Creating Inclusive Classrooms with Faculty-Student Pedagogical Partnerships

As political science faculty, we often confront controversial topics in our classrooms. The general decline in respectful political discourse in the United States makes creating inclusive classrooms for all our students crucial, and perhaps, more difficult than it was five or ten years ago. One strategy we have found useful in our classrooms is creating pedagogical partnerships between faculty and students. There is substantial evidence that faculty-student partnerships with a pedagogical focus provide significant benefits to participating faculty and students (Cook-Sather, et. al. 2014). Further research finds that faculty-student partnerships involving students from historically underrepresented groups provide significant benefits for student partners (Cook-Sather 2018). In this paper, we explore the use of faculty-student partnerships focused on making classrooms more inclusive.