Integrating equity: Developing actively inclusive physics classrooms

Despite decades of effort to create a more welcoming environment, women and people of color remain dramatically underrepresented in physics and astronomy, and minoritized groups continue to report hostile climates. This unwelcoming environment manifests, for example, in the use of textbooks focused on the achievements of white men, widespread accounts of micro-aggressions, and the conflation of privilege with aptitude. What, then, can we do to make our physics classrooms more equitable and welcoming? In this presentation, I will outline an approach rooted in anti-racist, critical pedagogy, consisting of four main tenets. First, we must examine who is represented in our course materials and challenge assumptions of whose knowledge is valued and why. However, representational diversity in the curriculum is necessary but not sufficient; this work should be accompanied by a critical examination of the forces that shape contemporary physics. Equitable teaching requires a recognition that our field is fundamentally unequal; students and faculty must work together to understand the roles that biases and privilege play in our field, in our classrooms and labs, and in our own lived experiences. This critical reflection on the dynamics of our field should be accompanied by a shift in teaching practices, away from traditional individualistic, competitive, exam-driven physics teaching, towards the adoption of more collaborative teaching strategies centered on disrupting existing inequities. Finally, anti-racist pedagogy emphasizes praxis, or students and faculty putting theory into action; this extends beyond the classroom to impact our work in our departments, research labs, and communities. In this presentation, I will explore each of these four main tenets of critical pedagogy in detail, providing concrete examples of what this might look like in a physics classroom and strategies for integrating actively inclusive, equitable pedagogy into our courses.