, technocratic and transformative inclusion to examine how feminist, anti-caste and critical vocabularies are increasingly absorbed into systems of civility, visibility and procedural control. Transformative inclusion, the configuration most aligned with redistribution, dissent and epistemic plurality, is the one most forcefully neutralised.

Across geopolitical contexts, from postcolonial states to liberal democracies, gender inclusion is increasingly appropriated not as a demand for justice but as a mechanism of control. The techniques of co-option vary, yet they consolidate into a shared political rationality in which equity is stripped of redistributive force and redeployed to affirm institutional legitimacy, nationalist virtue and market competitiveness. This is not a rupture with neoliberal governance but its intensification through more disciplinary and exclusionary forms. For example, in India, the National Education Policy 2020 invokes empowerment while enacting epistemic erasure, systematically marginalising the knowledges of women from subordinated caste, class and religious communities (Peerzada et al, 2024; Patil, 2023; Singh, 2023). At the same time, state-led campaigns such as Beti Bachao elevate women’s visibility only within ideals of modesty and nationalist virtue (Chhachhi, 2020). In Hungary, the 2018 ban on gender studies aligned higher education with labour-market imperatives and nationalist agendas (Barát, 2022; Zsubori, 2018). In Turkey, reforms under Erdoğan consolidate patriarchal norms while constraining feminist organising (Zihnioğlu and Kourou, 2025). Here, gender inclusion is tolerated only when it reinforces state agendas and restricts dissent.

Elsewhere, inclusion is recast as ideological deviance. In the United States, the Trump-era rollback of DEI initiatives and reproductive rights has weaponised inclusion as a spectre of radicalism, disproportionately targeting racialised and LGBTQ+ communities (Amnesty International, 2024; Chao-Fong, 2025). In Argentina, Milei abolished the Ministry of Women, describing feminism as fiscally irresponsible (James, 2024). In Italy, Meloni’s government invokes ‘traditional values’ to erode anti-discrimination frameworks (De Giorgi et al, 2023, p.v11i1.6042). In these cases, inclusion is not merely neutralised but actively vilified, its political charge reframed as cultural threat.

Even when inclusion is celebrated, it is tethered to respectability and moral legibility. In France, femonationalist discourses instrumentalise gender equality to legitimise anti-Muslim policy (Farris, 2012; Möser, 2022). In Greece, conservative statecraft reframes inclusion through familialist narratives while dismantling equality infrastructures (Bempeza, 2025). These patterns reflect a longer political repertoire in which authoritarian and ultra-nationalist projects mobilise idealised domestic femininity to naturalise social hierarchies. As historian Diana Garvin (Garvin quoted in Matei, 2025) notes, ‘what fascisms old and new have in common is they tend to look to women to fill in the gaps that the state misses’, with contemporary ‘womanosphere’ influencers in the US reviving fantasies of domestic bliss that obscure intensified gendered precarity (Matei, 2025).

Such gendered constructions coexist with escalating violence. More than 50.000 women and girls were killed by intimate partners or family members in 2024, which means one woman or girl was killed every ten minutes, or 137 every day, according to the latest UNODC and UN Women femicide report (UNODC/UN Women, 2025). This sits within a wider continuum of harm: 83.000 women and girls were intentionally killed last year, and the report finds no sign of real progress. It also highlights a steep rise in digital violence, including harassment, stalking, gendered disinformation and deepfakes, which increasingly spills into offline contexts and contributes to more lethal forms of harm. These global patterns intersect with regional crises. For example, more than 7.000 women were killed in India in gender-related violence in 2022 (NCRB, 2023); eleven women are murdered daily in femicides across Latin America (NU CEPAL, 2024). At the same time, masculinist influencers such as Andrew Tate cultivate transnational publics organised around misogyny (Adams, 2025; Wescott et al, 2024). As UN Secretary-General António Guterres (2025) warns: ‘Instead of mainstreaming equal rights, we are seeing the mainstreaming of misogyny’.

These global pressures reverberate across institutions that have historically positioned themselves as democratic spaces, including universities, which increasingly recast gender equity as a reputational risk or cultural flashpoint rather than a democratic obligation (D’Angelo et al, 2024; McEwen and Narayanaswamy, 2023). Equity becomes an emblem of modernity to be audited, displayed and curated, rather than a demand for justice. Ahmed’s (2012) theorisation of non-performativity is essential here: institutions declare commitments to equality precisely to contain the transformations such commitments would require. In this context, symbolic and technocratic inclusion flourish, while the structural conditions for transformative inclusion continue to narrow.

These shifts reflect broader political and economic formations. Brown (2015) shows how neoliberal reason converts justice claims into performance demands, hollowing out democratic vocabularies. Fraser’s (2017) account of ‘progressive neoliberalism’ illuminates the terrain in which market liberalism coupled with selective diversity politics absorbs emancipatory discourse while preserving inequality. Patnaik (2021) argues that the rise of neofascism is a political necessity for neoliberalism in crisis, as rights are redefined as privileges and inclusion is repurposed to stabilise inequality. In this conjuncture, these tendencies intensify into what Giroux (2018, 2021, 2022a) names ‘neoliberal fascism’, a formation structured by three interlocking fundamentalisms: a market fundamentalism that commodifies all aspects of life, a religious fundamentalism that moralises inequality; and a regime of manufactured ignorance and militarised illiteracy that discredits critical thought and erases historical memory (Giroux 2022b, p48-54).

The United States now offers a further manifestation of this global pattern, illustrating how attacks on DEI can function as a broader assault on higher education. As recent analyses of US politics show, the first and particularly the second Trump administration is actively modelling itself on Viktor Orbán’s illiberal statecraft, centralising executive power, purging public institutions and mobilising ‘family values’ and anti-‘woke’ politics to reshape education and media governance (Giroux, 2017; Smith, 2025; Kauffmann, 2025). The dismantling of DEI under the Trump administration, framed as a defence of merit, free speech and fiscal responsibility (The White House, 2025), marks the beginning of a wider attempt to consolidate political influence over higher education. Executive orders targeting DEI have been followed by lawsuits, funding withdrawals and intensified federal scrutiny, prompting universities such as Michigan, Columbia and Chicago to scale back equality infrastructures, cut programmes and reduce humanities provision (cf Bleiler, 2025; Pickering, Cosgrove and Massel, 2025; Quinn, 2025). These developments do not simply eliminate DEI; they position anti-gender politics as a mechanism of disciplining universities, narrowing intellectual autonomy and extending political control over academic life. They exemplify wider global tendencies in which inclusion becomes a field through which illiberal projects consolidate authority. The assault on DEI is thus not a uniquely American phenomenon but part of a broader authoritarian turn in which inclusion is recoded to stabilise, rather than challenge, existing power.

Understanding gender governance in higher education through this conjunctural lens reveals not merely the erosion of equity but the emergence of a political formation that reconfigures inclusion into an apparatus of civility, visibility and administrative control. These tendencies are not aberrations but expressions of a larger global grammar that binds emancipatory rhetoric to authoritarian-neoliberal governance. The result is not the dilution of equality but its rearrangement as a practice of containment.

The implications for the sector are profound. If inclusion is increasingly reorganised through metrics, decorum and procedural compliance, then reclaiming its democratic potential requires an epistemic and institutional shift. Inclusion needs to be understood not as a reputational asset but as a commitment to justice, redistribution and collective struggle. This means recovering equality as political and pedagogical labour: the work of confronting injustice, protecting dissent and renewing the public imagination. Academic freedom and equality are inseparable: without equality, freedom becomes privilege; without freedom, equality becomes performance.

As Angela Davis (Davis quoted in Gerges, 2023) reminds us: ‘Diversity without structural transformation simply brings those who were previously excluded into a system as racist and misogynist as it was before… There can be no diversity and inclusion without transformation and justice.’ And as Henry Giroux (2025) argues, democracy depends on how societies fight over language, memory and possibility. That struggle now runs through the university itself, shaping its governance, its epistemic life and the courage to imagine more just and democratic possibilities.

Ourania Filippakou is a Professor of Education at Brunel University of London. Her research interrogates the politics of higher education, examining universities as contested spaces where power, inequality, and resistance intersect. Rooted in critical traditions, she explores how higher education can foster social justice, equity, and transformative change.

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Categories: Leadership Governance & Management | Tags: conjuncture, DEI, diversity, EDI, equality, feminist, gender, governance, inclusion, liberal, neoliberal, neoliberalism and higher education, social justice, technology | Permalink.

Author: SRHE News Blog

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December 1, 2025

Relational Communication Theory in Action: Enhancing Learning and Competence – Faculty Focus

Interpersonal communication theories not only help students navigate personal and professional relationships but also strengthen teacher-student connections. Drawing on Orón (2018) and Orón Semper & Blasco (2018), we encourage instructors to use this one-day activity to shift from a “student-centered” to an “interpersonal relationship-centered” pedagogy. This approach views instructor-student relationships as essential to learning and as a space for students to apply theory with relational intent. The activity promotes self-reflexivity, theory analysis, and collaborative dialogue, resulting in improved theory comprehension, stronger rapport, and communication practices that respect classroom diversity.

