R3 1.7 April 13, 2023 The Norton Guide to Equity-Minded Teaching

A summary and review of a new resource on creating equal opportunities and equitable outcomes through teaching.

Citation:

Artze-Vega, I., Darby, F., Dewsbury, B., & Imad, M. (2023). The Norton Guide to Equity-Minded Teaching. W.W. Norton.

Online at: https://seagull.wwnorton.com/equityguide

Paywall or Open: 

The e-book version is free to read online, with registration. Print copies retail for $25 from the publisher, and at the time of this writing, there is also a discount code for orders from individual instructors (EQUITY25; 10% off plus free domestic shipping).

Summary and review:

This is a substantive volume on advancing equity through course design and pedagogy in higher education, with emphasis on multiple modalities such as online, hybrid, and face-to-face. It’s written by a team of authors who are well known in the field of inclusive teaching and faculty development, and who bring in a variety of examples drawn from their own experiences.

These multiple perspectives mesh seamlessly within a structure that first breaks down the subject into major sections, then units, then review of supporting research, then strategies. At the final, most granular level, there’s a wrap-up called “How Can I Get Started?”

The book is comprehensive and detailed, identifying a wealth of (occasionally surprising) ways that faculty can advance - or hinder - equity. To take one example, here’s how the book addresses the topic of building trust with students. Trust is a facet of teaching that most faculty are probably aware of, but that few are approaching in an intentional or planful way. The authors argue that, far from being an afterthought or happy accident, trust is a disproportionately powerful influence on equity (a “secret weapon,” in the words of one scholar they quote). They review research placing trust at the center of the larger issue of forging meaningful relationships as part of higher education, then they move on to specific strategies for making those relationships happen.

It starts, as teaching improvements often do, with reflection. Here are a few questions the authors suggest to get the ball rolling:

Picture two to three students with whom you’ve stayed connected long after the end of the course. Do you notice any patterns in these students’ identities or aspirations?

What does it take for someone to earn your trust?

How do you earn your online students’ trust? For instance, how can they tell that you’re “there”—that you’re present in the course and ready to support them?

Discussion follows of the concrete steps that instructors can take to build trust: appropriate self-disclosure, activities and questions that encourage students to tell you more about their backgrounds and aspirations, finding and remarking on areas of common ground. In the culminating “How Can I Get Started?” section for the unit, there’s a condensed list of these strategies, broken down by online versus face-to-face modalities, with specific questions to ask and activities to try.

A few other distinctive features set this guide apart. One is the overarching framework of “equity-minded teaching.” In the larger ecosystem of writing and work on diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice in higher education, this is a refreshingly straightforward way to convey what the book’s goals and focus are.

As the authors explain their terminology choices:

“In this guide, we define equity-minded teaching as teaching that is informed by principles, practices, and historical understandings that aim to realize equal outcomes among all students, with particular attention to students of minoritized races and ethnicities. To unpack this definition a bit, the focus on outcomes reminds us that good intentions are not enough; we have a responsibility as faculty to recognize that our teaching has enormous impact on students and thus to monitor the outcomes of our practice. Key outcomes include student success (measured using common criteria like grades, reenrollment, credit accumulation, and graduation) and learning (as measured by our assessments). As coauthors we chose to stress the focus on learning because students will reap the benefits of our improved teaching practices only if our efforts result in more and deeper learning. Without enhanced learning, there is no equity, and any claim of student success improvements rings hollow.”

The authors go on to say that while there are quite a few related concepts and terms (culturally responsive teaching, inclusive teaching, and more), this guide isn’t going to dwell too much on the distinctions among them. I agree with their call on this question; to my mind, it’s possible to respect the important nuances and distinctions among these concepts, without letting them hold faculty back (even if temporarily) from getting started on the actions they need to start taking right away. 

The authors also manage to cover all of this ground in an evidence-based way without the style coming across as sterile or disconnected from personal contexts for teaching. They do talk about themselves and their own practices, notably in two extended “case studies” in Unit 7, An Inside Look: Examples of an Equity-Minded Online Class and In-Person Classroom. Personality touches also enliven the useful sample materials provided throughout, such as the engaging “About Your Instructor” syllabus section example (Figure 3.2).

The Norton Guide to Equity-Minded Teaching belongs on any instructor’s reading list, but there are a few cautions to keep in mind. These are not criticisms so much as my sense of what this book is best suited for in terms of audience and purpose. One of its key strengths is the  comprehensive, detailed structure, but this is something of a limitation as well. It might not make the best reading (in its entirety, at least) for something like a limited-time faculty reading club. Those faculty who are completely new to the field might also do better with a shorter, more elementary reading (for example, Vijy Sathy and Kelly Hogan’s excellent “How To Make Your Teaching More Inclusive”), before moving on to this one.

This might not be the first book to give out to a novice seeking an introduction to the subject, but there are many other applications it could be perfect for. I think it would make an ideal core text to anchor a longer-term development experience – perhaps something like coupling it with an online course such as Columbia University’s Inclusive Teaching EdX resource.

I can even envision this book being the base for a full-fledged course redesign initiative. Faculty could work through it section-by-section, identifying key areas of opportunity to address equity and choosing from among the different strategies as they create a redesign plan. I can only imagine that this would be more powerful than the typical checklist-driven approach to course and curriculum overhaul. There are certainly some wonderful rubrics and quality improvement systems out there (in fact, this book discusses several, on pages 81-82), but I would bet that one based on this book would offer not only a sharper focus on equity but also would push faculty to make deeper changes, powered by the alignment to values that is such a core strength of the authors’ approach.

In sum, The Norton Guide to Equity-Minded Teaching is a powerful and much-needed contribution, one that taps into an almost unimaginably broad and deep well of research and application. Faculty professional development specialists, instructional designers, and e-learning leaders in particular should add it to their summer reading lists, and should be thinking about how to put this resource to work in semesters to come.