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/

More 'Guidance and help' activities:

Equity Unbound Activity

Office Hour Scheduling via Google Calendar

Particularly helpful to facilitate the scheduling of office hours with students for teachers who need to meet students individually in short timeslots.

Fikry Boutros