Student and instructor diversity in higher education has grown significantly in recent years (Li & Koedel, 2017), with over a million international students enrolled in U.S. universities (Urban, 2016). This diversity—across culture, gender, race, ability, and socioeconomic status—shapes classroom dynamics and presents unique challenges related to language, identity, and cultural differences (Jones et al., 2021). Instructors must respond by creating inclusive learning environments that support all students (Downing & Billotte Verhoff, 2023). Diversity also presents an opportunity to apply communication theories to foster intercultural empathy and improve collaboration. Students may initially struggle to understand and respect differing perspectives, affecting group work and engagement (Gray et al., 2020), but these challenges can become learning opportunities that deepen classroom inclusivity.

Communication scholars often apply interpersonal communication theories in the classroom to strengthen student–teacher relationships (Xie & Derakhshan, 2021). This single class activity integrates uncertainty management, self-disclosure, and communication accommodation theory (CAT) for undergraduate students to (a) to understand and (b) apply these theories to facilitate an inclusive and self-reflexive classroom. Teachers are the leading actors during everyday interaction and play a significant role in shaping communication and enhancing the teaching and learning process (Almas Rizkika Nabila, 2020). This activity encourages students to actively co-create a meaningful learning experience, highlighting the reciprocal nature of classroom interaction (Anyichie & Butler, 2023; Kong, 2021).

Self-disclosure: Communication Privacy Management

Self-disclosure is “any conversation about the self that a person communicates to others” (Ampong et al., 2018). Communication Privacy Management (CPM) theory helps students understand how they set and manage privacy boundaries with peers and instructors (Petronio et al., 2021).  The intersection of privacy boundaries and the learning space is complicated as students and instructors navigate privacy. Instructors deliver the lecture and explain the course content, but they also intentionally and willingly share their personal stories (Liu & Zhu, 2021). For instance, the first author, an international graduate assistant, connects class discussions to experiences from his home country, helping students relate and engage. Such instructor self-disclosure encourages student participation and fosters more meaningful classroom communication (Goldstein, 1994) (Liu & Zhu, 2021). 

However, instructors and students rarely critically examine the disclosure norms in the classroom and their role in learning and relationship building. For example, disclosure boundaries (i.e., how far instructors can go to share their experiences) (Cayanus, 2004). Additionally, while students may attend to how much information they share in the classroom, this activity challenges them to apply CPM theory to examine their disclosure practices, expectations, and privacy boundary negotiations. 

Communication Accommodation Theory

Communication Accommodation Theory (CAT) explains how individuals adjust their communication such as speech, tone, pace, gestures, or body language—to interact effectively with others. Instructors can use CAT to enhance student understanding during lectures (Howard Giles, 2023). The theory outlines two key strategies: convergence, where a speaker adapts to another’s communication style (e.g., simplifying vocabulary, repeating phrases, pausing, smiling, nodding), and divergence, where a speaker maintains differences by avoiding shared cues (e.g., using complex words, changing topics, or not adjusting speaking pace) (Marko Dragojevic, 2016) (Pardo et al., 2022).

Drawing on this research, the goal of this activity is 1) to understand the theories and analyze how they facilitate the teaching process, 2) to explore the perceptions of students about these theories and their inclusion in the classroom, 3) to determine the expectations of students related to characteristics of these theories. 

The Activity

This single-class activity applies to various undergraduate courses, such as public speaking, communication among cultures, communication in interpersonal relationships, argument analysis and advocacy, and persuasion. Instructors can do this activity during introduction week as they begin navigating disclosures about themselves and student expectations. Moreover, planning this activity at the beginning will challenge students to examine their positionalities, norms, and expectations critically.

Step 1: Personal Reflection

Before implementing the activity, instructors should familiarize themselves with relevant communication theories and reflect on how their own identities shape their teaching assumptions (Nabila, 2020, Downing & Billotte Verhoff, 2023). We recommend engaging in self-reflexive questions, such as: What disclosure boundaries do I set and why? What uncertainties do I face around privacy or accommodation in teaching? What expectations exist between me and my students regarding communication and flexibility? Instructors should identify what personal information they’re willing to share, why they’re sharing it, and how it might impact classroom relationships. For example, the first author reflected on cultural and linguistic differences and adjusted his teaching by using simpler language, acknowledging English is not his first language, and setting shared guidelines to support mutual understanding and accommodation. This reflective process helps align instructional practices with inclusive, theory-informed pedagogy.

Step 2: Students’ Perceptions About Components of Theories

This activity takes approximately 30 to 40 minutes and is best suited for a full class session. Instructors should introduce the key theories with examples and explain the activity’s purpose and timing. For advanced courses, assigning theory readings beforehand can deepen analysis, making it more effective to conduct the activity later in the semester rather than at the start. During the session, students should be divided into groups of four and asked to write their expectations for the course and the instructor. To guide discussion, instructors can pose prompts such as:

What expectations do you have for your instructor when it comes to using different communication accommodation strategies?

How do you manage your own self-disclosure in the classroom? Where do you draw the line on what you choose to share?

What are your thoughts on instructors’ self-disclosure? What types of disclosures have a positive or negative impact on your learning experience?

How comfortable are you with classroom communication? What strategies could reduce uncertainty or discomfort?

How do you plan to engage with and accommodate diversity in terms of culture, race, gender identity, and sexual orientation in your classroom interactions?

Can you connect your responses to the core ideas of the communication theories we’ve discussed? How do these theories help explain disclosure and accommodation in the classroom context?

These questions will provide space for students to reflect on their experiences. Moreover, during that time, the instructor will also answer these questions from the instructor’s perspective and enlist the convergence techniques they perceive to accommodate. Instructors can give 15 to 20 minutes to answer the provided questions briefly. 

Step 3: Describing the Theories and Their Impact

Instructors will invite each group to share their responses, followed by the instructor’s own disclosure of planned strategies—such as accommodation, anticipated uncertainties, and boundaries around self-disclosure. A comparison table with two columns (students vs. instructor) can be used to visually display both perspectives. Instructors then lead a discussion with prompts like: Why do these expectations exist? What differences or overlaps emerge? How do these perspectives interact? This activity encourages students to (a) practice perspective-taking shaped by diverse identities, (b) apply key concepts like co-creating privacy boundaries (CPM), and (c) see how theory fosters a supportive learning environment. Since student familiarity with these theories may vary, instructors should first assess their basic understanding.

Debriefing

At the end of the activity on the same day. Instructors can initiate the debriefing by including the Q&A sessions such as: 

How did this activity impact, how you view self-disclosure and accommodation?

What do you understand about embedding these theories in the classroom?

How can this activity help to build a good student-teacher relationship and create an inclusive environment in the classroom?

Appraisal

In the second week, I (the first author) compiled all responses into a table and presented it to the class. I briefly discussed both student and instructor perspectives, then posted reflection prompts on Blackboard for feedback. Students responded positively, noting that the activity was enjoyable and helped them get to know one another. Many emphasized the importance of communication accommodation, agreeing that in a diverse classroom, convergence strategies are essential for fostering inclusion and mutual respect. One student highlighted that accommodation is key to ensuring understanding and promoting respectful interaction (see Table 1).

Table 1: Responses of Students and Instructor

	Communication Accommodation	Self-disclosure	Uncertainty
Students	-Speaking slower during a speech even when anxious -Staying away from slang words to avoid language barriers -Clear annunciation -Respectful of each other’s speaking language -Appropriate tone/voice -In class participation -Speaking clearly and loudly**** -Visual cue images if doing a speech. -Articulation -Be patient -Stay engaged -Ask him to repeat	-Disclose how comfortable you are speaking in front of a group, so the professor understands your anxiety or emotion towards speech presentation -Disclosing where you are from, what languages you, speak, and how much you understand a topic will be very important to critiquing your peers on their speeches -Safe space -No personal information** -No social media -Should disclose important and relevant events that could affect quality -Establish boundaries	-Topics that peers choose to speak about throughout the semester may be understood less or more by others -How to write a speech -How we will be graded -How heavy the workload will be -Fear of asking questions -Ask for help when needed -Talking in front of people preparation -Speech topics (Range of issues) -Comfort -What is expected of us from the professor -Memorizing speeches -Deadlines -Clear instructions for assignments -Reminders of important dates -Remember to submit assignments -Nervous
Instructor	-Speak slowly -Use clear words -Allow students to ask questions -Repeat my words without asking -Take a break during lecture and ask students if they have any concern or not -Making good eye contact -Listen everyone carefully -Give everyone chance to speak	-If you are comfortable to share your personal information you can, we can make a rule that whatever you share in this class will stay in this class	-How do you feel when I show attendance sheet on BB -How do you feel about forgetting your name -What do you think when it takes time to respond to your email -How you think when you meet me outside of class at court street on weekends

One limitation of this activity is the time required to develop and implement it during the first week of the semester, making early planning essential. Second, the activity is best suited for small classes; in larger classrooms, it may be difficult to follow all steps without modification. Lastly, delayed feedback or response-sharing may reduce the activity’s impact, as students may forget key details over time.

