Fostering an Inclusive Learning Environment: How to Mitigate Stereotype Threat and Support Student Belonging
Creating a Supportive Course Climate
In order to help support students’ sense of belonging, and thus improve their learning outcomes, it is important to intentionally create an inclusive course climate. “Course climate” refers to the collective sum of student and instructor behaviors—and related student perceptions—that influence the emotional and social experience of a given class. No matter how content-focused a course is, climate plays a dramatic role in what, how much, and how effectively students are able to learn.
Research suggests that classroom climate ranges across two continua, from marginalizing diverse perspectives to centralizing them, and from doing so implicitly to explicitly. The most supportive learning environments explicitly centralize diverse viewpoints through representative course materials and planned prompts that proactively value a variety of different ideas. Moreover, a supportive course climate is characterized by interactions by both the instructor and students that are nonjudgmental, open, and respectful. An inclusive course climate also involves creating a sense of community in which individuals are honestly able to share their thoughts and ideas, as well as comfortable exploring conflict and controversial topics.
Unfortunately, this research shows that most courses tend to fall in the category of “implicitly marginalizing” climates. In implicitly marginalizing learning environments, unplanned instructor responses to comments or events in the classroom tend to diminish diverse perspectives and devalue those who bring them. Course climate thus has a differential impact on students with marginalized viewpoints and identities, such as first-generation college students, women in math and science classes, students with racial or ethnic backgrounds stereotyped as less academically successful, and students who do not subscribe to the dominant political ideology in the classroom.
This negative impact on students’ sense of belonging then has an adverse impact on students’ academic performance and overall well-being in and beyond the college classroom. Although everyone shares the need to belong, college students’ perceptions of belonging can differ based on their identities and experiences, as well as their academic performance or preparation. In learning environments in which they feel they do not belong, students are less likely to be engaged. When students learn that it is normal to experience academic struggle and that such struggle does not demonstrate their lack of belonging, they have improved academic outcomes compared with students who do not receive such messages.
Mitigating Stereotype Threat in the Classroom
Therefore, in order to support learning for all students, it is important to minimize cues that might trigger stereotype threat in students. “Stereotype threat” is the phenomenon of being at risk of confirming, as self-characteristic, a stereotype about one’s group. The more a certain social identity—be it gender, race, ethnicity, age, etc.—is highlighted for which there exists a stereotype in a domain, the higher the vulnerability to stereotype threat.
When activated in the classroom, students experiencing this kind of social identity threat plays out as an internalized awareness of negative identity-based stereotypes that can detrimentally affect students’ academic performance. Ultimately, classrooms become different places for different people who have to contend with different ambiguities and preoccupations about how they are being perceived in a given learning environment. Consequently, the threatening way this given social identity is perceived and potentially stereotyped interferes with a person’s intellectual performance, creating an unconscious stress response, and thus loading the experience with self-consciousness and anxiety—and fundamentally interfering with their ability to learn effectively.
The best way to change the behaviors and outcomes that can be caused by social identity threat is to change the contingencies to which the internal manifestations of that identity are adapting to; in other words, it is most efficacious to focus on the design, messaging, and implicit cues given off by the environment you help shape as an instructor in ways that convey to students that they belong and that they are being given the tools to succeed in your class.
Strategies for Fostering Belonging
Below are some concrete strategies for mitigating stereotype threat and fostering an inclusive learning environment that promotes a sense of community and belonging for all students:
- Reframe the task
- Emphasize high standards with assurances of capability
- Offer role models
- Provide external attributions for difficulty
- Emphasize an incremental view of ability
Read on below to learn more about these strategies, and consider how you might best apply some of these approaches in your context:
Reframe the task
Acknowledge the steps taken to make a given task or test fair. What have you done to design the task in such a way that it is designed to fairly assess students’ learning? What can you be transparent about when it comes to explaining the purpose and design of this task to students? Are there particular ways in which you can explicitly connect how this task is meant to support or demonstrate what students are meant to learn in your class?
Emphasize high standards with assurances of capability
Part of providing transparency about learning objectives and assessments involves conveying high standards and assuring students of their ability to meet those standards. When providing students with critical feedback, be specific with your commentary and frame your feedback with a message along the lines of “I have high standards, and I know you can meet them,” in order to build their trust and help them succeed. Make a point to find key moments throughout the semester to remind students that you believe in them and that they are all capable of excelling in your class.
Offer role models
As part of your class, expose students to role models who perform well in fields that typically invoke stereotype threat. Provide students with accounts of students, scholars, or luminaries in the field who initially struggled academically or questioned their ability but eventually succeeded. If it feels appropriate, consider including a story about your own academic challenges as a student as well to help illustrate where you started and how far you’ve come.
Provide external attributions for difficulty
Help students attribute anxieties about their academic performance to causes other than identity or stereotype. Share stories that let students know that it is common to struggle academically. Especially when there is a concept that you know students have historically found challenging in your course or discipline, let students know that this is indeed a difficult topic so as to allow for their own potential struggle with this topic to be normalized, and not internalized on the basis of one of their social identities.
Emphasize an incremental view of ability
Promote a “growth mindset” to overcome fixed notions of intelligence by emphasizing that learning is a process and that their abilities can evolve and grow over time. Conversely, describing student performance as a sign of natural ability conveys a “fixed mindset” and may activate stereotype threat. Therefore, it is beneficial to reinforce students’ understanding of intelligence as something that improves with effort, and through ongoing support.
Further Support
To request a one-on-one consultation about how you might mitigate stereotypes and create a more supportive course climate (or to discuss any aspect related to teaching), email Alexia Ferracuti, Director of Inclusive Pedagogy (aferracuti@vassar.edu).
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