Guidance and help
Self-assessment Tool (of social justice in your teaching) from DISCs (Disciplines Inquiring into Societal Challenges)
Gauge your level of competence and comfort in the themes of gender-consciousness, interculturalism, and community, both in their individual pedagogical practices and wider academic engagements.
With Maha Bali
Educator prep: None
Student prep: None
Asynchronous
No tech needed
Duration: 5-30 mins
Activity purpose
The DISCs Self-Assessment Tool is intended to help users gauge their own levels of competence and comfort in the themes of gender-consciousness, interculturalism, and community, both in their individual pedagogical practices and wider academic engagements. Based on your assessment, you will be provided with useful readings and resources to help you further explore these issues.
The tool was created by Karl Kitching and Gyunghee Park.
Useful for
This tool is useful for teachers themselves to self-assess (alone or in community or collaboratively with their students) the different areas where they may be more and less conscious of social justice in their teaching practices (e.g. choice of readings, inclusion of diverse learners, awareness of historical roots of gender and race issues in higher education).
Preparation
None.
Instructions
Go through the self-assessment tool and look at the recommendations towards the end. Some of the recommendations are full books, and you may not have time to read them all, but you can have an idea of areas where you might want to explore more. Where you seem to be particularly competent in an area, the tool does not recommend further reading for you, but instead recommends that you share your work with others.
Duration
Around 10-15 minutes to take the self-assessment and another 10-15 minutes to read the results.
Adaptations and examples
Ask a group of colleagues to take the self-assessment tool and have a discussion afterwards, e.g. making commitments of changes you will make to your teaching next semester.
Ask your students to take the self-assessment tool, responding to the teaching questions with what they think you are doing in the class, and discuss areas where they feel you can do better.
The exact output of the tool is not as important as the questions it provokes for you, the blind spots it helps you identify and the language it gives you to discuss these with students
Technical requirements
Web browser.
Useful resources
The entire DISCs website: https://discs.ie/
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