Athar Memon, MBBS, MSPH, is a graduate student in the PhD program in the Scripps School of Communication Studies at Ohio University. Athar Memon research interest is related to health communication specifically health care access, behaviors to access healthcare services among marginalized population, barriers related to patient-provider interpersonal communication, health literacy and its relationship with health outcomes and healthy behaviors. His work has been published in various journals including Professional Medical Journal, Journal of Pakistan Medical Association, Pakistan Journal of Public Health, PEC Innovation, and Eastern Mediterranean Journal.

China C. Billotte Verhoff, PhD, (Purdue University) is an Assistant Professor in the School of Communication Studies at Ohio University. Dr. Billotte Verhoff’s research agenda lies at the intersections of interpersonal and organizational communication. Specifically, she explores how individuals with marginalized and stigmatized identities navigate self-disclosure and social support processes to identify the associated relational, career, and health outcomes. Dr. Billotte Verhoff’s work has been published in peer-reviewed journals such as Communication Monographs, the Journal of Language and Social Psychology, Communication Studies, Sex Roles, Women and Language, and Health Communication.

References

Almas Rizkika Nabila, A. M., Syafi’ul Anam. 2020. “TEACHER’S MOTIVES IN APPLYING COMMUNICATION ACCOMMODATION STRATEGIES IN SECONDARY ELT CLASS. Linguistic, English Education and Art (LEEA) Journal, 3(2), 373-384.”

Ampong, G. O. A., Mensah, A., Adu, A. S. Y, Addae, J. A., Omoregie, O. K., & Ofori, K. S. 2018. “Examining Self-Disclosure on Social Networking Sites: A Flow Theory and Privacy Perspective. Behav Sci (Basel), 8(6).”

Anyichie, A. C., & Butler, D. L.. 2023. Examining culturally diverse learners’ motivation and engagement processes as situated in the context of a complex task. Frontiers in Education,

Cayanus, J. L.. 2004. “Effective Instructional Practice: Using Teacher Self-Disclosure as an Instructional Tool. Communication Teacher, 18(1), 6-9.”

Downing, S. S., & Billotte Verhoff, C. C. 2023. “Incorporating mini lessons on the hidden curriculum in communication classrooms. Communication Teacher, 37(3), 246-253.”

Ewa Urban, L. B. P.. 2016. “International Students’ Perceptions of the Value of U.S. Higher Education Journal of International Students, 6(1), 153-174.”

Gray, D. L., McElveen, T. L., Green, B. P., & Bryant, L. H.. 2020. Engaging Black and Latinx students through communal learning opportunities: A relevance intervention for middle schoolers in STEM elective classrooms. Contemporary Educational Psychology, 60, 101833.

Howard Giles, A. L. E., Joseph B. Walther. 2023. Communication accommodation theory: Past accomplishments, current trends, and future prospects.

Jones, B. D., Krost, K., & Jones, M. W.. 2021. Relationships between students’ course perceptions, effort, and achievement in an online course. Computers and Education Open, 2, 100051.

Kong, Y. 2021. The Role of Experiential Learning on Students’ Motivation and Classroom Engagement. Front Psychol, 12, 771272.

Li, D., & Koedel, C. 2017. “Representation and salary gaps by race-ethnicity and gender at selective public universities. Educational researcher, 46(7), 343-354.”

Liu, X., & Zhu, L. 2021. The Role of EFL Teachers’ Self-Disclosure as Predictors of Student’s Willingness to Communicate and Their Engagement. Front Psychol, 12, 748744.

Marko Dragojevic, J. G., Howard Giles. 2016. Accommodative Strategies as Core of the Theory. Communication Accommodation Theory: Negotiating Personal Relationships and Social Identities across Contexts, 36-59.

Pardo, J. S., Pellegrino, E., Dellwo, V., & Möbius, B. 2022. Special issue: Vocal accommodation in speech communication. Journal of Phonetics, 95, 101196.

Petronio, S., Child, J. T., & Hall, R. D. 2021. Communication privacy management theory: Significance for interpersonal communication. In Engaging theories in interpersonal communication (pp. 314-327). Routledge.

Xie, F., & Derakhshan, A. 2021. A Conceptual Review of Positive Teacher Interpersonal Communication Behaviors in the Instructional Context. Front Psychol, 12, 708490.

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October 31, 2025

There Are No “Shy Students”, Only Poor Learning Environments – Faculty Focus
As we learn more about how to improve classrooms in higher education, the concept of the “shy student” is a recurring one that serves as a convenient shorthand for describing students who don’t speak up. As a result, some faculty members may be frustrated with students who are less vocal in group activities and conclude that it’s part of a student’s personality.

But what if the problem is not with the student but the classroom itself? Insights in educational sciences suggest that engagement in the classroom isn’t just about a student’s innate disposition. In fact, it’s more likely to be a result of poor instructional practices or a failure to understand differences in context or culture. We can create more equitable spaces that value a broader range of student voices by rethinking how we define engagement and redesigning our learning environments.

The Research on Participation and Personality

Popular writing on the topic of education styles sometimes reinforces the idea of a “shy student”. It’s common when referring to students who are more forthcoming with answers or discussion that we use the words “extroverted” or “introverted”. However, although these traits can sometimes be visible in the actions of students, research suggests that this isn’t in fact an obstacle for all students to participate in meaningful and mutually beneficial interactions. Traditional classroom settings have often rewarded more rapid and spontaneous verbal responses, but this can unintentionally privilege extroverted communication styles.

Susan Cain’s well-known work on introversion explains how, although some students seem reserved, their presence in the classroom can complement more outgoing students. This is particularly true when conversations between the two veer between the lighthearted and the serious. “Extroverts need to know that introverts…may be only too happy to be tugged along to a more lighthearted place,” Cain writes about the variety in classroom conversations, adding that quieter students “should know that they make it safe for others to get serious.”

Analyses in educational psychology suggest that classroom participation is less about innate personality and more about whether students feel psychologically safe and intellectually respected to speak out.

Research by scholars such as Mary-Ann Winkelmes on transparency in learning and teaching (known as the TILT framework) boosts students’ motivation by showing them the purpose behind their work. Students that understand the reason and method of a given task and connect it to their learning are more inclined to invest in it fully and participate more actively.

Similarly, the concept of “academic behavioral confidence” (or ABC), explored by researchers like Paul Sander suggests that confidence in higher education is malleable and responsive to classroom environments. Rather than assuming students are shy, we must ask whether we’ve fostered a learning environment in which students feel secure in sharing their thoughts.

The Role of the Classroom Environment

The design of a classroom plays a crucial role in shaping student participation. Lecture halls at traditional universities, with imposing tiered seating, can sometimes reinforce passivity. We all remember the time when lecturers would insist on the Socratic method and ask us questions point-blank as a means to illustrate knowledge! On the other hand, an active learning environment encourages dynamic learning spaces, smaller group discussions, and alternative forms of communication (through text or anonymous participation, for example).

The use of calling on students in the lecture room can inadvertently silence students who need more time to process. Inclusive teaching practices, such as think-pair-share, anonymous polling, or discussion boards, provide multiple modalities for students to contribute.

To this end, Cognitive Psychologist Stanislas Dehaene’s four pillars of learning—attention, active engagement, error feedback, and consolidation—can help articulate the design of a better higher education classroom. By fostering environments that capture students’ attention, be it through interactive or varied teaching methods, educators can cater to diverse learning styles.

Getting students to actively engage can be encouraged through collaborative activities or real-time responses. This ensures that all students participate and learn at their own pace. Providing immediate and constructive feedback on errors will additionally bolster students in their understanding of a topic.

Lastly, creating opportunities for consolidation, such as through spaced repetition or reflection sessions, allows all learners to reinforce and retain knowledge. This makes learning accessible and effective for everyone. Educators can scaffold this participation by providing low-risk entry points into discussion, validating diverse contributions, and offering constructive feedback that encourages further exploration.

Strategies for More Engaging Classrooms

Fostering participation among students who choose not to speak up requires careful planning and collaboration within higher education departments. As Head of Learning Innovation at Wooclap, here are several strategies that I’ve seen in action to help promote more engagement in the classroom:
1. Redefine Participation: Expand the definition of participation to include active listening, written reflections, online discussion posts, as well as creative endeavors. Make these forms of engagement visible and valued when grading a student.
1. Use Diverse Modalities: Offer students different ways to contribute. This can be done verbally, in writing, through technology, or in small groups. Digital Tools that allow for non-verbal or anonymous engagement can be leveraged to make quieter voices more audible.
1. Set Clear Expectations: Use transparent teaching methods to clarify what participation looks like and why it matters. Share examples and model respectful discourse to encourage more engaging discussions.
1. Create Psychological Safety: Cultivate an environment where students feel comfortable taking risks. This can include normalizing uncertainty, encouraging questions, and quickly intervening against microaggressions or dominance in discussions.
1. Solicit Feedback and Adapt: Regularly check in on students to see how classroom structures are working for them. Use anonymous surveys to gauge comfort levels and adjust practices accordingly.
Designing for All Voices

Higher education instructors shouldn’t be quick to judge students who are less vocal during class. In many cases, choosing not to speak up might be a rational response to a classroom design that is overbearing or limiting in its structure for more thoughtful and reflective judgment.

