Creating accessible classroom environments requires a simultaneous commitment to reducing barriers to success and designing activities and assignments that invite all students to participate in an intellectual space. Building an accessible and equitable writing course requires an ongoing conversation between faculty and students to negotiate the course environment that works for everyone in the moment. See WID's Fighting Academic Ableism page for ideas and strategies for navigating academic ableism and supporting students. 

Accessible materials are an important element of inclusive pedagogy. While accessibility features are necessary for some readers with disabilities, the practice of creating accessible documents benefits everyone. WID's list of document accessibility tips and resources can help you get started with making accessible documents.

Asao B. Inoue's Above the Well: An Antiracist Argument from a Boy of Color is a mix of argument and memoir encouraging antiracist work in classrooms and beyond. It is a great resource for upending your assumptions about “good” language use and engaging with a call to do antiracist work around language.

Shawna Shapiro's book, Cultivating Critical Language Awareness in the Writing Classroom, explores how to design, scaffold, and respond to writing assignments in ways that are in line with our commitments to equity and inclusion. It gives examples of writing assignments across disciplines that draw out the assets of multilingual and international writers, as well as strategies for responding to and evaluating student writing in ways that are both effective and affirming for writers of all language backgrounds. Critical Language Awareness (CLA) is an approach to writing instruction that prioritizes students’ self-reflection and rhetorical agency, and promotes social justice in the academy and beyond.

Inclusive Teaching, written by Vijy Sathy and and Kelly Hogan, offers a host of practical strategies for welcoming all students, fostering a sense of belonging, and enhancing peer and student-teaching relationships. Their framework emphasizes how structuring instruction and communication with students builds equity and inclusion. In addition, Sathy and Hogan address how documenting your experiences can help to reflect on and demonstrate inclusive teaching practices.

WID has compiled a list of low-prep, high-engagement activities from several sources that you can use to increase inclusivity in your classroom.

Some students have experienced trauma that makes typical classroom practices inequitable for them. In Alex Shevrin Venet's book, Equity-Centered Trauma-Informed Education, Venet offers six principles that can help instructors and administrators make changes in classroom approaches and institutional policies, starting a process of transformation that is essential for our time. This text will help you to explore ways that these principles can help to create a more trauma-informed and equitable student experience.

Informed by the field of neuroscience, Universal Design for Learning (UDL) is an approach to teaching that addresses the diverse learning needs of all students. Some individuals may learn best by engaging activities such as listening, writing, drawing, reading, experimenting, building, discussing, designing, observing, or enacting. The goal of a UDL-based curriculum is to provide students with a variety of options, so they can each learn in the way that’s most effective for them. In addition to the UDL resources offered by the Center for Teaching and Learning, the CTL partners with WID to offer workshops on this topic.