Creating Inclusive Learning Environments
What can the practices and pedagogies developed for teaching refugees, asylum seekers, and displaced students teach us about how to be better university teachers and administrators in general?
This workshop series organised by OLIve and OSUN’s Working Group on Education for Refugees IDPs and Host Community Members draws on the collective experience of OSUN teachers and administrators. It is not only for those teachers and administrators who work with students who have experienced displacement, but for all university teachers and administrators who want to think through what it means to teach and learn from students who are marginalized by their ethnicity, class, gender, legal status etc.
The aim of the series is to help OSUN teachers and administrators develop in ways that foster inclusive learning environments. When faced with ‘non-traditional’ or ‘marginalised’ students we need to move beyond ideas centred on ‘deficit’ ‘integration’ or ‘catching up’. Rather, we must find ways to value the learning and experience of students which have not been traditionally appreciated in higher education. We can learn from our students to become better teachers. This entails thinking seriously about caring, anti-racist and trauma-informed practices and ethics as a way of furthering educational excellence. This is vital if our objective is to empower students both inside and outside the classroom.
This necessitates an upskilling; developing teaching and administrative practices and strategies that can be employed at the scale of the classroom, department, institution and beyond. Each month different facilitators will introduce topics that we can work through collectively. The workshop will help teaching and administrators develop tools and strategies they can use in their work.
Sessions will take place on the last Tuesday of every month at 3:30 p.m. CET / CEST and run for 90 minutes.