Designing great learning environments that adhere to the four pillars of education, as articulated by Stanislas Dehaene, can help educators support all students and not just those who are the quickest to speak. By doing so, we can shift the narrative away from having “shy students” to fixing the systems that fail to engage them. We can improve on these systems by reimagining participation, embracing diverse communication styles, and prioritizing inclusion in our pedagogy.

Arlène Botokro has a decade of experience at the crossroads of pedagogy and digital transformation, working internationally. She has played a pivotal role in shaping Wooclap’s impact in higher education since joining the company in 2020. As Senior Manager of Education Partnerships and Innovation Projects Lead, she built strategic collaborations with leading universities, ensuring Wooclap’s solutions align with research-driven best practices. Her international experience spans the U.S., France, and Ghana with projects across multiple countries, including previous roles at Sciences Po and consulting in innovation for the publishing sector. This diverse background has given her a deep understanding of how digital learning practices can be adapted across different educational and corporate environments. Arlène continues to expand her knowledge in neuroeducation through coursework at Harvard University, reinforcing her commitment to integrating cutting-edge research into EdTech solutions.

References

Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking, (Penguin Books, 2012).
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October 3, 2025
Want to be a drummer? Grab a bucket.

The tent donated by the Mani Tese association swayed every 10 minutes. In May 2012, aftershocks from the Emilia earthquakes in Northern Italy shook the ground. But inside that precarious structure, dozens of people played music together as if nothing could stop them.

Oil buckets transformed into drums, pots hung from metal nets, plastic bins resonated like timpani. What might have seemed like an improvised concert was actually the birth of something revolutionary.

“That was truly an unforgettable moment for all of us,” said Federico Alberghini, the head and founder of Banda Rulli Frulli. “We realized we had something huge in our hands, a project with such vision and energy that telling it now still moves me.”

Founded in 2010, Banda Rulli Frulli is an inclusive and accessible music project that brings together young people of all abilities to build instruments from recycled materials and create music as a collective. Born as an educational experiment, it has grown into a community movement combining creativity, craftsmanship and social inclusion.

In that tent, among young people who had lost their homes and families uprooted from their lives, an experiment was being born that today counts 2,400 participants in 12 bands spread across Italy, with the first international expansion planned for New York in autumn 2025.

Hearing the beat of a different drum

The story of Rulli Frulli begins long before the earthquake. Alberghini was just 11 years old when, accompanying his father to a vintage car show in the Modena area in the early 1990s, he noticed a door with the inscription, “Quale percussione?” or, “Which percussion?” Beyond that threshold awaited Luciano Bosi, a collector of percussion instruments and pioneer of construction workshops using recycled materials.

“He was sitting on the floor,” Alberghini said. “He performed a solo for me with two sticks using four volumes of the [telephone book], without even greeting me first. When I saw all this I told myself that this was what I wanted to do when I grew up.”

Bosi is now part of the Rulli Frulli staff and has donated his entire instrument collection to the project. His philosophy is simple: any object, even the most mundane, can be a musical instrument. In the 1970s he had been the first to bring workshops for building instruments from recycled materials to Italian schools.

That encounter planted a seed that germinated years later. Alberghini, after pursuing a career as a drummer in various bands, became a music teacher at the Fondazione Scuola di Musica Carlo e Guglielmo Andreoli. It was then that he began experimenting in his grandmother’s garage with a small group of young people from the area.

“In 2009 I had to climb over the fence of the Finale Emilia dump because I couldn’t find anyone to give me a bucket to play,” Alberghini said. “Today we receive containers of buckets and bins to supply the more than 2,400 girls and boys who are part of the Rulli Frulli bands scattered across Italy.”

Among these bands is the one from Finale Emilia municipality. Rulli Frulli now has dozens of concerts to its name and has released six albums in collaboration with some of the biggest names from the Italian independent music scene.

A generative method of inclusion

What makes the Rulli Frulli project unique is not only the use of recycled materials, but its natural approach to inclusion for people with disabilities. “Any potential disabilities are never ‘announced,’” Alberghini said.

The result has attracted the attention of the Catholic University of Milan, which in 2022 conducted and published a scientific study on the so-called “generative method” of the band. The research revealed, among other things, how the group’s sound environment — dozens of people playing self-built percussion instruments at very high volume — can have unexpected therapeutic effects.

A child with autism who cries at the noise of a vacuum at home can, in the context of the band, find comfort in equally loud, deafening sounds that might otherwise be overwhelming — sounds that become less disturbing when created in a group.

“When you watch the Banda Rulli Frulli on stage today, you see 80 people engaged in a performance so solid, so impactful that it doesn’t even cross your mind to look for disability,” Alberghini said. “You don’t notice it because you’re overwhelmed by the impact of those who are playing.”

From tent to national spotlight

The turning point came in 2016, when the band was selected to participate in a May Day Concert in Rome. The scene that presented itself to the event’s historic sound engineer has become legendary: from a double-decker bus that arrived in Piazza San Giovanni, dozens of people poured out, all dressed in blue-and-white striped shirts, and invaded every space in the backstage area.

“The sound engineer arrives, looks at me, consults a folder and says: ‘So, you are guitar, bass and drums, right?’” Alberghini said, reconstructing those moments. “‘No,’ I replied, ‘we are those over there,’ pointing to the sea of people in striped uniforms.”

After that concert social media exploded, the band became known throughout Italy and received an invitation to appear on the prime-time national television program of pop star Mika. “When I watched the episode again, I saw 60 people moving as if there were 10: perfect, organized, like true professionals,” Alberghini said.

Since 2018 the project has spread throughout Italy according to a structured three-year process: in the first year the educators from Finale Emilia go to the headquarters of the band that is being formed once a week; in the second year they go every two weeks; in the third once a month. From the fourth year, the new band is autonomous, but remains connected to the network through a collaboration contract that establishes common practices, including ethical policies on sponsorships.

“We receive requests from individuals, from associations, from local institutions, from cooperatives,” Alberghini said. Among the most significant projects is “Marinai,” [Sailors] a band composed of 25 boys from the Ivory Coast seeking asylum in Reggio Emilia. “I remember the first rehearsal with them: we went there, we unloaded buckets, sticks, bins, etc. I turned around for a moment and, without me doing anything, a beautiful samba started.”

From ruins to rebirth

In May 2022, Italian President Sergio Mattarella inaugurated the Stazione Rulli Frulli, a multifunctional hub created from the former bus station of Finale Emilia. The renovation cost more than €1 million. Today the structure houses a rehearsal room, a radio station, a completely soundproofed construction laboratory, the Astronave Lab (a social carpentry workshop for young people with disabilities) and a restaurant open every day.

“Every week our spaces are frequented by 700-800 young people and employ 25 people,” Alberghini said. “Our goal is not to do activities only with young people with disabilities, but to mix everything together: the Station must be a beautiful and welcoming place for anyone.”

The success is tangible: reservations at the restaurant, where young people with disabilities also serve at tables, are so numerous that there is no space for months. “A parent kept telling me to forget about it, because he was afraid that our idea would scare the rest of the community,” Alberghini said. “Well, he was wrong.”

What was born in a small town in Emilia after an immense catastrophe is transforming into a global model. Rulli Frulli will soon become a foundation, and there are plans for the first band on foreign territory at La Scuola d’Italia Guglielmo Marconi in New York City.

“The goal is to export the Rulli Frulli model outside Italy as much as possible,” Alberghini said. “Because this is a big and new project, which we want to expand as much as possible in Europe and in the world.”

The message coming from Finale Emilia is as simple as it is powerful: when a community faces difficulties together, transforming waste into opportunities and differences into wealth, it can build something that goes far beyond the sum of its parts. In an increasingly divided world, the sound of plastic buckets and pots could be exactly the symphony we need.

Questions to consider

1. How can a collective tragedy transform into an opportunity to create more inclusive and resilient communities?

2. How does Rulli Frulli’s “natural” approach to inclusion differ from traditional methods of social integration?

3. What kind of music could you make from things you find in your home?

Source link

August 18, 2025
Harnessing Intercultural Expertise in an International Classroom – Faculty Focus

The increasing internationalization of higher education does not automatically lead to global knowledge and skill exchange in the classroom. Hierarchical barriers in pedagogy and classroom geography impede peer-to-peer learning. This article outlines the benefits of using a community cultural wealth approach – with an example – to disrupt academic and cultural hierarchies by drawing on the multiplicity of students’ assets, skills, and knowledge bases within international cohorts. Such a method enables international students to share their diverse expertise and breakdown assumptions about where and in whom relevant knowledge and information lies.

