1. Announcements
Digital Foundations Workshops Administered by DTC and CDSC
Digital Privacy: Tools for Daily Living [March 5, 3-5pm in CDSC]
Best Practices [March 28, 3-4pm in CDSC]
Our Many Lives on Social Media [April 4, 3:30-5pm in Bundy]
Midterm grades due TODAY (2/28) by 5:00 p.m.
If interested in First Year Focus, contact Karen Weathermon ASAP at

2. We acknowledge that we are gathered today on the traditional homelands of the Palus Band of Indians and the ceded lands of the Nez Perce Tribe. We further acknowledge their presence here since time immemorial and recognize their continuing connection to the land, to the water, and to their ancestors.

3. Small Groups and/as Microaggressions
CLASP PDC Session #5
Wednesday, February 28, 2018

4. Toward a Theoretically-Grounded Pedagogy
CLASP faculty development programming seeks to:
cultivate personalized and discipline-specific strategies for supporting the retention and persistence of first-generation, multicultural, low-income, or otherwise underrepresented students
address the divide between theory, research, teacherly intent, and pedagogical practice

6. “Collaborative Learning and the ‘Conversation of Mankind’”
"To think well as individuals we must learn to think well collectively -- that is, we must learn to converse well."
"We establish knowledge or justify belief collaboratively by challenging each other's biases and presuppositions; by negotiating collectively toward new paradigms of perception, thought, feeling, and expression; and by joining larger, more experienced communities of knowledgeable peers through assenting to those communities' interests, values, language, and paradigms of perception and thought."
“We generate knowledge by ‘dealing with’ our beliefs about the physical reality that shoves us around. Specifically, we generate knowledge by justifying those beliefs socially.”
-Kenneth A. Bruffee

7. “Rhetoric and Ideology in the Writing Class”
“[I]n studying rhetoric -- the ways discourse is generated -- we are studying the ways in which knowledge comes into existence.”
“For social-epistemic rhetoric, the real is located in a relationship that involves the dialectical interaction of the observer, the discourse community (social group) in which the observer is functioning, and the material conditions of existence.”
-James Berlin

8. Ready, Set, Go!

9. Small Group Discussion #1
In small groups, please discuss the following questions regarding the ways in which you currently design, administer, and support small group work and collaborative learning in your classroom:
How do you put students in small groups?
What sorts of tasks are students asked to complete in small groups?
Where do small groups complete the work you have assigned them?
How long do small groups have to complete the tasks assigned to them?
How do you assess or monitor individual and/or collective contributions to group work?
How do you articulate the value of group work to students?

11. Microaggressions Theory
“Brief and commonplace daily verbal, behavioral, or environmental indignities, whether intentional or unintentional, that communicate hostile, derogatory, or negative slights and insults, particularly towards those of historically oppressed groups.”
-Derald Wing Sue, et al.

12. A Brief Anecdote

13. As instructors of the course we are responsible for all mechanisms of assigned peer interaction inside and outside of the classroom.

14. Ethnic Minority Students at PWIs
Ethnic minority students at predominantly white institutions encounter:
unwelcoming, hostile campus environments
minimal campuswide responsibility on issues of diversity
lack of representation and cultural support from White counterparts
a sense of personal responsibility (and obligation) to serve their own racial communities, represent diversity, and change stereotypes / racist attitudes across campus
expectations of having to know all about their culture, in order to provide a minority perspective for others
-Lee Jones, Jeanett Castellanos, and Darnell Cole, “Examining the Ethnic Minority Student Experience at Predominantly White Institutions: A Case Study” (2002)

15. Learning, Adjustment, and Persistence
According to numerous studies, these sorts of campus climate issues have a disproportionately negative effect on first-generation, multicultural, low-income, or otherwise underrepresented students in terms of learning, adjustment, and persistence (Cabrera, et al., 1999; Fischer, 2007; Johnson, et al., 2007; and Kuh, et al., 2008).

16. Measuring Faculty Learning and Implementation
“The purpose of the UW Growth in Faculty Teaching Study (UW GIFTS) was to determine how pervasive change was in faculty teaching, what kinds of changes faculty made, and why they made them.”
Key Finding #1: “[C]hange in teaching was pervasive.”
Key Finding #2: “Reasons for change most often emerge from the interaction between the faculty member and the particular students and course she is teaching, rather than sources external to the classroom.”
-Catherine Hoffman Beyer, Edward Taylor, and Gerald M. Gillmore, Inside the Undergraduate Teaching Experience:The University of Washington’s Growth in Faculty Teaching Study (2013)

17. On the Limits of Deferring to Students
“The best learning is one-to-one; novice students’ great fear is the one-to-one with professors. Through this program [CLASP], the professors get to discover the students as more than victims; the students get to discover the professors as less than geniuses.”
-Victor Villanueva

18. Small Group Discussion #2
In small groups, please discuss the following questions regarding the ways in which you might forge more meaningful intersections between collaborative learning and microaggressions theory in your classroom:
How will you put students into small groups?
What sorts of tasks will you ask students to complete in small groups?
Where will you ask small groups to complete the work you have assigned them?
How long will small groups have to complete the tasks assigned to them?
How will you assess or monitor individual and/or collective contributions to group work?
How will you articulate the value of group work to students?

19. Thank you for being my audience!
If you have any further questions, comments, or concerns regarding this presentation, please feel free to contact me at
Thank you for being my audience!