Reflection Questions
• What did you learn about Indigenous cultures through this chapter? Why do you think you didn’t know this before?
• How do you think you can include culturally responsive teaching practices in your own teaching?
• How can culturally responsive education improve your students’ learning?
• How can Indigenous culture in particular be incorporated into your teaching to enrich your lessons for all your students?
References
Bazron, B., Osher, D., & Fleischman, S. (2005). Creating culturally responsive schools. https://www.researchgate.net/profile/David_Osher/
publication/265066182_Creating_Culturally_Responsive_Schools/
links/54c521db0cf2911c7a540861.pdf
Brown, D. B. (2004). Urban teachers’ professed classroom management strategies: Reflections on culturally responsive teaching.
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/
download?doi=10.1.1.941.997&rep=rep1&type=pdf
Conley, Robert J. (2007). A Cherokee Encyclopedia. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.
Forbes. (2017). Stop using PowerPoint, Harvard University says it’s damaging your brand and your company. https://www.forbes.com/sites/
paularmstrongtech/2017/07/05/stop-using-powerpoint-harvard- university-says-its-damaging-your-brand-and-your-company/
Englash, R., Gilbert, J.E., & Foster, E. (2013). Broadening participation towards culturally responsive computing education. https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/
10.1145/2483852.2483864
Fenwick, T. J. (2003). Learning through Experience: Troubling Orthodoxies and Intersecting Questions. Malabar, FL: Krieger.
Foreman, Grant. (1982). The Five Civilized Tribes: Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek Seminole. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.
Gay, G. (2018). Culturally Responsive Teaching: Theory, Research, and Practice.
New York: Teachers College Press.
Green, M. C. (2004). Storytelling in teaching.
https://www.psychologicalscience.org/observer/storytelling-in- teaching
Harmon, D. A. (2012). Culturally responsive teaching though a historical lens:
Will history repeat itself?. Interdisciplinary Journal of Teaching and Learning, 2(1), 12-22. https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1056428.pdf Krystian, M. (2017). Harvard researchers find PowerPoint could be bad for
business. https://infogram.com/blog/prezi-vs-powerpoint-harvard- study-presentation/
Ladson-Billings, G. (1994). What We Can Learn from Multicultural Education Research. Educational Leadership, v51 n8 p22-26.
McHenry, N. (2018). Teaching across a cultural chasm.
https://www.chronicle.com/article/Teaching-Across-a-Cultural/242287 Morgan, H. (2009). What every teacher needs to know to teach Native American students. Multicultural Education, 16(4), 10-12.
https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ858583
Moulton, S.T., Turkay, S., and Kosslyn, S.M. (2017). Does a presentation’s medium affect its message? PowerPoint, Prezi, and oral presentations.
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/
journal.pone.0178774#sec036
Native Governance Center. (2019). A guide to Indigenous land acknowledgment. https://nativegov.org/news/a-guide-to-indigenous- land-acknowledgment/
Richardson, V. (2003). Constructivist pedagogy. Teachers College Record, 105(9), 1623–1640. https://doi.org/10.1046/j.1467-9620.2003.00303.x 50 | Indigenizing Your Classroom
Schunk, D. (2012) Learning theories: An Educational Perspective (6th ed.), 228-277. Boston: Pearson
Wilson, D. & Conyers, M. (2014). Brain moves: When readers can picture it, they understand it. https://www.edutopia.org/blog/brain-movies- visualize-reading-comprehension-donna-wilson
4. Teaching Practices for Student-Centered Learning Online
RACHEL MACK
Introduction
Welcome to the online teaching chapter! Teaching online is not only fun, but it also has advantages for both you and your students. In my online teaching, I have enjoyed the flexibility (Bates, 2012) of the online teaching process.
While online education can initially seem intimidating to new graduate teaching assistants (TAs) and faculty, if you are feeling overwhelmed by it, you are not alone. Seasoned faculty sometimes have difficulty with online teaching, especially if they are not used to the format. When COVID-19 forced face-to-face classes to become online classes, some faculty and teaching assistants in academia were left scrambling to both meet the needs of students and present their material well (Kamenetz, 2020). Moving a class online can be especially challenging for those who are not well-versed in online teaching tools, or who are accustomed to using lecture-only teaching formats. However, an online course doesn’t need to be a challenge to create and implement.
How to cite this book chapter:
Mack, R. 2022. Teaching Practices for Student-Centered Learning Online. In:
Westfall-Rudd, D., Vengrin, C., and Elliott-Engel, J. (eds.) Teaching in the University: Learning from Graduate Students and Early-Career Faculty. Blacksburg:
Virginia Tech College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. https://doi.org/10.21061/
universityteaching. License: CC BY-NC 4.0.
52 | Student-Centered Learning Online
If you find yourself overwhelmed at the prospect of teaching an online course, you may be overthinking it. There are ways to make your online course simple and useful at the same time. In this chapter, I will walk through the components necessary for a basic, easy-to-implement online course, so that you may quickly set yourself up for the delivery of effective teaching for your students.
In my teaching, I have seen critical thinking elevated by highlighting student questions and interests, which in online classes can make space for student ideas to influence the direction of the lessons. Student-centered practices that achieve this include, but are not limited to, being a facilitator rather than a lecturer, focusing on what students want to know, and encouraging students to brainstorm their own ideas on the topic. Read on for more detail about using student-centered practices to enhance online teaching.
This chapter will discuss…
• How to make an online course more student-centered.
• How to quickly convert from a face-to-face course to an online course.
• Preventing yourself from throwing all of your efforts into creating your online course.
• Creating online experiences that students will enjoy.
Online learning environments can be challenging for teachers who wish to promote student-centered teaching practices. Teachers of online courses cannot always observe students to gauge whether their students are responding well to the lesson. Online courses can be tricky for those teachers who wish to encourage student-teacher and peer-peer interactions. They can pose challenges for teachers who want to promote
motivation to learn through activities, course content, and assessment (Briggs, 2015). Teachers wish to see students engaged, but the inherent physical separation of students and instructors that exists in online