Racially Inclusive Teaching Toolkit

A guide to racially inclusive teaching is an Oxford Teaching Idea developed by the Centre for Teaching and Learning. It provides prompt questions to consider how students could be encouraged to engage with race and racial diversity in their learning and ways to support a racially diverse classroom.

Questions one to five in the guide explore how students could be encouraged to engage with racial content and diversity in their learning. Questions six to 10 explore ways to support a racially diverse classroom and encourage all students to engage in discussions about race. The prompts and ideas provided in this guide come from conversations with students and staff at Oxford as well as broader scholarship on racially inclusive teaching.

You may find this a useful starting point for considering racially inclusive teaching practices. In reflecting on this guidance, you may find it helpful to consider how the suggested approaches may need to be adapted to suit different teaching and learning contexts and settings (eg in tutorials or lectures, online or in-person). 

To complement the guide to racially inclusive teaching above, there are two self-evaluation tools, one for teaching staff and one for students. These self-evaluation tools provide prompts from the practices identified in the guide.  

The tool for teaching staff is designed to be used by individuals or groups of staff to review current practices, support conversations about racially inclusive teaching and identify and share good practices with peers. It also provides some suggestions for working in partnership with students to evaluate racially inclusive teaching by using the student evaluation tool.

The student tool is designed for students to review their experiences of racially inclusive teaching and learning.

Case studies on racially inclusive teaching practices, shared by teaching staff at Oxford, are available to explore.

We invite colleagues to contribute their own examples of current racially inclusive teaching practices.

If you would like to submit a case study, please complete this form.

Explore Race and the curriculum at Oxford: a student-produced resource.

This Canvas resource has been developed by current students and recent graduates as part of the Centre for Teaching and Learning student experience internship in 2021.

It captures the experiences of students at Oxford, as well current teaching practices at Oxford.

This project was supported by the University’s Diversity Fund.

If you would like to find out more about racially inclusive teaching, there is an ORLO (Oxford Reading List Online) that provides links to further resources, guidance and literature on racially inclusive teaching.

If there is a resource that you would like to suggest adding to this reading list, please use this form.

This toolkit has been supported with funding from the University’s Diversity Fund, and it responds to the recommendations of the University’s Race Equality Task Force.

Many members of the University – both students and staff – have contributed to its development. The Centre for Teaching and Learning would in particular like to thank:

• the Centre for Teaching and Learning student experience interns who worked to develop the Canvas resource in summer 2021
• the contributions and feedback received from the Project Advisory Group, comprising academic and learning support staff, and Senior University Officers
• members of the Race Equality Task Force
• the University's Diversity Fund, which funded the Canvas resource
• the Oxford SU who helped develop the funding proposal for this project
• the support provided by the MPLS Diversifying STEM Curriculum Project
• the many academic staff who contributed case studies
• the many students who shared their experiences of learning at Oxford through interviews and surveys (including Breaking Barriers in Biology)
• the Bodleian Libraries for providing guidance on library support and collating reading lists.