Carnegie Mellon University

Eberly Center

Teaching Excellence & Educational Innovation

Provost’s Inclusive Teaching Fellows

Sponsored by the Provost and administered by the Eberly Center, this program aims to enhance diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in CMU courses. Fellows participate in monthly cohort meetings and collaborate regularly with Eberly Center consultants to (re)design a CMU course to:

  • diversify the representation of voices in their disciplines,
  • increase the prevalence of inclusive teaching at CMU, 
  • enhance students’ sense of community and belonging, 
  • generate and disseminate transferable teaching strategies, and
  • promote diversity, equity, and inclusion in CMU curricula.

Each project also includes collecting data to study its impact and guide future refinements. Fellows receive a $5,000 fellowship and are selected through a competitive application process. CMU faculty may apply for a Provost’s Inclusive Teaching Fellowship here.

Apply to be a Provost’s Inclusive Teaching Fellow

The request for proposals for the 2024-2025 Academic Year is available here. The deadline for applications is March 12, 2024. 

If you are thinking of applying but not sure where to start, for inspiration, please consider our websites on creating an inclusive classroom climate and how to center DEI in teaching. We also encourage you to schedule a meeting with an Eberly Center colleague to discuss your course and ideas for enhancing diversity, equity, and inclusion in course design and delivery. 

For questions about the fellowship or to request a meeting, email us at eberly-assist@andrew.cmu.edu.

2023-2024 Provost’s Inclusive Teaching Fellows

We are pleased to announce the 2023-2024 Provost’s Inclusive Teaching Fellows. The Fellows represent all seven CMU Schools and Colleges, the Pittsburgh and Doha campuses, and a variety of undergraduate and graduate course formats. (See also previous cohorts of Provost’s Inclusive Teaching Fellows.

College of Fine Arts

Imin Yeh headshotImin Yeh
Associate Professor and Director of Foundational Studies 
School of Art 
Course: 60-104 | Foundations: First Year Seminar

 


DEI Goal: 
Prioritize student experiences, values, and perspectives to support their growth as individuals and as a community.

This course aims to build community with the first-year cohort and familiarize students with the facilities and resources within the School of Art. Students explore various methods of artistic research and forms of making that can support today’s creative citizens. This project deliberately infuses DEI throughout each aspect of the course. A second focus of the project is to develop and execute a new course objective: “Practice various forms of critique, respectful dialogue, and ways of reading works of art while recognizing and developing awareness of our own biases.” Students are assigned a collaborative timeline drawing to complete together in response to weekly prompts, providing the opportunity to have rich discussions about a variety of topics, including issues of DEI. Data from the timeline discussions serves as a foundation for subsequent lectures and helps build toward a critique exercise later in the semester. Student timeline entries serve as qualitative, direct data points to assess students’ development on what art, artists, and types of media they recognize and value, which informs other aspects of the School of Art curriculum. Instead of designing and presenting this course from the top-down, with a focus on content, this project centers the students’ experiences, values, and perspectives.


Imin Yeh Kate PukinskisKate Pukinskis
Assistant Professor, Composition and Theory
School of Music 
Course: 57-959 | Music and Triads: Before/Beyond Roman Numerals in Western Music



DEI Goal:
Reach more students by incorporating a wider range of materials in assignments.

This course is a graduate music analysis course in which students explore the familiar technical tools and vocabularies associated with the triad in music theory, but in freshly reconstituted contexts and spaces. The predominant focus of this PITF project is to dig deeply into student assessment; I am diversifying and expanding assignment design to cover a wider variety of material and methods, as well as to better reflect my students’ skills and goals. My hope is that the translation of the work inside the class to their work outside of the class becomes smoother and more transparent to them. Redesigned assignments include more transparency about steps to success as well as learning outcomes and objectives. Additionally, assignments build on each another and are being designed in tandem so that the thread or throughline of the assessment is more soundly anchored into the work. Redesigning my assessments to enact a wider reach--in the repertoire, the methodology, and with the student in mind--positions me to meet more students where they are at the start of the semester and to balance the general learning outcomes with the individual student journey.


Lisa Velten-Smith headshotLisa Velten-Smith
Associate Professor of Voice and Acting
School of Drama 
Course: 54493-A | The Business of Acting

 

 
DEI Goal: Center the student by getting them to reflect and choose how to participate and what their professional and personal goals are.