The Challenge of Hierarchy

I have been asking myself the following questions with increasing frequency as I grapple with teaching international cohorts of learners:

How can I move away from being considered the sole source of knowledge in the classroom?

How can I enable my international students to benefit from each other’s knowledge and insights?

How can I support students to co-construct their learning?

As an educator, working out how to center students in the process of learning remains an ongoing challenge, whether working with international or domestic students. For international students, their diverse expertise and experiences add significant value to the learning community. Yet, many of these students have experienced the banking model (Freire 1996) in their previous educational experience, where they were likely considered empty vessels to be filled with information by their instructors. Thus, when confronted with the liberal expectations of a Western education, where students are expected to engage with new people and evaluate and apply new knowledge, many feel underequipped to succeed, as they wrongly assume they have nothing to contribute. This fear of lack may further drive international students to remain in cultural enclaves within the classroom, to mask their concerns. In the grips of this fear, the benefits of an international education are not immediately granted by proximity in the classroom space.

A community cultural wealth model may help to overcome these challenges. This model, developed by Yosso (2005), foregrounds other than academic assets that students possess, including linguistic, familial, navigational, cultural, resistant, and community “capitals”.

This model disrupts the banking model of education as students are affirmed as arriving replete with assets and releases students from their fears by affirming a diverse array of expertise and in whom this expertise may reside. As social theory arises from daily life (hooks, 1994), in response to the circumstances of one’s existence and its connection to history, politics, and power, the community cultural wealth model enables students to connect their life experiences with their learning. Not only does this model transform student-to-student learning, but it also transforms instructor-to-student learning, upending the classroom hierarchy around who in the room holds relevant and useful information (Schoen 1991), and reducing reliance on the instructor as the arbitral of knowledge.

Asset Recognition and Intercultural Exchange

In both the USA and the UK, I have taught Master level courses in public health ethics. In these courses, I help the students to consider ethics applying theory and using evaluation tools to assess degrees of harm or benefit a given policy might cause. Regardless of country, Master’s cohorts consist of students from India, Bangladesh, Nepal, Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, and Uganda, in varying proportions. Most of these students have trained as clinicians or hold degrees in the hard sciences.

One semester, Indian students were in the majority. I shared a case that helped students to consider the impacts of Indian government policy, Janani Suraksha Yojana (JSY), which provides financial incentives for poorer, rural Indian women to give birth in a hospital. The case, developed by D. K. Bhati (2016, section 4.12, case 4), highlights the clash between traditional birth practices and hospital birth incentivization and the various challenges it poses, amid the benefits. Underpinning information in the case included cultural nuances around marriage migration to the husband’s region, traditional practices of returning to the wife’s homestead to deliver, maternal consent, maternal control over financial resources, as well as logistical issues around lack of continuous emergency care for obstetrics and the exclusion of private health care provision from the program.

My intention was to explore the risks and benefits of incentivization through a case that would foreground the strengths of Indian cultural expertise. I gave each student a number from one to five to allocate them away from their comfort situations into ones in which each group formed a diverse assemblage of backgrounds. There, they were to discuss the case, by working through a set of questions. These included questions Bhati (2016) provided in the case:

Who are the various stakeholders involved and what are their values and perspectives?

What are the pros and cons of using cash incentives for a public health program?

Given her status as poor, young, married, and pregnant, how could the young wife’s autonomy have been upheld?

Should there be different notions of autonomy depending on context – individualist (Euro-American) sensibilities or interdependent (non-individualist, non-Euro-American) sensibilities?

To these, I added the following questions:

Given her lack of status societally, how might the cash incentive remain in the mother’s care?

The JSY policy recommends that fathers or mothers be sterilized to prevent future pregnancies; should this be incentivized with cash? Is this a just incentivization? Explain.

As anticipated, some Indian students were able to provide context for the case and speak from a place of knowing, about rural birthing practices, marriage migration, lack of health literacy, and power imbalances between husbands and wives and their respective families. Unexpected outcomes, which arose in the dialogues, were supplemental knowledge from across the cohort. These included familiarity with other governments’ policies on maternal health, similar situations involving poor rural women in other geographical locations, related experiences from those practicing obstetrics, and insights from the academic theory. Further unexpected outcomes arose through students’ recognition of their educational and social differences between those represented in the case, and themselves, revealing gaps that the ‘cultural experts’ could not fully broker. Interestingly, the recognition of this gap increased senses of connection across the cohort, as the students realized that amid their differences of language, culture, and nation, they shared class, wealth, and education-based assets.

I highlight this example as a watershed moment. Following these intercultural conversations, students’ confidence increased over their capacity to understand, to integrate different voices, and to use and critique evidence, exemplified in their individual coursework. Throughout the semester, students more readily reorganized themselves into small groups, without my explicit directing, suggesting that once nudged across boundaries, the benefits of learning to and from one another outweighed emotional resistance. Informally, students expressed their appreciation of learning together and further related that this approach would support them as public health practitioners, where they would need to connect to, communicate with, and learn from people different from themselves. The community cultural wealth approach further enabled me as instructor to overcome my internalized hierarchies of knowledge creation by allowing learning to unfold in accordance with the various skills in the room, and to arrive at unanticipated and novel outcomes.

By breaking down academic and cultural hierarchies in the international classroom, both the students and instructors can acknowledge and advance diverse understandings and harness the richness of an international cultural, professional, and educational encounter.

Julie Botticello holds a PhD in Anthropology and has taught in the UK and the USA for the past 20 years, predominately to diverse and international cohorts of students, on subjects relevant to the social sciences and to public health. Julie holds a teaching fellowship at the University of New Haven on inclusive pedagogy, teaches a group of incarcerated women at a Federal Prison, and serves as the program director for the undergraduate Health Sciences BS degree.

References

Bhati, D. K. 2016. Case 4: Decoding Public Health Ethics and Inequity in India: A Conditional Cash Incentive Scheme—Janani Suraksha Yojana, in H. Barrett, D. W. Ortmann L, Dawson A, et al., editors. Public Health Ethics: Cases Spanning the Globe. PubMed. Cham (CH): Springer. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK435775/#ch4.Sec21

Freire, P. 1996 [1970]. Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Hammondsworth: Penguin.

Hooks, Bell. 1994. Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. New York: Routledge.

‌Schön, D. 1991 [1983]. The Reflective Practitioner, How Professionals Think in Action, Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing.

Yosso, Tara J. 2005. “Whose Culture Has Capital? A Critical Race Theory Discussion of Community Cultural Wealth.” Race Ethnicity and Education 8 (1): 69–91. https://doi.org/10.1080/1361332052000341006.

Source link

July 25, 2025
Harnessing Intercultural Expertise in an International Classroom – Faculty Focus

The increasing internationalization of higher education does not automatically lead to global knowledge and skill exchange in the classroom. Hierarchical barriers in pedagogy and classroom geography impede peer-to-peer learning. This article outlines the benefits of using a community cultural wealth approach – with an example – to disrupt academic and cultural hierarchies by drawing on the multiplicity of students’ assets, skills, and knowledge bases within international cohorts. Such a method enables international students to share their diverse expertise and breakdown assumptions about where and in whom relevant knowledge and information lies.

The Challenge of Hierarchy

I have been asking myself the following questions with increasing frequency as I grapple with teaching international cohorts of learners:

How can I move away from being considered the sole source of knowledge in the classroom?

How can I enable my international students to benefit from each other’s knowledge and insights?

How can I support students to co-construct their learning?

As an educator, working out how to center students in the process of learning remains an ongoing challenge, whether working with international or domestic students. For international students, their diverse expertise and experiences add significant value to the learning community. Yet, many of these students have experienced the banking model (Freire 1996) in their previous educational experience, where they were likely considered empty vessels to be filled with information by their instructors. Thus, when confronted with the liberal expectations of a Western education, where students are expected to engage with new people and evaluate and apply new knowledge, many feel underequipped to succeed, as they wrongly assume they have nothing to contribute. This fear of lack may further drive international students to remain in cultural enclaves within the classroom, to mask their concerns. In the grips of this fear, the benefits of an international education are not immediately granted by proximity in the classroom space.

A community cultural wealth model may help to overcome these challenges. This model, developed by Yosso (2005), foregrounds other than academic assets that students possess, including linguistic, familial, navigational, cultural, resistant, and community “capitals”.

This model disrupts the banking model of education as students are affirmed as arriving replete with assets and releases students from their fears by affirming a diverse array of expertise and in whom this expertise may reside. As social theory arises from daily life (hooks, 1994), in response to the circumstances of one’s existence and its connection to history, politics, and power, the community cultural wealth model enables students to connect their life experiences with their learning. Not only does this model transform student-to-student learning, but it also transforms instructor-to-student learning, upending the classroom hierarchy around who in the room holds relevant and useful information (Schoen 1991), and reducing reliance on the instructor as the arbitral of knowledge.

