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Engaging Diversity in First-Year College Classrooms

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Abstract

The increasing calls for diversity research signal a need to explore strategies through which we attempt to interact with and respond to diversity intentionally in courses and curricula. This case study of a first-year inquiry course in a college of education fills a gap in the literature by documenting and analyzing instances of educators actively working with multiple dimensions of diversity in the classroom so as to support students’ development of diversity-related competencies. The guiding research question for this study was to explore what curricular and/or pedagogical activities students in a first-year experience course identified as facilitating their engagement with diversity in an intentional, purposeful manner.

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Notes

  1. All names used in this paper are pseudonyms in order to protect the students’ identity.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Postsecondary Teaching and Learning, University of Minnesota, 206E Burton Hall, 178 Pillsbury Dr. SE, Minneapolis, MN, 55455, USA

    Amy Lee & Rhiannon Williams

  2. School of Social Work, University of Minnesota, 105 Peters Hall 1404 Gortner Avenue, Saint Paul, MN, 55108, USA

    Rusudan Kilaberia

Authors
  1. Amy Lee
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  2. Rhiannon Williams
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  3. Rusudan Kilaberia
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Amy Lee.

Additional information

Amy Lee

received her Ph.D. from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and is currently an an associate professor and department chair of the Department of Postsecondary Teaching and Learning at the University of Minnesota. She can be contacted at Department of Postsecondary Teaching and Learning, University of Minnesota, 206E Burton Hall, 178 Pillsbury Dr. SE Minneapolis, MN 55455. E-Mail: amylee@umn.edu.

Rhiannon Williams

received her Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota. She is a Research Associate in the Department of Postsecondary Teaching and Learning, University of Minnesota.

Rusudan Kilaberia

received her MSW from the University of Minnesota and is currently a Ph.D. student in the School of Social Work at the University of Minnesota.

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Lee, A., Williams, R. & Kilaberia, R. Engaging Diversity in First-Year College Classrooms. Innov High Educ 37, 199–213 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10755-011-9195-7

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