This is a semester-long course whereby seniors in the Acting/Music Theater curriculum learn about the business side of their industry and what actions they can take to be a productive participant in their careers. Special attention is paid to honoring their values and maintaining a strong sense of self in a challenging entrepreneurial career. Flipping the classroom provided the opportunity for the students to explore content on their own time and complete various assignments before coming into class. As a result, I was able to provide a diverse body of content not only in terms of the type of deliverable (podcast, video, text) but also work to ensure diverse representation in the authorship of the deliverables. With students empowered with the new information, questions had time to be formulated and we were able to have more robust conversations ensuring everyone’s point of view was heard. The new design has allowed me to center the student from the very beginning, through assignments designed to challenge them to be clear about what career and life they envision for themselves. The assignments provide students choice of how the students consume information (text, video, podcasts), plus various methods of participation whether it be through jamboard, online workbooks, in person discussions, exit tickets, work with a partner or online video submissions. To assess the impact of these changes, I am using a survey to ask about students' sense of growth and their sense of belonging.


Miso Wei headshotMiso Wei
Assistant Teaching Professor
School of Drama 
Course: 54271 | Technical Management

 


DEI Goal:
Structure students’ metacognition so they can more effectively grow as learners and communicators.

This is a foundational management course for design, management, and technical students to learn about soft skills and hard skills of management. My PITF project aims to improve the students' learning experiences by diversifying the course content and also grounding my teaching methods in student experiences. I utilize learning journals for the students to track their learning progress, their developing communication strategies, and learning expectations. By increasing their metacognition, I hope to support more types of students. By increasing my awareness of where the students are and how to meet them where they are, I can be more inclusive to the diverse students in my class. To assess my project, I have deployed both an assessment of students’ listening and communication skills and a survey about students’ sense of belonging.


Carnegie Mellon University - Africa

George Okeyo headshotGeorge Okeyo
Assistant Teaching Professor
College of Engineering
Course: 04-638 A | Programming for Data Analytics

 


DEI Goal: 
Support students with different backgrounds and goals with scaffolded, formative assessments and real-world problems.

This is a foundational course that is taken by students who aspire to take more advanced courses in either software development or data analytics. It explores fundamentals of object-oriented programming and uses the knowledge and skills gained to build various types of advanced analytics solutions. My PITF project is designed to support the diverse students that enroll for the course through inclusive teaching strategies. My goal is to enhance student engagement, foster and motivate student learning, and provide a supportive environment for all students to attain the learning objectives. We are scaffolding students by providing redesigned course material as well as practice exercises that enable us to provide formative feedback and support learning. We are also using different types of assessments based on solving real-world problems to enhance student engagement. We have conducted an initial survey, an early course feedback survey, and plan to conduct an end of semester survey to gauge how effective our strategies are. By enabling students to solve graded practice exercises and receive formative feedback, we have made learning gradual, stepwise, and connected for all practical assignments in order to maintain student motivation.


Carnegie Mellon University - Qatar

Nesrine Affara headshotNesrine Affara
Assistant Teaching Professor
Biological Sciences Qatar
03-230 Introduction to Mammalian Physiology

 


DEI Goal:
Coming soon

Description: Coming soon


Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences

Derrick Gray headshotDerrick Gray
Senior Lecturer
Philosophy
80-130 Introduction to Ethics

 

 
DEI Goal: Make philosophical ethics more meaningful and useful in student lives by broadening the moral theories considered and encouraging individual reflection.

In this course, students critically engage in philosophical ethics and important contemporary moral debates. They learn how to read, think, and write so as to effectively formulate, explain, and support their own ethical views. The goal of the PITF project is to encourage a greater range of students to find philosophical ethics meaningful and useful in their own lives. This includes encouraging each student to actively think about their own ethical development, and about their own role (acting as an individual or in concert with others) in whether/how their society promotes social justice. As part of the project, updated course materials and discussions present moral theory beyond just the traditional Eurocentric canon, and press students to consider the larger political context of what might otherwise seem like personal ethical decision-making. Reflection exercises encourage students to find their own more personal connections with the theory and issues we discuss. To assess this project, I'm using pre- and post-surveys to ask students' about their confidence in their analytic skills and about their ability to meaningfully reflect on the role of ethical thinking in their lives. By including a wider range of voices in course materials, and by using reflection exercises, I hope to help more students discover the relevance of ethical thinking in their own lives.


Heinz College of Information Systems and Public Policy

Gabriela Gongora-Svartzman headshotGabriela Gongora-Svartzman
Assistant Teaching Professor
Course: 90-803 | Machine Learning Foundations with Python

 



DEI Goal: 
Create a space where students feel they belong, develop empathy and sensitivity toward data, learn from each other's perspectives, and incorporate their learnings into their careers.

