Summer 22 Inclusive Syllabus Portfolio | Seunghee Wie
NUFD 9: Food Safety and Sanitation
Course Description
NUFD 9 is a lower division lecture course and open to any students, while it is a required course for students who are in B.S. Nutrition and Food, Minor in Nutrition and Food, B.S. FACE Education, and an elective course for B.S. in Hospitality and Tourism Management. This class is offered as an asynchronous online course with 40 enrolled.
Before:
Before the Inclusive Syllabus FLC, I thought that a course syllabus is a contract between students and faculty, and thus my choices of words and tone of language were formal and policy-oriented. After participating in the training, I learned that my syllabus included harsh and unwelcoming messages, which had room to be improved and inclusive. Furthermore, I did not realize many of my class policy sentence starts with "No" (i.g. "No make-up," "No late submission") with BOLD and colored in red.
Motivation for Redesign of your Syllabi
Inconsistent and mixed practices between welcoming & unwelcoming and validating & invalidating were often identified even though my syllabus generally reflected equity-minded practices of demystifying and creating a partnership.
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After:
I changed and added more welcoming language with inclusive tone. The sentences beginning with the word "No" were changed to neutral and friendly reminders with limited CAPS.
Include Evidence of Accessibility or Language Choice Changes
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Example 2
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Techniques Incorporated Into Redesign
To make my syllabus inclusive, I added the Land Acknowledgement and revised my tone to be welcoming, encouraging, and approachable. My class practices and policy were re-examined and revised to support my students to be successful in achieving their goals, rather than penalizing their failure and errors. Reviewing the CUE Syllabus Review Guide and references was very helpful in learning the importance of inclusiveness and diversity. Completing these module pages already made me realize the lack of inclusiveness in my syllabus.
Assessment of Syllabus Redesign
Redesigning my syllabus reflects our department' DEI statement that addresses creating, achieving, and maintaining a diverse, equitable, caring, and inclusive environment for all students, faculty, staff, and community members, which is aligned with Sacramento State University's antiracism, diversity, equity, and inclusion imperative. I will continue to work on fully embracing and valuing each individual's strengths and diverse lived experience and practicing our institutional principles.
Reflection: Challenges and Lessons Learned
My original syllabus about the class policies, rules, and relationship building included negative words (Do not, Won’t, etc.) along with some bold, cap, underlined, or colored in red and often do not include either “I” or "You" in the sentence. My accessible course syllabus was developed adopting the Template syllabus from the Accessbiel Technolgy Initiative, CSUS. I shared with a counselor my findings and feedback that the Syllabus Template is accessible, but not inclusive.
One of the ideas I like to implement was changing the name of "Office Hours" to "Student Hours." I will need to check with the department and faculty peers about changing “office hours” to “student hours” because this name change won’t be matched with our department website, signages in the department, and other faculty advisors, and thus it may cause more confusion.
Faculty Biography
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I am Seunghee (Skyler) Wie, a Professor in Nutrition and Food Program, Department of Family and Consumer Sciences. I have experience with delivering courses in multiple digital pedagogies: hybrid, fully synchronous online, and fully asynchronous online. This various pedagogical combination has constantly required me to adopt various tools and technologies over the years. |