Building Rigorously Compassionate Syllabi: Fostering Individual Accountability and Community Care

Our project seeks to revitalize the syllabus document as a tool of inclusion. We are interested in making visible the “hidden curriculum” with which students often struggle. The syllabus language, grading and attendance policies, communication and assignment fulfillment methods, course calendar flexibility, course material formats – these can all contribute to developing personal accountability and investment in community. Our project will assemble multiple cohorts of faculty and assistant instructors to contribute ideas and experiment with tactics in their syllabi and pedagogy, refining as we iterate.

We believe our approach has potential to apply to a wide range of aspects of inclusion, belonging, and accountability. This includes the ways our course construction creates welcoming structures for students of various bodyminds, gender identities and expressions, racial and ethnic background, languages of origin, and schooling and training background. We thus think there is strong potential for us to “share back” to JEDI initiatives across the US academic landscape from which we have been drawing and will continue to draw. Specifically, we are confident that the strategies that we will be refining can contribute to the continuing “Care in the Academy” national Mellon-funded project, the first phase of which Andrew Dell’Antonio, our co-project-lead, was invited to shape, as well as other national initiatives on inclusive access in academic communities.