Asset Recognition and Intercultural Exchange

In both the USA and the UK, I have taught Master level courses in public health ethics. In these courses, I help the students to consider ethics applying theory and using evaluation tools to assess degrees of harm or benefit a given policy might cause. Regardless of country, Master’s cohorts consist of students from India, Bangladesh, Nepal, Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, and Uganda, in varying proportions. Most of these students have trained as clinicians or hold degrees in the hard sciences.

One semester, Indian students were in the majority. I shared a case that helped students to consider the impacts of Indian government policy, Janani Suraksha Yojana (JSY), which provides financial incentives for poorer, rural Indian women to give birth in a hospital. The case, developed by D. K. Bhati (2016, section 4.12, case 4), highlights the clash between traditional birth practices and hospital birth incentivization and the various challenges it poses, amid the benefits. Underpinning information in the case included cultural nuances around marriage migration to the husband’s region, traditional practices of returning to the wife’s homestead to deliver, maternal consent, maternal control over financial resources, as well as logistical issues around lack of continuous emergency care for obstetrics and the exclusion of private health care provision from the program.

My intention was to explore the risks and benefits of incentivization through a case that would foreground the strengths of Indian cultural expertise. I gave each student a number from one to five to allocate them away from their comfort situations into ones in which each group formed a diverse assemblage of backgrounds. There, they were to discuss the case, by working through a set of questions. These included questions Bhati (2016) provided in the case:

Who are the various stakeholders involved and what are their values and perspectives?

What are the pros and cons of using cash incentives for a public health program?

Given her status as poor, young, married, and pregnant, how could the young wife’s autonomy have been upheld?

Should there be different notions of autonomy depending on context – individualist (Euro-American) sensibilities or interdependent (non-individualist, non-Euro-American) sensibilities?

To these, I added the following questions:

Given her lack of status societally, how might the cash incentive remain in the mother’s care?

The JSY policy recommends that fathers or mothers be sterilized to prevent future pregnancies; should this be incentivized with cash? Is this a just incentivization? Explain.

As anticipated, some Indian students were able to provide context for the case and speak from a place of knowing, about rural birthing practices, marriage migration, lack of health literacy, and power imbalances between husbands and wives and their respective families. Unexpected outcomes, which arose in the dialogues, were supplemental knowledge from across the cohort. These included familiarity with other governments’ policies on maternal health, similar situations involving poor rural women in other geographical locations, related experiences from those practicing obstetrics, and insights from the academic theory. Further unexpected outcomes arose through students’ recognition of their educational and social differences between those represented in the case, and themselves, revealing gaps that the ‘cultural experts’ could not fully broker. Interestingly, the recognition of this gap increased senses of connection across the cohort, as the students realized that amid their differences of language, culture, and nation, they shared class, wealth, and education-based assets.

I highlight this example as a watershed moment. Following these intercultural conversations, students’ confidence increased over their capacity to understand, to integrate different voices, and to use and critique evidence, exemplified in their individual coursework. Throughout the semester, students more readily reorganized themselves into small groups, without my explicit directing, suggesting that once nudged across boundaries, the benefits of learning to and from one another outweighed emotional resistance. Informally, students expressed their appreciation of learning together and further related that this approach would support them as public health practitioners, where they would need to connect to, communicate with, and learn from people different from themselves. The community cultural wealth approach further enabled me as instructor to overcome my internalized hierarchies of knowledge creation by allowing learning to unfold in accordance with the various skills in the room, and to arrive at unanticipated and novel outcomes.

By breaking down academic and cultural hierarchies in the international classroom, both the students and instructors can acknowledge and advance diverse understandings and harness the richness of an international cultural, professional, and educational encounter.

Julie Botticello holds a PhD in Anthropology and has taught in the UK and the USA for the past 20 years, predominately to diverse and international cohorts of students, on subjects relevant to the social sciences and to public health. Julie holds a teaching fellowship at the University of New Haven on inclusive pedagogy, teaches a group of incarcerated women at a Federal Prison, and serves as the program director for the undergraduate Health Sciences BS degree.

References

Bhati, D. K. 2016. Case 4: Decoding Public Health Ethics and Inequity in India: A Conditional Cash Incentive Scheme—Janani Suraksha Yojana, in H. Barrett, D. W. Ortmann L, Dawson A, et al., editors. Public Health Ethics: Cases Spanning the Globe. PubMed. Cham (CH): Springer. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK435775/#ch4.Sec21

Freire, P. 1996 [1970]. Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Hammondsworth: Penguin.

Hooks, Bell. 1994. Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. New York: Routledge.

‌Schön, D. 1991 [1983]. The Reflective Practitioner, How Professionals Think in Action, Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing.

Yosso, Tara J. 2005. “Whose Culture Has Capital? A Critical Race Theory Discussion of Community Cultural Wealth.” Race Ethnicity and Education 8 (1): 69–91. https://doi.org/10.1080/1361332052000341006.

Source link

July 25, 2025
When ZIP Codes Teach: How Geographic Inequity Shows Up in Our Classrooms – Faculty Focus

What if I told you the education system isn’t broken—it’s working exactly the way it was built to? That’s not just a soundbite from my TEDx Talk—it’s my lived experience.

I grew up in a historically underserved neighborhood in Houston, Texas, zoned to one of the lowest-performing elementary schools in the city. But due to a granted academic transfer, I ended up attending a top-performing public school just three miles away. Same city. Different ZIP code. Completely different resources—and trajectory.

That three-mile difference changed everything. And today, as a doctoral student and aspiring professor, I can see how those early disparities still show up in our college classrooms.

Here’s the thing: public school funding in the U.S. depends heavily on local property taxes. That means wealthier neighborhoods get better schools—often with state-of-the-art facilities, robust extracurriculars, and college prep courses—while nearby communities may struggle with crumbling infrastructure and underpaid staff (Owens-Young 2023).

Part of my dissertation, I compared two elementary schools less than three miles apart. One had a PTA raising over $100,000 annually. The other didn’t have working air conditioning. These weren’t just different schools—they were different worlds. And students from those environments bring that context with them when they walk into our lecture halls.

But what we see in higher education—missed assignments, low engagement, quiet classrooms—isn’t always a motivation issue. Often, it’s a preparedness gap. And that gap isn’t the student’s fault.

As faculty, we can’t change where our students come from. But we can shape what they experience once they’re here. Below are four strategies I use in the classroom to help level the playing field:

1. Start by Asking, Not Assuming

Instead of assuming a lack of interest, ask about their background. I use a quick, anonymous prompt on the first day of class: “What’s one thing you overcame to get here today?” One student wrote about taking two buses from the other side of town after getting their younger siblings off to school. That kind of insight changes how we teach.

2. Rethink Participation

Not everyone feels comfortable speaking up in class. Consider using written reflections, discussion boards, or tools like Jamboard and Padlet. For instance, in one of my leadership classes, I use a shared Google Doc where students add thoughts anonymously. The quieter students thrive—and the louder ones gain new perspectives.

3. Normalize Struggle

Students from under-resourced schools often view academic struggle as failure. That’s why I share my own story of nearly failing out during undergrad. I also let students revise one major assignment. One student improved from a 72 to a 90—and more importantly, realized they were capable all along.

4. Offer Flexible Assessment Options

Some students express themselves better visually or verbally. I once had a student create a narrated photo essay instead of a traditional paper—it was powerful, reflective, and demonstrated full mastery. When students see that their strengths are valued, their confidence grows.

None of these ideas require overhauling your entire course. But they do require intentionality. And that’s what makes the difference.

I’ve been the under-resourced student, and now I’m becoming the professor I wish I had—someone who saw potential beyond performance.

We don’t control our students’ ZIP codes. But we do influence how they feel in our classrooms—and whether they believe they belong there.

Lloyd Lindley Jr. is a PhD student in Educational Leadership and Organization at Texas Woman’s University, a TEDx speaker, and author of “From the Hood to Understood”. He is the co-founder of a grassroots nonprofit that advocates for equitable access to education, mentorship, and financial literacy in underserved communities. Lloyd has been featured on Good Morning Houston and KTSU Radio for his impactful community work and continues to champion culturally responsive teaching and student empowerment at all levels of education.

References

Owens-Young, Jessica. 2023. “The ZIP Code Effect.” American University.

Source link

July 11, 2025
When ZIP Codes Teach: How Geographic Inequity Shows Up in Our Classrooms – Faculty Focus

What if I told you the education system isn’t broken—it’s working exactly the way it was built to? That’s not just a soundbite from my TEDx Talk—it’s my lived experience.

I grew up in a historically underserved neighborhood in Houston, Texas, zoned to one of the lowest-performing elementary schools in the city. But due to a granted academic transfer, I ended up attending a top-performing public school just three miles away. Same city. Different ZIP code. Completely different resources—and trajectory.

