This post is a collaboration between Alisa Percy and Katie Duncan.
In the lead up to the next FFYE Forum on Tuesday February 14, we’d like to reflect on how far we’ve come with inclusive teaching and learning practice at UTS, and how we might further the agenda of inclusive practice in diverse ways.
For over a decade, the First and Further Year Experience (FFYE) Program at UTS has promoted effective and inclusive teaching for all transitioning students, but particularly those from low socio-economic backgrounds through the advice provided by the LowSES project team (Devlin et al, 2012) and the six key curriculum principles of Transition Pedagogy (Kift, 2009, 2015):
| Transition | Addressing students’ academic and social needs in their first year of study. |
| Diversity | Embracing the reality of students’ backgrounds, previous experiences and preparedness for academic study. |
| Design | Utilising scaffolded and evidence-based curriculum design. |
| Engagement | Employing pedagogies and material that foster positive interactions and relationships. |
| Assessment | Scaffolding assessment for formative feedback and improvement. |
| Evaluation and monitoring | Using data to engage in continuous improvement. |
You can learn more about the six principles in action at UTS in our First-year Transition series.
While Transition Pedagogy continues to be profoundly helpful for thinking about the design and facilitation of inclusive education, it’s focus on socio-cultural and socio-economic disadvantages means that it has been less attentive to other dimensions of student diversity. This includes students with a disability or ongoing medical or mental health condition, neurodiverse students, gender diversity, and so on.
In the FFYE Forums in 2023 we plan to deepen and extend our understanding of inclusive education. We recognise that inclusion is not about providing compensatory educational affordances to those who might be deemed marginal. Rather, it is about embracing diversity and acknowledging that it is intersectional, complex and inherent in all students, as well as staff. To do this work, we are taking a deeper dive into the nine UTS Inclusive Education Principles, adopted from Deakin University with permission.
UTS Inclusive Education Principles
- Recognise and embrace student diversity: Inclusivity means understanding the nature of diversity of students with any cohort without viewing it as problematic, but rather as a rich educational resource in itself
- Provide accessible and useable learning environments: All teaching materials, learning activities and spaces should be accessible and useable by all students so that no student is disadvantaged
- Design flexible learning experiences: An inclusive education rests on curriculum designed to enable students to gain knowledge and develop proficiency in multiple and flexible ways
- Represent diversity in the curriculum: Learning resources and activities should reflect diversity of the wider community
- Scaffold underpinning knowledge and skills: Learning activities and resources should scaffold student’s development of necessary underpinning competencies
- Build a community of learners: All students should be welcomed and supported as part of a respectful, vibrant learning community
- Assess equitably: Inclusive assessment means creating assessment activities that allow all students to show they can meet the necessary standards
- Feedback effectively: Effective feedback offers constructive, personalised, specific, accurate, criterion-referenced commentary on student’s work.
- Reflect on and evaluate practice: Reflective practice helps teachers recognise where potential to exclude or disadvantage some students exist.
Register for the next FFYE Forum
In our upcoming FFYE Forum on February 14, we will introduce these nine principles and also consider how both Transition Pedagogy and the UTS Inclusive Education Principles provide supplementary ways of designing and facilitating inclusive education, student wellbeing and belonging at UTS.
| FFYE Transition Principles | UTS Inclusive Education Principles |
| Transition | Scaffold underpinning knowledge and skills. |
| Diversity | Recognise and embrace student diversity. Represent diversity in the curriculum. |
| Design | Provide accessible and usable learning resources and environments. Design flexible learning experiences. |
| Engagement | Build a community of learners. |
| Assessment | Assess equitably. Feedback effectively. |
| Evaluation and monitoring | Reflect on and evaluate practice. |
If you would like to join us for the FFYE Forum, Towards Inclusive Education at UTS – Diving Deeper into Transition Practices on February 14, 2.00 – 4.00pm, please register here. The Forum will be in hybrid format to support maximum flexibility and access for all participants.
Feature image by SGR.