co-creating inclusion: a living inclusive teaching toolkit

the problem

redesigning engineering curricula and classroom policy to include students of all identities is work that mostly lands on individual instructors, in their own courses, without the time or research or resources to figure out what good practice even looks like. my co-lead came to this after making course adaptation after course adaptation by trial and error, with essentially no guidance.

toolkits are one answer. plenty already exist. what we hadn’t seen was one built through reflection-based codesign with the students and instructors who’d actually use it — which is the methodological contribution here, and the reason the thing reads differently from a pdf of principles.

the framing we borrowed is the sigchi education initiative’s “living curriculum”: a network for co-creating resources rather than a document that ages out. we took it further by putting the co-creation inside the design process, prompting students and instructors to reflect and contribute as we built.

how we ran it

this sat under our department’s dei committee at a design engineering department in an r1 university, and it ran as a codesign group students joined for research credit. across four academic quarters we worked with eighteen student researchers — first-year undergraduates through phd students, with wildly different amounts of prior research and design experience.

• two tracks at once. the group built the figma prototype and wrote the toolkit’s actual contents in parallel, collectively drafting each component and then implementing it. a low-fidelity prototype existed by the end of quarter one.
• interviews with students and faculty about individual components and specific design choices — students on whether the content was right, instructors on whether they’d actually use these resources in a course, and both on goal-directed questions: is this discoverable, does this interaction do what you expected?
• card sorting and a/b testing to check that our iterations matched what interviewees expected, rather than what we’d convinced ourselves they meant.
• several rounds of iteration, landing on a high-fidelity, ready-to-implement prototype midway through the third quarter.

what’s in it now

the toolkit is live on the hcde site, credited to the dei committee and the students across multiple directed research groups in 2023 and 2024. it has kept growing since the paper, which is the whole idea of a living curriculum — so what’s there now is not quite what we published.

it still forks by role. the student path is about contributing to a welcoming classroom while supporting your own success:

• accommodation guide — disability and religious accommodations, now merged into one place
• slide deck template — screen-reader friendly and high contrast
• course feedback — how to give an instructor feedback worth acting on
• hybrid learning strategies
• beyond land acknowledgements — the purpose, and how to take informed action
• suggesting a new course — a route into the curriculum itself, which wasn’t in the version we wrote up

the instructor path has grown the most, and is now organised as a progression rather than a list:

• foundational knowledge — the goals and principles the toolkit rests on
• best practices & strategies
• making course materials accessible — actionable steps under ada guidelines and past them
• syllabus & policies — templates and course policies
• inclusive grading practices — equitable rubrics and grading
• feedback & tips — testimonials from the hcde community

that grading section is worth pointing at. it arrived after i’d started the measurement literacy work, and it’s the clearest place the two halves of what i do meet — research into how students experience grading, turned into something an instructor can actually pick up on a monday.

and the mechanism that makes it living is still there: a contribute route for anyone in the department to request a change or author a new resource. a toolkit nobody can add to stops being current the day it ships.

we deliberately avoided one-size-fits-all. every resource offers several strategies with examples and an explicit invitation to adapt them — a department this interdisciplinary can’t be served by a single prescription.

a resource about student experience that students didn’t build is just another document about them.

what we got wrong first, and fixed

• we hadn’t agreed what belonged in it. “which resources matter?” turned out to be inseparable from “what is this toolkit for?” until we settled that as a group, we kept pulling in technical resources that belonged somewhere else. naming the purpose forced a full reassessment and a much more intentional selection.
• instructors were hard to recruit — busy, over-committed — while students were straightforward. rather than stall, we prioritised finishing the student pathway, which also kept student voices central. testing the instructor side is still in progress.
• onboarding every quarter was the recurring tax. ten weeks is a short turnaround, and a new cohort has to absorb the prior methods, data, and design work fast. we tried proactive fixes like annotating screens with the reasoning behind each design decision. it helped, but the honest summary is that we traded continuity for a wider range of perspectives.

what worked

students brought classroom experience straight into the design — recalling what had gone well and badly for them, and reflecting on how their own identities shaped power dynamics in a room. that’s what a toolkit written by administrators can’t reach.

the mixed-expertise group also produced a lot of peer-to-peer learning. students taught each other design process, software, and testing methods, which is the collaborative environment user-centered design is supposed to have and often doesn’t.

what i took from it

this was my longest-running project and the one that taught me most about sustaining participatory work across cohorts — how to hand a project between groups of people without losing the commitments that shaped it, and how to keep codesign from collapsing into consultation.

it also fed straight into how i teach. running a multi-year design project with rotating student teams isn’t that different from running hcde 417, and most of what i know about scoping student work to be both real and finishable came from here.

the paper, and the toolkit itself

• Co-Creating Inclusion: Designing a Living Inclusive Teaching Toolkit — zavary & ghosh, asee 2024 (google scholar)
• the toolkit itself, live on the hcde site