Inclusive engineering classrooms: student teaching assistants' perspectives

Inclusive teaching is the intentional practice of recognising biases, working to mitigate their impact, and ensuring that students have equitable learning opportunities. In addition to improving students' sense of belonging and self efficacy, inclusive teaching improves retention, improves academic performance, and reduces achievement gaps. In many large enrollment introductory classrooms, student teaching assistants (TAs) contribute to the classroom climate in addition to the teachers and the students. In this qualitative study, 262 TAs were asked about their teaching strengths, areas that need improvement, obstacles, and ideas about their role in reducing incidents of discrimination or harassment. We coded their open-ended responses using a framework proposed by Dewsbury (2020) to map ideas about inclusive practices that these TAs are bringing into the classrooms. Our analysis suggests that TAs can be powerful forces in building inclusive classrooms, given the coherency with Dewsbury’s inclusive teaching competencies. Following training, the importance they accorded to content knowledge decreased and active learning increased, coherent with increased focus on supporting students’ learning. Positive classroom climate dominated TAs’ ideas about decreasing discrimination in the classroom, however this did not feature among the teaching strengths they listed and many TAs cited a need to improve their skills in this area. However, empathising with students was also cited less often in the post survey, suggesting unintentional impact of the training that is counter to inclusive teaching. This suggests that TA training should be explicit about how inclusive teaching to fully exploit potential for TAs to foster inclusive classrooms.