New Playbook Outlines an Ecosystem Approach to Equity-Based Teaching

Improving outcomes for every learner requires an ecosystem approach to equity-based teaching that changes not only what happens in classrooms but also the structural and institutional contexts in which education is embedded. Those contexts can include all the stakeholders within an institution — from students to administrators — as well as outside influences from business, professional associations, and state governments.

A new report from the Equity-Based Teaching Collective establishes a framework from an ecosystem perspective for how colleges and universities can produce equity-based teaching and outcomes for Black, Latine, Indigenous, and Low-Income (BLILI) students. Equity-Based Teaching in Higher Education: The Levers That Institutions Can Use for Scaling Improvement begins by defining equity-based teaching and proposing an ecosystem approach to achieving it.

The Equity-Based Teaching Collective is a group of scholars committed to advancing equitable teaching in higher education. They are composed of principal investigators and team members across American University, Florida International University, and the University of Connecticut.

The report then details 15 recommendations for institutional leaders, directors and staff of centers for teaching and learning, school deans and department chairs, faculty, and students. Each recommendation identifies actions for stakeholders and offers call outs — cautions to consider  — and call ins — opportunities to reflect.

Some of those recommendations in the report include:

• galvanizing efforts for broad-scale equity-based teaching
• building capacity for equity-based teaching through a multi-pronged teaching development approach
• structuring hiring and promotion policies to support EBT

The recommendations constitute a comprehensive playbook and are based on a landscape analysis — including 10 focus groups — to document the state of the equity-based teaching discussion within the research community, understand the lived experiences of those who implement gateway introductory courses, and identify promising policies, programs, and practices.

What is equity-based teaching?

Equity-based teaching (EBT) is a commitment to designing learning experiences that address the root causes of inequity in education to effect long-term institutional change and to improve outcomes for BLILI students in particular, and all students in general. Equity-minded college classrooms have instructors who understand that students show up bearing the weights and props of their history, and the ratio between the two can impact their ability to attain successful outcomes.

Instructors who understand that classrooms have not historically supported the success of BLILI students combat this by incorporating elements into their teaching that allow students to:

• engage in academic learning where they are represented in the curriculum and grasp how they can meaningfully apply their learning to their lives outside the classroom,
• cultivate a critical consciousness of the world, including race consciousness, and
• productively dialogue across differences.

Yet, cultivating equity-minded classrooms, especially on a broad scale, cannot be the work of faculty alone. This is a shared responsibility that requires an ecosystem approach.

Why is an ecosystem approach needed?

Achieving an equitable learning environment for all students can only come from change within an entire educational ecosystem. An ecosystem approach to equity-based teaching begins from the understanding that teaching and learning are shaped by and take place within multiple nested and interrelated contexts.

Enacting EBT thus requires changing not only what happens in classrooms but also the structural and institutional contexts in which education is embedded.

An ecosystem approach also recognizes that everyone in the ecosystem is responsible in one way or another for either advancing or preventing EBT. This includes those who teach students directly as well as academic administrators, institutional leaders, policymakers, disciplinary associations, and external stakeholders such as funders and local communities, as well as students in the educational ecosystem.

With this expansive understanding of educational stakeholders and participants, combined with attention to the multiple contexts where education takes place, an ecosystem approach to EBT aims both to address the root causes of inequity in education and to effect long-term institutional change.

Outline of the ecosystem approach to equity-based teaching

Equity-Based Teaching in Higher Education: The Levers That Institutions Can Use for Scaling Improvement outlines four tenets of this ecosystem approach. These tenets speak, respectively, to what education is, where it takes place, whose knowledge and experiences should be centered, and how teaching and learning need to be reconfigured to achieve this.

What

EBT first expands our conceptions and expectations of education and teaching so that education includes and goes beyond subject-matter teaching and learning, centering equitable policies, practices, experiences, and outcomes.

Where

EBT recognizes that education takes place in nested and interrelated contexts; thus, educational transformations must go beyond classrooms to include the structural and institutional contexts in which they are embedded.

Who

EBT seeks to center and benefit all students, especially those who have been historically marginalized, by representing, recognizing, and advancing students’ own forms of knowledge and lived experiences, as well as their diverse identities, communities, and histories.

How

EBT facilitates relational and reciprocal learning environments that cultivate caring and authentic relationships, redistribute power in both the classroom and the curriculum, and recognize students, teachers, and communities as education co-constructors.

The ecosystem approach holds all four tenets to be equally important and understands them as necessarily holistic.

Visualizing the ecosystem

If EBT is critical for improving course outcomes, particularly in introductory courses, then how could all students experience EBT in their coursework? In many higher education institutions, teaching improvement initiatives start with working one on one with faculty. However, this assumes that faculty and their courses are the problem that must be improved.

Yet, decades of literature and research on EBT improvement show that the problem lies in an ecosystem that does not center the nurture of EBT as its goal; therefore, faculty rarely have the time, motivation, knowledge, skills, support, or resources to enact EBT in their courses.

The full higher education ecosystem is highly complex and includes many actors. Communities, the state and federal landscape, disciplines, higher education associations and related businesses, and funders all play significant roles in EBT improvement in higher education (Figure 1).

Figure 1. Broad Ecosystem of Equity-Based Teaching Improvement in Higher Education

• Communities, including neighborhoods, local organizations and resources, and families, that surround universities bring valuable knowledge and understanding of higher education that impact how EBT is enacted.
• States have sociopolitical contexts, policy, and resources that can either nurture or thwart EBT. For example, policies that remove people doing equity work will make EBT improvement more challenging.
• Disciplines and disciplinary associations that reward EBT and provide teaching development opportunities can help foster EBT in introductory courses at scale across institutions.
• Associations like the Hispanic Association of Colleges and Universities and the American Association of Colleges and Universities play a role in training leaders to better understand equitable practices and help deepen the knowledge of leaders regarding equity support EBT policies in institutions. Organizations, like the Professional Organizational Development (POD) Network, provide support for teaching improvement in higher education.

• Businesses play a significant role in motivating institutional priorities. Yet, some businesses do not focus on equity and/or teaching. For example, publishers that produce material for courses, including courseware, do not always have equity at the center, so prices can have inequitable impacts, whereas certain courseware developers take equity seriously in their design. This is a key decision point for department and institution leaders procuring technology.

Efforts among individual actors, such as those above, are incomplete because they often operate within their domain of influence but do not cut across to impact the full ecosystem necessary for systematic change. Individual efforts that do not consider the broader ecosystem will not create large-scale and sustained change. Each aspect of the ecosystem and the aforementioned example actors provide a different lever for possible change. Yet alone they are insufficient.

Many higher education institutions are deeply engaged in components of EBT, but they are doing so in disparate aspects of their system. There is strong evidence of engagement with EBT policies that will give all students opportunities to be successful.

However, consistent with the challenges of teaching in complex ecosystems, the development and enactment of policies that activate enough elements of the ecosystem to allow for sustainable EBT are still slightly out of reach. As technological innovation continues, research on teaching needs to better reflect the ways it can support EBT practices. Also, institutions of higher learning need to pay close attention to the environment where this technology will be incorporated.

Editor’s note: The material in this article is excerpted and adapted from Equity-Based Teaching in Higher Education: The Levers That Institutions Can Use for Scaling Improvement which was written by The Equity-Based Teaching Collective.