From the moment I enter a new classroom, filled with eager (and sometimes sleepy) faces, my primary goal is promoting and practicing inclusivity. The Midwest is often characterized for its lack of diversity, but as a native Hoosier and educator, I can testify to the vast array of personal experiences my students bring with them to the classroom. When I began my university teaching career, first as a lead tutor at Hanover College and later as an Associate Instructor at Indiana University, I believed a one-size-fits all approach could promote equality in my classroom. However, I quickly realized how students’ unique experiences could directly impact student learning in positive ways by opening the floor for critical discussions about our world. When I recognized diversity as an asset within the classroom, I devoted myself to creating a welcoming and inclusive environment to foster a diverse classroom community that allowed students to understand and utilize their individuality in constructive ways. In each of my courses, I incorporate personal attendance questions, handwritten journals, and open conversations to facilitate genuine engagement with my students as well as a friendly classroom culture. I believe cultivating this inclusive classroom community opens the door to a specific type of productive learning achieved through trust and open-mindedness.

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One of the first steps for developing this classroom culture of inclusivity is to demonstrate how discomfort can be productive by introducing new concepts and allowing my students to experiment with multiple perspectives. From the onset of each course, my students participate in a number of thought experiments in order to stretch their creative muscles and expand their critical thinking; for example, they might assume control of a failing amusement park, escape a desert island, or, in the case of my self-designed seminar on dystopian fiction, control a foreign government. For this activity, I gamified my classroom and assigned small groups control of an imaginary country. Students had to determine how much information to provide their citizens about a number of topics, and each decision of giving or withholding information had positive and negative consequences. If the group’s “approval rating” dropped to zero, they were eliminated from the game. Through this process, I promoted active analysis of the complicated government systems found in dystopian fiction and illustrated a scaled version of the dystopian race to tyrannical control. My thought experiments help students take control of their thinking in a positive way, and equip them for future difficult conversations about the problems facing our modern world: power, control, and alterity. After engaging in these thought experiments, I witness students visibly gain confidence: they begin employing specific vocabulary and critical thinking skills in their responses in both class discussions and written work. They take risks with their writing and ask discerning questions, and they begin to recognize my classroom as a safe space that will also continuously challenge them.

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Understanding the productivity of discomfort can also prepare students for challenging discussions about identity as defined by race and disability. In a media-driven society, my goal is for students to be prepared to address charged, relevant topics, and I promote critical discussion of these topics within the classroom. I work actively to prepare myself for these discussions. For instance, when I decided to incorporate the film Black Panther into my composition classroom for a unit on visual analysis, I met with Monica Green, Director of the Neal Marshall Black Cultural Center, to discuss how to integrate race into my class dialogue. We examined the importance of representation, the background of the comic, and even technical considerations in making a film with a primarily Black cast. This conversation deeply improved my ability to navigate the classroom through racial discourse and led to many successful student-written papers about the film and its cultural implications, including an essay on dual identities in the face of biracialism. Similarly, I have worked with Student Disability Services to educate my students on both learning disabilities and on-campus resources. One first-year student went to Student Disability Services on my recommendation and discovered he had a learning disability; this paved the way for support throughout his academic career. By introducing racial and disability discourse in my courses, I am able to deliver a more comprehensive educational experience and encourage my students to keep an open mind about complex topics and advocate for themselves and their experiences.

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Students recognize and value my commitment to inclusive environments; in a recent evaluation, one student wrote, “I love the discussions and how Prof. Line does not turn down anybody’s comment. She respects everyone’s response to her questions…she is always promoting participation.” Another said, “Ms. Line was really understanding of how some people understand readings and other materials differently than their peers. She made it really comfortable if you were struggling with what something meant or if you disagreed with what others were saying.” By promoting a positive and collaborative atmosphere, my students not only feel their opinions are valued, but they respond by valuing one another’s opinions. In one of my Basic Writing courses, I led a discussion based on implicit bias and how to evaluate an author and their intended audience. Informed by an assigned reading about dialect and accent, a written response to the Harvard Implicit Association Test, and a series of videos about the history of African-American Vernacular English, my students managed the discussion independently, and one student explained her own experience as a Black American at Indiana University. This discussion inspired one of her peers to write his final term paper, complete with interviews from classmates, about the efficacy of resources available to students of color in Midwestern university settings. This freedom to explore and think critically about the world is exactly the type of community I strive for in my classroom; it provides a strong foundation for my students to contribute to their own learning experience.

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The foundation I build grounded in inclusivity prepares students to transition from thinking about external conflict into introspectiveness and pushes them to question their own identity and bias—steps that are crucial to the learning process and enable them to act with their own agency. In a composition class, while discussing societally constructed gender roles within a music video, I asked my students to observe a male and female student walk across the room. I then asked the volunteers to repeat the action, but alter their movements: the female student would focus on walking through her shoulders and the male student would focus his movement through his hips. Immediately, the room was filled with laughter, and we began a discussion of how even our public movements are performances of our gender. I believe this embodied experience was possible through the supportive and inclusive environment I built throughout the semester. Students were not afraid to volunteer to walk, and they were fully engaged with the subsequent discussion. Activities like this contribute to how students understand abstract concepts, like the societal constraints of gender. After this demonstration, one student who began the course thinking feminism was “ill-founded” wrote a strong final essay on the male gaze affects women’s organizations, like beauty pageants and sororities. In his reflection on the paper, he credited the above activity as the cause of his reevaluation of gendered performances. Utilizing activities that help students experience the concepts they are discussing in the classroom not only makes the concepts clear and memorable but also catalyzes critical analysis outside the classroom.

