Equitable Pedagogy with Dr. Michel Estefan

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Learn practical equitable pedagogy practices to improve student success in higher education.

In this episode, I interview Dr. Michel Estefan, Assistant Teaching Professor, Sociology Department at the University of California, San Diego.

The focus of the episode is the article, From Inclusive to Equitable Pedagogy: How to Design Course Assignments and Learning Activities That Address Structural Inequalities

(Scroll down to access the transcript.)

We cover the following key topics:

2:04:00: The influence of parenting and upbringing on Dr. Estefan's pedagogy

15:16:70: What led many IHEs to reconsider how they serve students

17:58:50:  Three main types of communicative strategies

Cultural
Psychological
Cultural Matching

22:51:50: Communicative strategy limitations and three additional essential strategies to address structural barriers to improve equitable outcomes 

Structural barriers:
Academic Inequities
Resource Disadvantages
Cultural Discrimination

35:29:50: How to approach faculty who are averse to changing their craft

43:12:50: Equitable design: examples of pedagogical practices 

Deliberative Interdependence
Transformative Translation
Proactive Engagement
 

Select Dr. Michel Estefan episode quotes:

"There's a typology of the three main types of communicative strategies that we've been able to identify. There are cultural communicative strategies, psychological communicative strategies, and communicative strategies that are focused on we referred to as cultural matching. The key to understand these different types of strategies is that each one identifies a different factor as the source of the equity gap, and they conclude with different sets of recommendations and interventions for how to close that equity gap."

"It's also important to acknowledge communicative strategy limitations because they cannot address the type of structural barriers that first generation and working class students often face in their educational pursuits. For this reason, the second part of this paper identifies what we believe to be are three central structural barriers that this population of students commonly face. We call the first academic inequities, the second, resource disadvantages, and the third, cultural discrimination."

"I don't begin courses with the learning objectives, with what I'm hoping that we can achieve by the end of the academic term or by reviewing the list of authors or readings that we're going to cover. I actually begin courses with a set of values that motivate my pedagogy, literally the ethical values that motivate my pedagogy. They are things like kindness. They are things like community. I lay out these values to students, and then I explain the process whereby I try to translate them into concrete pedagogical practices."

"One of the big findings in some of the scholarship on teaching learning is this thing called the "curse of expertise." The curse of expertise is this idea that the more of a specialist you become in a given content area, you actually become worse at teaching it because you forget what it was like to learn it for the first time. One of the things that you want to nurture in yourself is constant, critical self-reflection. You constantly have to put yourself or try to put yourself in the position of that student learning that material for the first time. It's also key to have really caring and constant channels of communication with your students. You need to hear from them. You need to create a space of comfort with your students so that your students can feel safe in being vulnerable and coming up to you and saying, "I don't get this." 
 

About Dr. Michel Estefan
Dr. Michel Estefan is an Assistant Teaching Professor in the Sociology Department at the University of California, San Diego. His teaching and research focus on making classrooms more equitable for historically minoritized students. His published work has appeared in Teaching Sociology, Inside Higher Ed, and Teaching/Learning Matters and has been covered various times in The Chronicle of Higher Education. In the course of his career, he has trained close to 2,000 graduate students, faculty, lecturers and postdocs across the University of California and California State University systems on how to build more equitable classrooms, design integrated courses, and promote student participation. His teaching has been recognized with awards from the University of California, San Diego, the University of California, Berkeley, SAGE publishing and the Teaching and Learning Section of the American Sociological Association.

About Dr. Al Solano
Al is Founder & Coach at the Continuous Learning Institute. A big believer in kindness, he helps institutions of higher education to plan and implement homegrown practices to improve student success and equity by coaching them through a process based on what he calls the "Three Cs": Clarity, Coherence, Consensus. In addition, his bite-sized, practitioner-based articles on student success strategies, institutional planning & implementation, and educational leadership are implemented at institutions across the country. He has worked directly with over 50 colleges and universities and has trained well over 5,000 educators. He has coached colleges for over a decade, worked at two community colleges, and began his education career in K12. He earned a doctorate in education from UCLA, and is a proud community college student who transferred to Cornell University.

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