Inclusive Teaching and Learning at Reading
Our Vision
We aspire for the University of Reading to be an environment that respects and supports the needs of individual learners from all diverse backgrounds and in doing so enriches the wider collective student experience.
Why Does Inclusion Matter?
The creation of a diverse and inclusive learning community is at the very core of what it means to be a university. We take it to be self-evident that learning requires openness to new ideas and to different ways of thinking about and experiencing the world. Universities are places of learning.
Teaching and Learning is Inclusive When…
Inclusive Learning Environments: Case Studies in Inclusion
- All students feel safe and secure in their learning environment, with a sense of belonging, connectedness and agency.
- Staff understand, and seek to remove, barriers students may encounter in relation to any aspect of their studies.
Read about what motivates our academics to make learning inclusive, and how teaching and learning can be made inclusive.
Resources for Inclusive Teaching and Learning
Inclusive Curriculum Content
- Curriculum Framework: Engaging Everyone Toolkit – comprises What is Inclusive Practice, Inclusive Curriculum Design, Inclusive Curriculum Delivery, Inclusive T&L Resources, and Student Engagement.
- Decolonising the Curriculum resources – compiled by UoR’s Decolonising the Curriculum Working Group. This resource includes case studies and a question-led method for decolonising your teaching, learning and assessment practices. Please note: this is Phase 1 of the Working Group project; further resources will follow in September 2023.
Inclusive Feedback and Assessment
- Curriculum Framework: Assessment Toolkit: Diversifying Assessment – comprises advice on varied assessment, choice of assessment, authentic assessment.
- Decolonising the Curriculum – question-led approaches to decolonising assessment can be found on pp13-14. More advice on decolonising assessment will be included in the Phase 2 resource package, which is due to be published September 2023.
- See the Disability Advisory Service’s Information for Staff page for information regarding individual adjustments to assessment (requires a UoR staff login).
Inclusive Learning Materials
- The Best File Formats – An interactive resource for staff and students. It will teach you how you can use the best file types for you to help you power through your work, and show you clever time-saving ways to work quicker, more efficiently and accessibly.
- Blackboard Ally for staff – check the accessibility of your learning content.
- Blackboard Ally for students – provision of alternative formats for learning materials.
- Digital Accessibility in T&L – Advice on how to create accessible learning resources and experiences, ensuring your Blackboard content is accessible and using Blackboard’s Ally tool. Accessibility personas with practical strategies you can use in your teaching.
- Inclusive Teaching and Learning Resources
- University Digital Accessibility Resources – visit the University Digital Accessibility area to understand how digital accessibility could be improved for all digital content.
Inclusive Cultures
- Curriculum Framework: Student Voice and Partnership Toolkit – comprises Student Engagement, Student-Staff Partnerships, Building an Academic Community, Closing the Feedback Loop.
- Curriculum Framework: Engaging Everyone Toolkit: Student Engagement – comprises Transition to University Learning, Creating a Sense of Belonging.
- Student Academic Transitions Toolkit
Inclusive Teaching Environments
- Aligning Space and Pedagogy Guide – provides guidance on designing learning activities for specific seating configurations. In a face-to-face on campus teaching you may be in a lecture theatre, lab or other designated teaching room.
Student Voice / Partnership
- Projects and partnerships – Essentials (student facing pages)
- Decolonising the Curriculum – advice for decolonising modules and programmes from the student perspective can be found on pp25-6.
- Inclusion Consultants – find out more about the Inclusion Consultants, who are University of Reading students employed to advise colleagues on how to make their modules and services more accessible and inclusive to our diverse student community.
- Student Partners and Student Panel – follow the link to find out more about our teaching and learning student partnership schemes, supported by the Centre for Quality Support and Development (CQSD).
Policy
Disability information and reasonable adjustments guidance
The following pages and documents, created and hosted by the Disability Advisory Service (DAS), require a UoR staff login to access:
- Disability information for representatives and staff, including advice on reasonable adjustments and alternative assessments.
- If you’d like further guidance on understanding when an adjustment is reasonable, see this guide and accompanying decision making flowchart.