Participants in “Diversity in the College Classroom” Present the First DCC Forum
Melissa Tully

On December 13, 2005, a group of students from the Diversity in the College Classroom (DCC) course held their 2005 forum.  The five graduate students presented their semester long projects to members of the UW-Madison community and discussed the future of their work.  Their projects are intended to confront issues of diversity that often go by unnoticed.  The DCC participants want to further incorporate diversity into STEM classrooms by utilizing the CIRTL pillar, learning-through-diversity.  DCC is offered through the Delta Program in Research, Teaching, and Learning at UW-Madison. 

Colleen Robinson-Klug, graduate student in the Land Resources Program of IES, kicked off the presentations with a question to Forum attendees: does a successful classroom learning community serve as an effective tool for diverse voices to be heard and diverse perspectives to be recognized as personally meaningful to each student as they relate to their own lives, therefore leading to enhanced learning for all? Robinson-Klug believes that organizing a classroom around learning community principles can indeed improve the education of all.  Her project involves redesigning a Food Science capstone course that she previously taught to try and find out if applying learning community principles does have a positive impact on learning.  Robinson-Klug walked attendees through the creation and implementation of “learning community norms,” a set of classroom agreements made between students and the instructor to help improve everyone’s  learning environment so all students may learn the material better.  She challenged attendees to use the Forum as an opportunity to explore how using these norms can help them participate more fully and learn more from the evening’s presentations.

Michele Price, graduate student in the department of Entomology, focused on images of scientists that undergraduates have and the possible link between these images and undergraduates leaving science majors.  Price believes that students do not see themselves as potential scientists and often have stereotypical views about who scientists are.  Price asked forum attendees to participate in her “draw-a-scientist” activity, which typically involves asking students to draw a picture of a scientist.  After the students have drawn their scientists, Price and the students review a 12-point checklist to see how many stereotypical aspects of a scientist were in the students’ drawings. Typical features include a lab coat, eye glasses and working inside, and the scientist is male and Caucasian. Price uses this activity to call attention to the traits often depicted during such exercises noting that students, particularly female students rarely include traits that they themselves posses.  Price plans to use a follow-up to this activity called the “Scientist of the Week,” which highlights different scientists to show the variety of people and jobs that are involved in science.  By breaking down students’ stereotypical images of scientists, Price hopes that more science majors will see themselves as scientists.  Her long-term goals are to get more students to remain in their chosen science majors. 

Jenny Kao-Kniffin, graduate student in the Land Resources Program of IES, presented her ideas for revising the Environmental Studies 101 course by challenging environmental misconceptions and utilizing learning through diversity concepts.  Environmental Studies 101 is an introductory course with an enrollment of primarily college freshmen and sophomores.  Kao-Kniffin plans to revise the course to incorporate more discussion-driven lessons that include diverse perspectives; to experiment with using case studies, news stories, and video clips to present course information; and to use active learning techniques to get the students involved.  Her major goals are to increase students’ environmental literacy and to challenge popular environmental myths and misconceptions.  Discussing how environmental problems, such as global warming, energy consumption, deforestation, wildlife conservation, and land use changes affect different parts of the world and differ across race, class, and gender will allow Kao-Kniffin to incorporate diversity into her classroom and offer students new ways of thinking about environmental issues. 

Mechanical engineering graduate student Aya Diab focused her presentation, “Ideas for Building a Learning Community and Ways to Assess Your Success,” on the instructor’s role in promoting a sense of community in the classroom and methods for evaluating the success of the community.  Diab presented a variety of examples of how an instructor can build a learning community in the college classroom such as, reflecting upon group dynamics in report writing; simply looking around to see if anyone is left out of the conversation and asking them to get involved; playing ice-breaker games; and presenting counter-stereotypes of scientists.  Diab has participated in courses where the instructors implemented these strategies and has found them to be very successful.  In order to evaluate the success of these in-class activities Diab offered a variety of evaluation methods (teaching-as-research).  Mid- and end-of-semester evaluations, group evaluations, online assessments, interviewing students, and colleague evaluations are some assessment methods that Diab recommended.

Erica Siegl, graduate student in the Sociology Department, took a departmental approach to changing how diversity is considered on the college level.  Her presentation, “Teaching the Choir to Sing: Approaching Diversity in the Sociology Classroom,” focused on students majoring in sociology.  In the course of her academic career at UW-Madison, Siegl noticed that while the minority population of UW-Madison has increased over the nine year period from 1994 to 2003, the number of minority students selecting the sociology major has decreased.  She became interested in understanding this trend and thought that the increasing number of introductory courses being taught be graduate student teaching assistants (GTAs) may have something to do with the decline.  She has created a survey to collect data regarding GTAs understanding of and commitment to diversity issues, which will be piloted in the Sociology Department soon.  Siegl hopes the data will provide insight into how prepared GTAs are to deal with an increasingly diverse student body at UW-Madison. 

Alice Pawley, a DCC instructor, was pleased with the outcome of the first DCC Forum, “I was thrilled with the breadth and depth of the students' projects.  They set out to investigate ambitious problems, and tackled them with rigor and enthusiasm.  I think these projects help demonstrate students' commitment to the values embodied in the Delta Pillars, and the intellectual skills the students have developed that will ensure they will be excellent teachers in the future.  I was excited by the turnout at the Forum too—21 people, including friends, family, colleagues, and other members of the UW community—came to support the DCC students by listening to their presentations.”

The inaugural Diversity in the College Classroom course (fall 2005) was taught by Jo Handelsman (Plant Pathology), Alice Pawley (Industrial Engineering), and Chris Pfund (Delta and WI Program for Scientific Teaching).  DCC will be offered again in the summer 2006.  For more information about the fall 2005 Diversity in the College Classroom course, visit the course page at http://delta.wisc.edu/Courses/DiversityCollClass/DCC.html.

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