Mission and Statements
“Northwestern is committed to excellent teaching, innovative research and the personal and intellectual growth of its students in a diverse academic community.” - Northwestern University Mission
Fostering and maintaining inclusive learning environments are at the core of Northwestern University’s mission and are essential to enabling full participation, engagement, and learning for all students. Creating an inclusive learning environment necessitates an awareness and knowledge of teaching practices and pedagogies that consider our own and our students’ diverse backgrounds, identities, and lived experiences. It requires intentionality on the part of instructors to examine their teaching and adopt changes to their curriculum, course design, and modality of instruction to create equitable learning experiences.
As we work to cultivate classroom and learning environments of inclusiveness, I encourage all instructors to engage with Northwestern Principles of Inclusive Teaching. Doing so will involve ongoing learning and adaptation as instructors apply the ideas to their classrooms, their disciplines, and their ongoing interactions with students. This resource does not stand alone in our efforts to promote inclusion within our community and should be used in concert with educational development workshops and other tools available to instructors, departments, units, and schools. Together, they support our efforts to elevate the academic experience for Northwestern students in significant ways.
I thank the members of the Office of the Associate Provost for Faculty, the Searle Center for Advancing Learning and Teaching, the Office of Institutional Diversity and Inclusion, and the Office of Equity for leading this initiative. I also would like to extend thanks to two former colleagues whose contributions to Northwestern Principles of Inclusive Teaching were invaluable: Sekile Nzinga, former interim chief diversity officer and director of the Women’s Center, and Omari Keeles, former assistant director for diversity and inclusion at the Searle Center for Advancing Learning and Teaching. This collaboration on Northwestern’s initiative to advance inclusive teaching has produced what is certain to be a truly impactful resource.
Kathleen Hagerty
Provost
First Chicago Professor in Finance
Pedagogy—teaching and learning—is higher education’s superpower. It is what we do best. Pedagogy is one of the most effective strategies to affecting societal change as we center more ideas and ideologies, more research and evidence, and more experiences and histories as part of our intellectual growth. Pedagogy is also iterative. It is informed by our research, and it is informed by our students. Northwestern Principles of Inclusive Teaching provides principles to help faculty at all levels of experience think anew about their approach to teaching. It distills principles based on pedagogical research and epistemological grounding in inclusivity. It challenges us to rethink our own suppositions as part of a discipline and rigor of thought and does so reminding us how much we care about inquiry, our research, and our students. It also reminds us that we are always learners ourselves.
In developing these materials, we have staked a claim that inclusive pedagogies—strategies that invite more people into a learning experience in an accessible and respectful way—are one of this University’s best practices. The principles laid out in here show us how to foster learning and engagement in and out of the classroom while creating a space in which people of all backgrounds can bring to, and take away, a teaching and learning experience that is as inclusive as it is effective.
This resource is about each of us at Northwestern University. Its guidance certainly applies to classroom instruction but could, too, be extrapolated to the ways in which we engage one another in learning and dialogue across a number of other experiences. I invite you and your colleagues to consider how these principles may be effectively applied to reframe our educational mission in a world that continues to witness radical change.
I am so proud that Northwestern continues to affirm its principles of diversity and inclusion while helping each of us to do the same.
Robin R. Means Coleman
Vice President and Associate Provost for Diversity and Inclusion
Chief Diversity Officer
Ida B. Wells and Ferdinand Barnett Professor in Communication Studies