From Inclusive to Equitable Pedagogy: How to Design Course Assignments and Learning Activities That Address Structural Inequalities

Current approaches to building inclusive classrooms for first-generation and working-class students tend to emphasize communicative strategies: receiving students with welcoming messages that acknowledge and value their life experience and promoting a growth mindset. These methods are important, but they do little to address structural sources of exclusion, such as academic inequities and disadvantages in resources like time. Communicative strategies alone secure inclusion without equity. Equity, however, involves teaching and learning activities that promote fair treatment and access at a structural level in order to offer students a concrete path to classroom success. In this article, we develop a framework for designing assignments and learning activities that addresses the type of structural barriers that most affect first-generation, working-class, and racially minoritized students. We identify three distinct types of structural disadvantages—academic inequities, resource disadvantages, and cultural discrimination—and propose three strategies for equitable design: deliberative interdependence, transformative translation, and proactive engagement. We illustrate each strategy with concrete teaching methods. We conclude by suggesting that only a transformative, comprehensive shift to equity mindedness is capable of doing justice to the increasing diversity of college classrooms.