Welcome to Inclusive Teaching at DU!
Author(s)
Valentina Iturbe-LaGrave
Director of Inclusive Teaching Practices
When I began working on the content modules for the Inclusive Teaching Practices website in 2017, our nation painfully grappled with daily affronts to the rights and freedom of its people. While longstanding racism has long been experienced by people of color, its impact on others became ever more accessible via technicolor videos shared on social media. The collective pain grew, the voices in the videos seared into our collective memory, and the heaviness of the moment became crippling for many university faculty, students, staff, and administrators. In this context, we in higher education became hyper-vigilant in topics such as calling-in versus calling-out, examining intent versus impact, and learning about the insidious ubiquity and impact of microaggressions. Requests for pedagogical approaches that faculty members could use to address the tangible tensions in their classrooms grew. In my first year at the University of Denver, I gave 47 talks, workshops, and individual sessions. All were by request of department chairs, deans, and faculty.
Alongside brilliant colleagues, I stood in community and unison in my unwavering commitment as an educator to honor students for who they are, who they've been, and who they aim to become. A critical mass grew on our campus, and faculty members engaged with the difficult topics that, for far too long, had been deemed irrelevant to their disciplines or teaching. Faculty Learning Communities on Critical Pedagogy, White Fragility, and Trans* in College filled up in less than 24 hours. I began to create waitlists for these programs, and email lists of countless faculty members whose dedication to excellent and inclusive teaching came to the forefront of their praxis.