Equity-Minded Pedagogy Course

Challenge

How might we design a faculty development experience that helps educators move from awareness of inequity to meaningful changes in teaching practice?

IMPACT

I designed Equity-Minded Pedagogy from the ground up using co-creation with faculty, students, and staff. What began as a campus-based experience grew into a multi-campus Community of Practice across the California State University system that ran for five semesters and continues to run on local California State University (CSU) campuses.

The model combined asynchronous coursework, large-scale synchronous instruction, multiple theories, institutional data, student voice, reflection, and applied course redesign. Research on the program found significant increases in faculty data awareness, equity behaviors, integration of knowledge and pedagogy, student feedback practices, and digital literacy and fluency.

Designing the Experience

I used empathy interviews and collaborative prototyping sessions to shape the curriculum, activities, and facilitation model. After the interviews two distinct outlines for the course were produced as prototypes (pictured below) and tested with faculty, students, and professional staff.
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The chosen course was structured around a progression from identity and systems thinking to institutional data, student experience, course evaluation, and prototyping for change. Faculty learned through applied activities including identity mapping, systems mapping, empathy interviews, journey mapping, syllabus review, institutional data analysis, and prototype development.
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The underlying approach emphasized participation, reflection, structural critique, and shared learning rather than a traditional one-to-many training model.

Teaching Through Practice

The teaching model intentionally mirrored the practices faculty were being asked to use with students. Rather than relying on lecture alone, sessions used modeling, guided practice, structured reflection, peer discussion, small group activities, live visual collaboration, collaborative sense-making, and feedback cycles.
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Faculty were regularly asked to do something with the content: map an identity, interpret data, analyze a system, interview a student, evaluate a syllabus, build a journey map, or prototype a course change. Facilitators then used whole-group debriefs, follow-up questions, and peer feedback to help participants make meaning from those activities.

Faculty did not simply learn about student voice, data-informed teaching, or iterative design. They interviewed students, analyzed campus data, evaluated their own courses, developed prototypes, and received feedback from peers.

This created alignment between learning objectives, teaching methods, activities, assessment, and transfer to practice.

Designing Synchronous Learning at Scale

As EMP expanded, the challenge became how to maintain participation and reflection in a large online environment.

I designed and facilitated synchronous sessions that moved between direct instruction, expert panels, individual reflection, chat participation, breakout discussions, collaborative activities, and whole-group synthesis.

The experience relied on a coordinated facilitation system with main facilitators, subject-matter experts, breakout facilitators, chat and Canvas moderators, Zoom moderators, and timekeepers.

The cohorts totaled 400 actively engaged faculty across multiple campuses and disciplines.

From Data to Course Redesign

EMP combined institutional data with qualitative insight from students and campus professionals.
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Faculty used data to identify patterns, then used empathy interviews and other forms of "thick data" to understand the expeirences behind those patterns.

They then translated those insights into low-stakes prototypes for assingments, policies, learning activities, and other course elements.

Measuring Change

The post-survey was administered the following semester, after faculty had time to implement, test, and refine what they learned in EMP.

‍Faculty became more confident using institutional data to examine equity gaps, with data awareness increasing from 3.42 to 3.75.

‍Faculty reported stronger equity-minded teaching behaviors, with equity behaviors increasing from 3.20 to 3.43.

‍Faculty showed the strongest overall gain in integrating knowledge with pedagogy, increasing from 4.08 to 4.33.

‍Faculty reported greater use of student feedback to inform instruction, increasing from 4.53 to 4.65.

‍Digital literacy and fluency also increased, from 2.96 to 3.19.

‍Advocacy shifted beyond the classroom as well. Faculty who reported regularly advocating for changes to institutional policies affecting marginalized students increased from 34% to 45%, while advocacy for curriculum revisions increased from 44% to 50%.Assignment design and collegial relationships also increased, though those changes were not statistically significant.
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