In the wake of campus climate data suggesting many UW-Madison students feel marginalized or uncomfortable in classroom discussions, the School of Education has decided to take action.
The result is The Discussion Project, a program that trains UW-Madison instructors on how to best facilitate equitable classroom discussions through the School of Education.
Paula McAvoy, the program director for the Center for Ethics and Education, and Diana Hess, the dean of the School of Education, founded the project in order to further inclusive excellence and participation in the classroom setting by better preparing instructors to interact with diversity.
The program includes two full-day sessions before the semester and a follow up, half-day session mid-semester to provide instructors with the tools and strategies to make classroom discussions as welcoming and productive as possible for all students. Each day has goals, with topics like ethical issues, facilitation and getting students talking.
“Engaging discussions are one of the most rewarding and memorable activities that students and faculty alike can experience in the classroom. Recent research shows that classroom discussion deepens learning, creates community, and helps students form an academic identity,” according to the Discussion Project’s website.
Since last fall, 44 instructors have participated in the program, including 24 this past spring session.
Class discussions can be challenging to teach since students — who are potentially not comfortable with one other - are asked to voice differing opinions and perspectives publicly. For this reason, preparing faculty and staff to properly respond to sensitive subjects brought up in discussion, while keeping the conversation academically and socially effective is a crucial challenge the project hopes to combat.
A major intention of the project is to address concerns in the classroom about the representation and inclusion of marginalized students. Data from the campus climate survey indicated that students of color feel as though they are asked to speak on behalf of their entire race in a classroom setting.
Kelly Truong, vice president of the Vietnamese Student Association, attested to this type of pressure, noting it is often because she is the only person of color in discussions.
“I think that sometimes it can be challenging to talk about race in the perspective of an Asian-American,” Truong said. “Sometimes you feel that there’s an expectation for you to speak, but I think I end up picking and choosing my battles.”
McAvoy has researched the role of instructors in classroom discussion and said she believes the instructor is crucial to fostering successful dialogue.
“It’s a common myth that a good classroom discussion is largely dependent on who enrolls in the class, and that’s just not true,” said McAvoy in a statement to Wisc.News. “Participating in a discussion is an academic skill that can be explicitly taught to students. They can get better at it.”
Even still, some students may not feel comfortable speaking in discussions, especially if they identify with minority opinion. For Jake Lubenow, chair of UW-Madison’s College Republicans, this can be exasperated by professors with outwardly liberal biases.
“I’ve certainly been in many classes myself where I felt my opinion was not welcome and didn’t feel like the fight was worth the trouble,” Lubenow. “I think most professors are fairly tolerant of opposing views but that does not mean that they work to introduce them if a student isn’t willing to stand up and voice a conservative stance.”
However, campus climate data suggests conservative students are among the most comfortable and generally feel accepted on the UW-Madison campus.
Sociology professor and PhD candidate Gina Marie Longo advises participants of The Discussion Project to further their initiatives past the required two-day sessions in order to create real change on campus.
“It needs to be a broader, not just top down, but also a bottom up initiative. Since we’ve had this culture of silence where we don’t talk about these issues, like racism and sexual orientation, working for two days among people you don’t know very well is a difficult setting to see change happen,” Longo said.
The Discussion Project is free to all faculty participants, who additionally receive a $500 incentive for completing all sessions, evaluations and distributing a student questionnaire. The project also offers post-training classroom observation and feedback from instructional coach and Madison West High School teacher, Jane Bernstein.
The program’s success will be monitored using a design-based research model of data collection and evaluation through School of Education program.
Sign-ups to join the project’s fall 2018 cohort will become available later this spring.