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When I draft experiential activities aimed at student engagement, I focus on incorporating the Universal Design for Learning principles, a framework I learned about through my participation in Indiana University’s online evidence-based learning courses. After taking this course, I began thinking about how to further implement multiple means of engagement, representation, and expression in my classroom. In my current Introduction to Fiction course, my students explored the element of “narration” by reading selections from a narratology textbook and annotating a short story at home, then arrived to a class session where we had an interactive lecture accompanied by guided notes. We then discussed how narration functioned within the short story, and finally, I asked students to work in small groups to experiment with narration. Each group received the same “base story” coupled with different pieces of information about the narrator. Students took time to re-write the story from a first-person perspective, and then recited their story while other classmates guessed at the narrator’s secret backstory. Through this multilayered lesson, students were required to exercise skills of creative and logical thinking, and employ a variety of different strategies to understand a complicated element of fiction. When the next summative assessment (a short essay) was turned in, students vocally expressed feeling far more confident in their ability to critically discuss narration and the essays reflected a strong grasp of the concept.

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In addition to fostering student agency within the classroom, I encourage it outside of the classroom as well, specifically during office hours. After polling my students, I realized that office hours were a source of fear and anxiety. Students were unsure of what to bring, what to say, or how to ask questions. In response to these concerns, I re-branded my office hours as “visiting hours,” and encouraged students to drop in, say “hi,” and use the space for homework or studying. Soon, my office hours turned into student-run discussion groups on the course material, and students worked collaboratively, with my guidance, on certain assignments. Once, when I had 10 students from various sections of composition arrive at once, I placed them in small groups to peer-edit their final papers while I called them individually for 10-minute personal meetings. Another key component in my office hours is helping students realize their own abilities. This requires a discussion about students’ individual goals for an assignment and asking them to reread their own work. One of my students, in a personal testimony about how my course impacted his undergraduate career, writes, “I am confident in saying that Miss Line’s student visiting hours were some of the most helpful meetings I’ve had from a teacher in my student career…The best part about Miss Line’s visiting hours is that she would not let students give her a whole paper for her to just peer review. She only looked at a certain paragraph, thesis statement, or specific question about an essay. This allowed me to grow as a writer and become more confident with my papers.” These important out-of-classroom conversations allow me to simultaneously connect with students and help them recognize their own potential.

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My values and passion as an educator have recently translated into an enthusiasm for designing innovative and effective curricula. In 2019, I had the privilege of designing a GenEd Arts and Humanities course for the Collins Living and Learning Center titled, “Wretched Worlds: Dystopias in Fiction” which focused on how the dystopia genre has risen to prominence and the different themes populating these texts. I incorporated project-based assessments, including one that required students to combine critical reading and archival skills with the goal of building their own dystopian artifacts. One student wrote the music and lyrics for a national song; the lyrics themselves were composed entirely of historical eugenics-driven newspaper headlines. This course helped me recognize how I could incorporate inclusivity into curricula that worked with learning outcomes on both a department and university-level; I began seeking out more opportunities, and this past summer, I was selected by the Director of Undergraduate Teaching to assist on adapting our current W131: Basic Writing curriculum and train instructors to create a 6-week intensive summer composition course for incoming first-year students in the Groups Scholars Program. We focused on creating an inclusive curriculum that allowed students to succeed socially as well as academically, in part by introducing collaborative work days. On these days, students were assigned a small group project for the entirety of the class session while the instructor and class tutor rotated between groups to ask about methodology and work strategies, as well as answer any questions. This semester, I am teaching ENG-L204, a course that fulfills both a GenEd Arts and Humanities credit and an Intensive Writing Credit. When curating my syllabus, I took care in selecting readings and creating activities that spotlighted various perspectives: in one short month, we’ve read already short stories from men and women across the United States and Latin America ranging in date from 1843 to 2017. Over the course of the semester, we’ll extend the geographical range into Europe and Eastern Asia. I regularly encourage my students to think about the ways they read and suggest “Further reading” material through the use of a collaborative Google Doc. I believe that inclusivity happens in the many components of a university education: it exists not only in classroom atmosphere, but also in the very curricula and learning outcomes that drive the course.

I look forward to continuing my own pedagogical edification as I design new courses and implement new strategies. I always look for opportunities to discuss my work with other educators, and I regularly attend workshops and lectures through my university’s Center for Innovative Teaching and Learning. Thus far, I have attended semester-length practicums on archival education, the pedagogy of composition, and teaching special topics in Germanic Studies. I am also currently enrolled in the Graduate Teaching Apprenticeship Program, and continue to take online courses in evidence-based approaches to teaching. These programs, combined with dialogue from other educators and previous students, constantly influence the ways in which I teach; after a recent workshop on reflexive learning, I immediately added a short, completion-based assignment to my L204 course asking students to reflect on their first two essays. It is in these workshops that the collaborative nature of education is revealed, and this is why I also look forward to mentoring future teachers with the same inclusive attitude that I maintain in my own classroom. I believe that by acknowledging our own experiences as educators, we can model the type of critical thinking and collaboration that our world necessitates.