Katie Panciera, Ph.D.
Milwaukee School of Engineering
Leveling the Playing Field
For a number of reasons, I am very intentional about ensuring that my classroom is a welcoming space where students of all backgrounds can learn together. While I will get into some of my rationale below, this is something I am incredibly passionate about and as I continue teaching and developing as a teacher, I have continued to learn, grow, and change.
Rationale & Experience
To say that my first year had a number of unexpected twists and turns would be a significant understatement. I started teaching in Fall 2019 and during week 1 of the spring term we suddenly went online due to COVID-19. In addition, my 3 year old no longer had childcare and my husband was in meetings 8 hours a day for the first time in his career. We had exactly a week to pivot our classrooms.
As I pivoted I thought a lot about my classmates at Berea College. Berea is a school that charges no tuition and many students have room, board, books, and computer at least partially paid by the school. I had classmates who lived in their cars over the summer and during winter break. In part because of this, I wanted to ensure that my assignments during COVID would be able to be completed even by a student living out of their car. I encouraged them to disclose hardships to me, but wanted to ensure that they could chose not to if they weren't comfortable with that.
Two more aspects came into play as I reflected on my experience as a student at Berea. First, I was surrounded by a number of first generation college students. Berea assumed that this was a large portion of their student body and set things up accordingly. There was a lot of implicit structure in the school and support from the faculty that doesn't exist everywhere. We like to assume that students know why they should come to office hours or that they should consider grad school or how to negotiate for jobs. But most students don't know that, especially our first generation students.
Of course as a woman in a male dominated field (computer science), I also thought a lot about my experience as a minority and when I felt like a minority in a classroom vs. when I didn't. For most of my undergraduate classes in computing women made up one third of the class and a female professor taught the class, but that was a very unique experience and something that's fairly rare. Many of our non-male students need to learn how to judge themselves and evaluate their work in a male dominated workforce.
Following my first year of teaching, I watched as my former hometown of Minneapolis mourned with the family of George Floyd and then rioted in protest. This encouraged me to bring discussions of race into the classroom. In my UX 253: Inclusive Design class I spend a week on unconscious bias, racism, and ableism. In SS 495: Cybercrime I created very strict guidelines to ensure that no students felt targeted due to their nationality.
While I do teach a class called inclusive design, which obviously covers a number of these topics, I also am very open in all my classes about the importance of mental health and taking care of your mental health. As someone who has struggled with mental health and knows others who have struggled, I want students to start thinking about their mental health ASAP. On the first day of my classes I tell them, "I take mental health very seriously. Just as you can't be expected to perform at your best when you're in immense pain due to a broken ankle, you also can't perform at your best if you're in immense pain due to depression, anxiety, trauma, or other mental health concerns." (See Mental Health Resources for help.)
Resources
I've utilized a number of resources from others to pull these together.
I keep an eye out for events discussing inclusive education and attended a seminar on this topic. Following the seminar I got a copy of the book that two of the leaders just released, Inclusive Teaching: Strategies for Promoting Equity in the College Classroom by Kelly A. Hogan and Viji Sathay. While Hogan and Sathay are at UNC Chapel Hill and teach much larger classes than me, they introduced a number of easy to implement ideas. While I had a number of the ideas in place already, this book reassured me that I am taking the steps needed to ensure that my classroom is what I want it to be.
During the summer of 2020 and 2021 school year, I developed a set of cards for the Engineering Unleashed platform. They are centered around the idea of discussing difficult topics in class. There is an initial card (listed first) followed by three cards with specific activities that I've used in my classes to bring these topics to my students. The initial card lists a number of books that I utilized to delve more into issues of race, gender, disability, class, and more.