Inviting Students to Bring Themselves to Class: Connecting Learning and Lived Experiences

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Event Description

In higher education, we want learning to be relevant to students’ lives, but how often do we explicitly incorporate students’ lives--who they are, what they know, where they come from--into our teaching and research? How do we take an asset-based approach, drawing upon the diversity of Berkeley's student population as well as our own subject matter expertise, to create a richer learning experience for everyone? What does this look like across different disciplines and what's at stake?

Panelists:

Moderator:

I want my students to leave [the classroom] with a more expensive sense of self.
Dr. Zeus Leonardo

Recommendations for Instructors

Classroom and Community Environment

  • Try to get to know who your students are. Ask their name before they make a comment in class, or talk to students individually to form relationships with students. [19:10]
  • Disrupt traditional classroom mechanics. Don't just stay on the stage; try to move around, talk to the students, or do classroom activities. These opportunities can break the barrier in the classroom between the instructor and the students and creates a more comfortable and inviting space. [19:25]
  • Before you walk into the classroom, think carefully about perspectives: Who will you be discussing with the students? Consider the syllabus, the class's scope, and how to introduce inclusivity in the curriculum. [22:20]
  • Be vulnerable and show your students the strength of vulnerability. [29:40] Bring yourself as an embodied person in the classroom. Please share your experiences to analyze them and have students input their analysis of the experiences as well. [26]
    • Don't, however, just share experiences without a purpose. Bring in experiences to enhance knowledge of related situations or academic readings. Be sure to link experiences to relevant social and structural contexts, make sure that they are closely connected to each other, and affirm that experience doesn't necessarily mean truth. [53:30]
  • Encourage affirming and problematizing experiences. Affirming is the first step to inviting shared knowledge and experience. However, introduce students to pair affirmation with critical thinking to cultivate critical reflection of these experiences and themselves. [28]
  • Allow for student individuality. Show students how to engage with course materials in their own manners and agents. Doing so fosters self-reflection and critical thinking with the material. [50]

Examples of Invitations of Experience

  • Dr. Voss and her research course for first-year students: Students were trained to interview, first practicing on one another and getting feedback from Voss, but later moved to parents, local churches, and other networks of these students. They would then move on to others they could interview in the networks of those they interviewed. In this way, Voss's course allows students to reach out to their communities and bring forth new voices into academia from the students' diverse backgrounds. [9:00-14:00]

Discipline, Inclusivity, and Homogenization

  • "Discipline is Discipline": Sometimes, discipline can help students bring new voices in, as in the case of Sociology and interviewing community members. However, when included in a discipline, consider what you or your students are included in. What are you or they assimilating to? "What is the 'i' in inclusion?" 
  • "Intelligibility" is the ability to see or not see certain things. Moments where there are mutualities in the intelligibility of experience and knowledge are key. These moments help students communicate what they see in the classroom to one another and the instructor.
    • Example of Intelligibility in action with inclusivity: Dr. Leonardo looked on Craigslist for a "low shelf," but searching up those key terms returned thousands of results. But when someone suggested to him the new vocabulary for a low shelf, "credenza," Dr. Leonardo was able to find what he needed from a select 30 items. Now, he defines low shelves as credenzas-- similar to how discipline is discipline and academics are included in expert fields. However, when he was included, the free association of the object with a low shelf disappeared.
  • Think about the dynamic between inclusivity and rigor and how exclusivity can lead to a more homogeneous, less rigorous academic experience. As discussed in the panel by Dr. Sacks, many of her social welfare students were unaware of one of the most extensive non-therapeutic experiments in history called the Tuskegee Syphilis Study and its underlying themes of medical mistrust and consent. [22]
At Berkeley part of our mission is to educate. And education is really about helping our students learn. And our students come from diverse backgrounds, different experiences. It helps them enhance their learning if we can connect the topic of the course with their personal experiences.
Dr. Tsu-Jae Liu