Introduction
As an associate lecturer on the BA and MA at Camberwell, I teach students with a wide range of backgrounds and learning needs. I don’t see them regularly or for very long, and I don’t have any paid planning time, so I can sometimes default to a one size fits all didactic style of teaching. This has not been effective at supporting all students, some have struggled to understand briefs, or to focus on tasks, others have become overwhelmed and fallen behind on the fast moving curriculum. I want to think about how I can not only improve access to my sessions but also offer extra ways to support and challenge to all students in my teaching.
Challenges:
- As a precariously employed HPL, it is challenging to build the ongoing relationships with students that allow for me to know them well enough to tailor my teaching to their individual needs.
- My students learning needs vary widely: English as an additional language, a range of neurodiversities, social issues, mental health issues, unequal access to resources including time.
- The curriculum (that I have no control over) demands a lot of work very quickly from students who are sometimes struggling to balance their studies with jobs, long commutes and caring responsibilities.
Opportunity:
I want to make my teaching universally accessible (if such a thing is possible) in the hope that if I cast a wide enough net, no one will fall through. Having read a range of innovative pedagogy techniques I want to think about how I can apply them practically in the classroom to improve the inclusivity of my sessions.
Plan of action:
- In Celebrating Silence, Winek argues that starting sessions with a short moment of quiet reflection, enhance equity in the classroom, allowing everyone to arrive, ground and prepare themselves for the discussion ahead: “
I now see one way that I can attempt to “even the playing field” for students, both those exhausted by long work hours and those more well- rested due to less required labor outside of school, is to offer them all quiet time for processing important course content in class. […] Breaking the cycle of performative rigor (i.e., busywork for the sake of being busy) and instead endorsing effective reflective resting as a valid form of rigor is something that instructors can do to help students find balance, meaning, and deeper learning as they navigate their undergraduate experiences (Bowen, 2021).”
I will start sessions with 10 minutes of quiet time in which I have the questions we will discuss written up for students to reflect on. This will hopefully allow students time to ground themselves as they arrive from busy lives and create more equity in group discussions as everyone will have had time to consider discussion questions.
- In Teaching to Transgress, bell hooks argues:
“We must return ourselves to a state of embodiment in order to deconstruct the way power has been traditionally orchestrated in the classroom, denying subjectivity to some groups and according it to others”
Bayers suggests that embodied learning is not only useful cognitively for learning but makes the classroom a more inclusive place:
“a classroom environment that enables bodily movement by way of fidgeting, doodling, knitting, or other embodied activities that might be seen as inappropriate in traditional academic settings enhances learning accessibility. Suppressing the urge to move as we learn, as “whole body listening” protocols ask students to do, pulls on energy reserves and increases cognitive load (Murphy Paul, 2021). A fidget- friendly classroom recognizes that varied bodies learn differently and that many bodies think better while moving.”
I will encourage movement in the classroom, whether that is giving students something to do with their hands during discussion, getting up to share thoughts with a partner, going for a discursive walk, or doing a body grounding exercise at the beginning of the class so that we challenge the mind body division that is so inherent in many classrooms.
- Hill argues in The Joy is in the inclusvie (teaching) journey is that
“One of the most important and critical steps that you can take toward expressing care and fostering inclusion (and its byproduct joy) is by simply insisting that you and your students learn each other’s names and how to pronounce them correctly.”
- I will make intentional time at the beginning of the year on name games that get everyone comfortable with remembering and pronouncing other students names. This will hopefully prevent the othering that students feel when their names are constantly mangled by staff and students alike, which can intefere with their learning and their sense of being in community with each other.
I hope that applying these three new teaching strategies: quiet time at the beginning of a session, movement breaks during a session, and an insistence on learning and getting people’s names to show respect and build community will help all my students to engage in my teaching with more ease and pleasure.
References/Bibliography:
hooks, b. (1994). Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. Routledge
Hill, L., (2025) ‘The joy in in the inclusive (teaching) journey’ in Kogl Camfield, E., Joy Centered pedagogy in Higher Education: Uplifiting teaching and learning for all. New York: Routledge
Bayers, L., (2025) ‘The Joy of Embodied Learning’ in Kogl Camfield, E., Joy Centered pedagogy in Higher Education: Uplifiting teaching and learning for all. New York: Routledge
Winek, A., (2025) Celebrating Silence: Making Space for Quiet Joy in the Classroom in Kogl Camfield, E., Joy Centered pedagogy in Higher Education: Uplifiting teaching and learning for all. New York: Routledge