18 Part N: Humanizing from an Institutional Perspective
What can humanizing learning look like in practice from the institution’s perspective?
We need to ask why some disciplines humanize learning while others are still lacking. Where can we look for guidance and models of success?
Institutions and departments might consider the following ideas and questions as they embark on the process of humanizing postsecondary education:
- Why four years? Why 5 courses?
- Eliminate silos. Build degrees and university departments around Problems, not Disciplines.
- Focus on skills learning rather than topics learning.
- Abandon pre-requisites.
- Hire instructors who know how to teach.
- Teach faculty how to teach. Give them time and space to do it. They might like it.
- Stop grading.
- Offer grace when it comes to transfer students’ credits.
- Don’t shy away from anti-oppressive, decolonial frameworks to make policies more palatable for administrators.
- Review hybrid learning environments or online learning environments.
- Do not gatekeep information on graduate programs. Let everyone know how they work.
- Do not (implicitly) tell instructors that in second year, the average grade for a course should be around X%.
- Be honest with students about assessment (e.g., the bell curve, etc.).
- Support faculty who want to try novel approaches. Provide them with a supportive environment to innovate and test new ideas
- Allow the possibility of weighting first- and second-year courses less heavily when calculating CGPA.
- Hire more trained strategists in student learning support bodies (e.g. the Accessibility Centre) to provide more efficient support to students and instructors.
- Educate students to be more articulate in voicing their needs, concerns, and opinions.
- Help students to extend their social sphere (i.e. international students tend to stay in their own ethnic group, interdisciplinary/interdepartmental/interuniversity events/projects are rather rare, etc.).
- Offer grant programs in support of humanizing course curriculum. Instructors could be matched with an instructional designer/educational developer and a student partner over the course of a development term preceding teaching the course.
- Offer grant programs to support instructors who want to experiment and try new things without being placed at risk (i.e., exempt them from student evaluations for the first run of the course).
- Change the course evaluation process to include questions around the humanizing of the curriculum in addition to the more general teaching and learning questions.
- Each class should have an anonymous section so students can voice their questions and concerns for the class in general. This should be available during the entire year, not just at the end of the class in a survey.
- Provide opportunities for TAs to collaborate with professors. Train TAs. Many of are thrown into the teaching world without much (if any) education training. Each TA should meet with their course instructor and have the chance to talk about expectations and the ways in which both the TA and the professor can create a safe, humanized learning environment.