That three-mile difference changed everything. And today, as a doctoral student and aspiring professor, I can see how those early disparities still show up in our college classrooms.

Here’s the thing: public school funding in the U.S. depends heavily on local property taxes. That means wealthier neighborhoods get better schools—often with state-of-the-art facilities, robust extracurriculars, and college prep courses—while nearby communities may struggle with crumbling infrastructure and underpaid staff (Owens-Young 2023).

Part of my dissertation, I compared two elementary schools less than three miles apart. One had a PTA raising over $100,000 annually. The other didn’t have working air conditioning. These weren’t just different schools—they were different worlds. And students from those environments bring that context with them when they walk into our lecture halls.

But what we see in higher education—missed assignments, low engagement, quiet classrooms—isn’t always a motivation issue. Often, it’s a preparedness gap. And that gap isn’t the student’s fault.

As faculty, we can’t change where our students come from. But we can shape what they experience once they’re here. Below are four strategies I use in the classroom to help level the playing field:

1. Start by Asking, Not Assuming

Instead of assuming a lack of interest, ask about their background. I use a quick, anonymous prompt on the first day of class: “What’s one thing you overcame to get here today?” One student wrote about taking two buses from the other side of town after getting their younger siblings off to school. That kind of insight changes how we teach.

2. Rethink Participation

Not everyone feels comfortable speaking up in class. Consider using written reflections, discussion boards, or tools like Jamboard and Padlet. For instance, in one of my leadership classes, I use a shared Google Doc where students add thoughts anonymously. The quieter students thrive—and the louder ones gain new perspectives.

3. Normalize Struggle

Students from under-resourced schools often view academic struggle as failure. That’s why I share my own story of nearly failing out during undergrad. I also let students revise one major assignment. One student improved from a 72 to a 90—and more importantly, realized they were capable all along.

4. Offer Flexible Assessment Options

Some students express themselves better visually or verbally. I once had a student create a narrated photo essay instead of a traditional paper—it was powerful, reflective, and demonstrated full mastery. When students see that their strengths are valued, their confidence grows.

None of these ideas require overhauling your entire course. But they do require intentionality. And that’s what makes the difference.

I’ve been the under-resourced student, and now I’m becoming the professor I wish I had—someone who saw potential beyond performance.

We don’t control our students’ ZIP codes. But we do influence how they feel in our classrooms—and whether they believe they belong there.

Lloyd Lindley Jr. is a PhD student in Educational Leadership and Organization at Texas Woman’s University, a TEDx speaker, and author of “From the Hood to Understood”. He is the co-founder of a grassroots nonprofit that advocates for equitable access to education, mentorship, and financial literacy in underserved communities. Lloyd has been featured on Good Morning Houston and KTSU Radio for his impactful community work and continues to champion culturally responsive teaching and student empowerment at all levels of education.

References

Owens-Young, Jessica. 2023. “The ZIP Code Effect.” American University.

Source link

July 11, 2025
Taking a systematic approach to inclusivity through uncovering the hidden curriculum

Every culture and society have distinct nuances and unspoken, unwritten values, norms and beliefs that influence behaviour, expectations, and life experiences. These evolving dynamics can also influence learning experiences.

Often referred to as the hidden curriculum, these aspects not only affect the way students experience their learning journey but the lasting impact their university experience has on their lives. It is vital, therefore, that anyone working in the sector is aware of these factors as they may impact both the curriculum, and the unintended values and perspectives communicated through the way the staff interact with students.

Educators should not only be aware of the dominant institutional culture but should actively encourage an inclusive learning community that values and embraces the diverse backgrounds and experiences of students and faculty. Drawing students’ attention to these often-overlooked factors can empower them to navigate academic and professional spaces more effectively, helping them reach their full potential.

The hidden curriculum has been shown to play a significant role in fostering moral values, professionalism and humanism in fields like medicine, management and the arts. But we also know that when it’s not implemented carefully, the hidden curriculum can reflect the interests of dominant groups; reinforcing privilege while disadvantaging others, such as those from working-class and marginalised communities. Therefore, we also need to openly analyse and critique the hidden curriculum, by identifying any political implications of specific pedagogic approaches.

When people are not aware of these unspoken values and expectations, they may feel excluded or marginalised, negatively impacting their sense of belonging and therefore their willingness to engage or ability to succeed. We therefore have an obligation to not only teach the hidden, cultural norms themselves, but also foster a critical awareness of them. Encouraging students to adapt while remaining true to their own identities, resulting in an authentic experience for all students, including those with different learning needs – such as neurodivergent individuals – as well as people from different backgrounds or cultures.

We know that a truly internationalised campus requires both institutional initiatives and individual efforts to foster intercultural understanding and collaboration, empowering students and staff to drive change together. But putting this into practice can be tough. As a result, efforts to widen participation have often led to social and academic exclusion, as systems struggle to adapt.

Systematically overcoming the hidden curriculum

Equitable assessments play a key role in overcoming the hidden curriculum. Clear guidance and opportunities to develop assessment literacy helps students to perform to their full potential. For example, if students are to submit a narrated presentation for their assessment, have they had opportunities to learn the required skills and to submit a formative presentation for feedback? Scaffolding the skills they are required to demonstrate, including writing skills, is imperative to student confidence and therefore submission and overall success.

Work placements should also accommodate students’ diverse backgrounds, ensuring inclusivity in workplace culture and expectations. This may include, for example, transport needs or special equipment; where this is the case, both the university and the employer have a responsibility to meet these needs so the student is able to attend their placement and complete their duties in an equitable way, allowing them to feel part of the team.

There should also be clear guidance on what success means. Staff should be aware of the implicit ways they are communicating the institutions and their own expectations. By emphasising grade attainment, they are potentially sending a message that high grades are valued and that those not achieving these grades are less important and/or valuable than those who are. Students who want to impress their lecturers may feel pressure to perform and feel marginalised when they do not achieve the grades they think are expected. To avoid this, staff should be explicit about how overall educational gain is measured and how students can develop their own map for navigating university life and measuring their own development.

On top of this, bringing hidden knowledge, such as vernacular, or higher education jargon, to the surface through tools like shared, and preferably co-created glossaries will help all students, particularly those new to a field, or who speak English as an additional language, feel more included and engaged.

Curriculum and learning design should also follow an intentional approach to foster belonging and encourage discussions about social inequalities – including why they exist and how to overcome them – making students more aware of the world that exists and their role and influence within it.

Fighting against pressures

Despite many institutions working towards overcoming the constraints of the hidden curriculum, there’s still an incessant problem at play. Universities are increasingly expected to embed numerous agendas into their teaching and learning frameworks: equality, sustainability, employability, decolonisation, accessibility and mental well-being – to name a few.

These competing demands can be overwhelming, particularly when trying to implement all these elements into individual modules. This can – and has – led to inefficiencies, confusion and a disconnect between academic content and broader institutional goals. Essentially, we end up stuck in the same position, or even more behind, as staff grapple with balancing traditional academic teaching with the growing list of institutional and societal changes.

It’s no secret that universities need to rethink how to integrate and prioritise all these different elements when teaching. We know inclusion matters to students, yet universities are having to draw back from a lot of their outreach work due to financial pressures, while at the same time fighting against a world that’s seemingly becoming more hostile toward equality, diversity and inclusion efforts. Universities need to relearn how to be inclusive with these constraints – effectively “doing more with less.”

Some have thought to distribute the elements across modules or offer co-curricular opportunities. Some have tried to enforce better levels of transparency in workload expectations for both staff and students, including better time management. And yet the struggle remains.

The steps to crack inclusivity

Trying to finally crack the code to inclusivity requires both top-down institutional strategies and bottom-up approaches that focus on academic and cultural drivers.

There are a few steps which have been found to help, such as investing in ongoing training and awareness programmes, as they provide sustained, comprehensive training on accessibility and inclusion for all staff. Increased awareness may lead to more critical assessments of institutional practices, but it will not diminish personal commitment. It is in these interpersonal interactions in learning, teaching and academic support that the tacit exclusions of the hidden curriculum can be interrogated and challenged.

But institutional staff need back up in the form of a holistic and inclusive institutional culture that values and prioritises inclusivity at all levels. This can be done by promoting accessibility as a core value, which can help the institution remain resilient during times of change or external challenges, and by emphasising inclusivity as a shared responsibility across all departments and roles.

Universities should also strengthen institutional support structures by ensuring staff know who to contact for accessibility issues and can trust institutional processes to provide timely and effective support. It’s important to clarify roles, responsibilities and procedures and develop clear documentation and accessible guidance related to accessibility to reduce confusion and improve responsiveness. It’s also important to avoid narrowly targeted interventions that might neglect or disadvantage certain academics. Sufficient budget and resources should also be allocated to sustain inclusivity initiatives.

As Knight and de Wit argue: “Economic and political rationales are increasingly the key drivers for national policies related to the internationalisation of higher education, while academic and social/cultural motivations are not increasing in importance at the same rate.”

