Inclusive Teaching: An Approach for Non-Traditional Student Success

Abstract

It is a recurring complaint among university teachers that most of today’s students come underprepared to university. The majority of these students are non-traditional, particularly mature, aboriginal, international, recent immigrant, first-generation, and visible minorities. Both universities and individual faculty members have been taking measures to help non-traditional students improve their skills and performance. These initiatives are remedial in nature, i.e., they aim at equipping non-traditional students with the academic skills and knowledge of mainstream students and teachers. Not surprisingly, these actions have proved inadequate to empower most minority students to succeed, as these measures neglect to acknowledge and incorporate the diverse values, beliefs, and skills that non-traditional students bring to the classroom. The pivotal thesis of this article is that students’ preparation reflects their own cultures, traditions, and beliefs. In other words, today’s students are not underprepared. Their preparation responds to a different notion of the world around them. So, instead of pushing non-traditional students to adopt mainstream academic skills, disciplinary perspectives, and processes, we should open our classroom doors to teaching diverse and non-traditional ways of approaching disciplinary content, and organizing and expressing thought. We should support this by including non-traditional pedagogies to help our students learn in a more inclusive way. This article describes a project I conducted, which aimed at fostering non-traditional student success. It focuses on inclusive teaching, i.e., an alternative approach that acknowledges and incorporates diverse knowledge modes, thought processes, and expressive styles into the classroom.