Building confidence about inclusive teaching through identity-focused professional development

Abstract

Despite global investments in improving STEM education, retaining students remains challenging, often attributed to learning environments that do not adequately support all students. While many higher-education institutions offer teaching development programs that focus on student-centered practices and reflection on practice, these approaches may insufficiently address inclusive teaching, which emphasizes awareness of student and instructor identities and lived experiences. Moreover, limited empirical research examines how professional learning emphasizing instructor and student backgrounds, coupled with structured identity-based reflective practice, impacts instructors’ confidence in implementing inclusive practices or designing learning environments. We investigated, after being exposed to identity-based inclusive teaching development, (1) how educators described increases in their confidence to engage in inclusive practices, and (2) what challenges educators identified requiring continued learning or support. We analyzed responses from 545 higher-education educators who participated in an asynchronous, self-paced, open-access online course, focusing on identity and lived experiences using structured identity-based self-reflection. Participants identified areas where they had “increased confidence” and were “still gaining confidence” following the course. We used inductive content-analysis methodology to identify five emergent themes: course structure, course climate, identity awareness, conceptual understanding, and future implementation. Educators most frequently described confidence development in course structure, course climate, and identity awareness, while reporting continued uncertainty in these same areas. Participants expressed increased confidence in designing inclusive course elements and fostering supportive classroom environments, yet identified challenges in addressing bias and responding to complex classroom interactions. These findings reveal a gap between awareness of inclusive teaching principles and the ability to enact them in practice, highlighting that confidence develops iteratively rather than linearly. These findings suggest that participants perceived identity-centered reflection as important to developing their confidence for implementing inclusive teaching practices. Their responses suggest that sustained, structured opportunities for reflection, practice, and feedback may be needed to support translating awareness into action. By conceptualizing confidence as a recursive developmental process, this study provides insight into how educators perceive the role of identity-centered professional learning in supporting their development as inclusive instructors. We offer practice-informed recommendations that faculty and faculty developers may implement to help bridge this critical gap.