Unlocking Student Potential with Inclusive Teaching Strategies

Abstract

This presentation discusses practical strategies that have been used to foster inclusion and support student success and wellbeing, empowering them to reach their full potential!

It introduces UNSW’s Healthy Universities Initiative (HUI, established in 2018) which focuses on curricular approaches to student academic success and wellbeing. HUI is grounded in the Dual Continua Model of Psychological Health (Keyes, 2002), which distinguishes between psychiatric disorders and psychological wellbeing, and emphasizes the importance of creating a supportive learning environment for all students. It adopts the evidence-based Self-Determination Theory (SDT; Ryan & Deci, 2000) to facilitate identification of strategies that support the psychological needs of competence, autonomy, and relatedness/belonging, and thus wellbeing.

Using SDT as a guiding framework, the presentation highlights how educators can develop or refine simple, effective approaches to meet students' core psychological needs of belonging, competence, and autonomy, leading to increased student success and thus wellbeing. 

The presentation will focus on a compulsory Statistics course for Arts and Business students, which is particularly challenging to teach as many students lack confidence or interest in Mathematics and Statistics and are well outside their comfort zones. By applying wellbeing-supportive strategies, including an inclusive and supportive classroom environment, students in this course can experience success, in some cases for the first time in their study of Mathematics and Statistics. The collaborative and supportive classroom environment established is also beneficial for tutors who are motivated to actively engage with students, and to work together to deepen their understanding of content and explore effective ways to explain key concepts to students.