Assessing and adapting inclusive practices in light of the changing external environment is key. Tools like cross-sectional surveys can track staff perceptions of accessibility and inclusion over time. This will help universities to monitor changes in staff confidence, attitudes and knowledge, and address areas of concern through targeted interventions. Universities should always engage with diverse voices, to inform and improve practices, while recognising and addressing external factors, such as legislative changes or global events, which may impact staff confidence and inclusivity efforts.

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June 20, 2025
Making a Meaningful Environment for Belonging – Faculty Focus

Belonging and mattering are crucial for creating educational environments where learners feel connected to their department and classmates (Hale et al., 2019). Student success has become a major outcome measure for many academic units(Accreditation Council for Occupational Therapy Education, 2005 and Commission on Accreditation in Physical Therapy Education, 2025). Researchers have found that learners’ sense of belonging enhances psychological flexibility, learner satisfaction, motivation, and professional identity, thereby increasing student success (Carter et al., 2023 and Tejero-Vidal et al., 2025). Measuring a learner’s perception of belonging can be challenging for educators. To support this effort, a social-ecological model has been developed to conceptualize the different layers that contribute to a learner’s sense of belonging(Johnson, 2022). The Departmental Sense of Belonging (DeSBI) tool specifically measures this sense within the context of department and peer relationships(Knekta et al., 2020).

I explored how an increased involvement in the belonging social-ecological model was associated with learners’ sense of belonging within their department. The goal was to help departments refine their model to enhance learners’ connection to faculty and peers, thereby increasing learners’ success. The hypothesis was that higher interactions in the social-ecological model would correlate with a higher sense of belonging. Sixty-eight learners from three allied health programs completed the survey, which found the results a statistically significant association between the learner’s involvement in the belonging social ecological model and a learner’s sense of belonging to a department.

Practical Application of the Belonging Social-Ecological Model

The study underscores the pivotal role of departmental culture and environment in shaping a learner’s sense of belonging. This is an essential consideration for departments when evaluating the factors provided to learners at each level of the belonging social ecological model.

Intrapersonal Level

Activities within the interpersonal level are journaling, professional development, and mental health practices. It is crucial for faculty to consider encouraging learners to journal at the end of a class session or to include journaling as a graded activity within their course. Supporting learners in building these habits helps foster psychological flexibility and self-awareness. This approach can also provide an opportunity strengthen the therapeutic alliance between individual faculty.

Interpersonal Level

Activities within this level include meals with classmates and faculty, physical activities, and social gatherings. Faculty should strongly consider whether their academic space provides the area for learners to study and have meals together. If your department lacks such space, advocating for one in or near your department should be a priority. If your academic unit has the gathering space, it will be important for faculty to evaluate if it will attract learners to use it effectively, or if learners will avoid the areas because of its set-up and location. Ensuring a dedicated space is not only available but actively used is a critical step for faculty when evaluating their effectiveness in fostering a sense of belonging within the department.

Additionally, faculty should encourage learners to spearhead the organization of social events outside the department so to strengthen connections between one another. With mentorship and engagement from faculty, learners will be empowered to create inclusive events that help all feel welcome.

Institutional Level

The institutional level considers what activities are offered by the university to the learners. Every university, regardless of its size, hosts various events each week for its learners. It is crucial for faculty to consider how their learners are engaging with university announcements about these events. Faculty should consider how the department reinforces these activities on its own announcement board. Should faculty hang signs near the department, or employ other creative strategies to ensure learners are fully informed about campus activities?

Community and Societal Level

The social ecological model is the community and society encompasses activities that extend beyond campus and occur within the community and at the society level. Each university is an integral part of the community in which it is located. Therefore, it is important for faculty to consider how learners are kept informed about the events occurring within the community they live. Ensuring the department highlights events, beyond the favorite coffee shop, restaurant, or activity spot, is crucial for fostering a sense of belonging. Considering each community offers unique experiences, making sure learners are aware of these activities is important. By combining the dissemination of institution activities with community events, faculty can address two domains with one strategic plan.

Physical and Virtual Space

Physical and virtual spaces are in the outer most layer in this social-ecological model and include the structure of class breaks, classroom setup, and online activities. Faculty should consider how physical and virtual learning environments impact social connections. For example, it is important for faculty to thoughtfully consider how breaks are structured – not just when they are given. Encouraging learners to leave the room for a short walk outside with peers, play a quick game of four-square, or throw a frisbee is beneficial, as it promotes learners to be active shift their mindset, and foster conversations beyond classroom content.

A final consideration involves the layout of the classroom. Is the classroom arranged traditionally with everyone facing forward, or can it be reorganized into pods or small groups, which will facilitate discussion during group projects? If the goal is to engage the entire room, can the seating be arranged into a large circle to allow learners to see each other’s body language while speaking? These small yet significant environmental factors can impact the learning environment and the sense of belonging for each learner in the room.

Conclusion

Increased engagement across all layers of the belonging social-ecological model significantly enhances the learners’ sense of connection and inclusion. This sense of belonging is not a peripheral benefit – it is foundational to learner motivation, participation, and overall success. Faculty play a key role in implementing thoughtful strategies that promote belonging at every level of the belonging social ecological model. In doing so, they help create a dynamic and inclusive learning community where every learner can thrive – leading to greater success and personal fulfillment in their learners’ academic journey.

Dustin Cox, PT, DPT, PhD, is an Associate Professor at Augusta University and a licensed physical therapist with advanced certifications in therapeutic treatment for Parkinson’s and lymphedema. He received his Doctor of Physical Therapy in 2011 and his Ph.D. in Health Sciences in 2023 from Northern Illinois University. Since 2016, Dustin has been dedicated to helping learners achieve their goals in becoming effective healthcare practitioners. Currently, Dustin teaches in a DPT program and clinically works with clients that are in the pediatric stage of life and clients with bleeding disorders.

References

Accreditation Council for Occupational Therapy Education. (2025, March 15). 2018 and 2023 ACOTE Standards. Accreditation Council for Occupational Therapy Eudcation. https://acoteonline.org/accreditation-explained/standards/

Carter, B. M., Sumpter, D. F., and Thruston, W. (2023). Overcoming Marginalization by Creating a Sense of Belonging. Creative nursing, 29(4), 320–327. https://doi.org/10.1177/10784535231216464

Commission on Accreditation in Physical Therapy Education. (2025, March 15). Accreditation Handbook. Commission on Accreditation in Physical Therapy. https://www.capteonline.org/faculty-and-program-resources/resource_documents/accreditation-handbook

Hale, A. J., Ricotta, D. N., Freed, J., Smith, C. C., and Huang, G. C. (2019). Adapting Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs as a Framework for Resident Wellness. Teaching and learning in medicine, 31(1), 109–118. https://doi.org/10.1080/10401334.2018.1456928

Johnson, Royel. (2022). A socio-ecological perspective on sense of belonging among racially/ethnically minoritized college students: Implications for equity-minded practice and policy. New Directions for Higher Education, Spring 2022, pages 59 – 68. https://doi.org/10.1002/he.20427

Knekta, E., Chatzikyriakidou, K., and McCartney, M. (2020). Evaluation of a Questionnaire Measuring University Students’ Sense of Belonging to and Involvement in a Biology Department. CBE life sciences education, 19(3), ar27. https://doi.org/10.1187/cbe.19-09-0166

Tejero-Vidal, L. L., Pedregosa-Fauste, S., Majó-Rossell, A., García-Díaz, F., and Martínez-Rodríguez, L. (2025). Building nursing students’ professional identity through the ‘Design process’ methodology: A qualitative study. Nurse education in practice, 83, 104256. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.nepr.2025.104256

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June 9, 2025

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Category: inclusion

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Author: SRHE News Blog

Self-disclosure: Communication Privacy Management

Communication Accommodation Theory

The Activity

Step 1: Personal Reflection

Step 2: Students’ Perceptions About Components of Theories

Step 3: Describing the Theories and Their Impact

Debriefing

Appraisal

The Research on Participation and Personality

The Role of the Classroom Environment

Strategies for More Engaging Classrooms

Designing for All Voices

Hearing the beat of a different drum

A generative method of inclusion

From tent to national spotlight

From ruins to rebirth

Questions to consider

The Challenge of Hierarchy

Asset Recognition and Intercultural Exchange

The Challenge of Hierarchy

Asset Recognition and Intercultural Exchange

1. Start by Asking, Not Assuming

2. Rethink Participation

3. Normalize Struggle

4. Offer Flexible Assessment Options

1. Start by Asking, Not Assuming

2. Rethink Participation

3. Normalize Struggle

4. Offer Flexible Assessment Options

Systematically overcoming the hidden curriculum

Fighting against pressures

The steps to crack inclusivity

Practical Application of the Belonging Social-Ecological Model

Intrapersonal Level

Interpersonal Level

Institutional Level

Community and Societal Level

Physical and Virtual Space

Conclusion