This course is designed to give students a solid grounding in algorithms, modeling, and tools employed in machine learning. The emphasis is on understanding the application of a wide range of modern machine learning techniques to specific data analysis scenarios rather than on mastering the theoretical underpinnings of the techniques. My PITF project is designed to promote an inclusive learning environment where students can progress as individuals and in groups to analyze and describe the societal impacts of machine learning methods implemented in real-world datasets while considering ethics, bias, and fairness. We are supporting students by assigning pre-work challenges to prepare students for in-class discussions, combining small and whole group discussions. Throughout several classes, we are focusing on cases that are solved with machine learning and touch on ethics, bias, and fairness. The focus of the class will be on leveraging machine learning skills for their careers (in public policy and healthcare analytics), where each assignment will have a combination of technical and reflections prompts that allow students to advance their coding skills as well as their empathy and awareness of ethics and sensitivity towards data. We will be assessing this PITF project by: (1) using pre and post surveys to measure student changes, (2) using embedded assignments with revised rubrics, (3) documenting group class discussion to measure group progress, (4) using reflection prompts in pre-work challenges, and 5) Early Course Feedback focus groups halfway through the semester.


Xiaoying Tu headshotXiaoying Tu
Assistant Teaching Professor 
Public Policy & Management
Course: 90728 | Introduction to Database Management

 


DEI Goal: 
Adopt diverse teaching strategies and resources tailored to different technical and cultural backgrounds, thereby creating a more welcoming and effective learning environment for all students.

This course provides a foundational understanding of database systems, focusing on the architecture, principles, and practical application of relational databases, including the interpretation of Entity-Relationship Diagrams, translation of business rules into database design, and formulation of SQL queries for effective data management and retrieval. The aim of my PITF project is a major revamp of the course to foster a more inclusive learning environment where students of diverse technical and academic backgrounds can effectively engage with and achieve the course's database-related learning objectives. To achieve a more inclusive learning environment, I will implement transparent rubrics and growth mindset feedback. I will also introduce scaffolded SQL instruction coupled with strategies like Think-Pair-Shares and anonymous in-class polls, to encourage class participation. I will also support students from varying backgrounds by providing preparatory work for coding novices, offering alternative challenges for those struggling with exams, and giving additional resources and advanced challenges for students seeking deeper engagement. I plan to assess the effectiveness of my PITF project by measuring students' self-efficacy and sense of belonging through pre- and post-course surveys, focusing on their comfort and success in handling the technical aspects of the course.


Mellon College of Science

Elisa Bellah headshotElisa Bellah
Postdoctoral Teaching Associate
Mathematics
21-241: Matrices and Linear Transformations

 

 
DEI Goal: Use an inquiry-based approach to mathematics education to promote deeper understanding and reach a broader variety of students.

The focus of my PITF project is an introductory course in linear algebra intended for scientists, engineers, mathematicians and computer scientists. In this PITF project, I will develop inquiry-based materials that meet the standards and class sizes of an introductory Carnegie Mellon mathematics course. Activities will be designed to promote depth of understanding over imitation of procedure, and will be monitored during class time through the use of technology such as i-clickers. Several inclusive design components will also be implemented, such as early semester sense of belonging interventions and exam wrappers. Student activity will be measured qualitatively against the newly designed "Authentic Mathematical Proof Activity" framework, and several surveys will be used to quantitatively analyze student outcomes, such as sense of belonging and conceptual understanding. It is well-documented that active learning leads to higher levels of student success, particularly among underrepresented groups in STEM. However, adoption of active learning methods is rare in the Carnegie Mellon mathematics department. One survey suggests some reasons for this include class size, time investment for implementation, experience with active learning, and effect on student evaluations. I hope to develop a rigorous and authentic implementation of this material that overcomes some of these obstacles and evidences feasibility of active learning models.


School of Computer Science

Joshua Sunshine headshotJoshua Sunshine
Assistant Professor of Computer Science
Software and Societal Systems Department
REUSE Summer Research Program for undergraduate students

 


DEI Goal: 
Help students reframe setbacks, develop a grown mindset, and increase a sense of belonging.

The goal of this course is for students to understand and apply skills necessary to conduct computer science research. The goal of my PITF project is to ensure that the students we recruit to our undergraduate research program feel like they belong in the CS research community. Improving belonging can improve attitudes about doing research, student perception of their research and technical skills, and student learning. We are redesigning every unit of the existing course to discuss early failures as a necessary part of research, drawing from diverse examples from our guest speakers and encouraging students to reflect early and frequently about their challenges and ways to solve them. We are developing pre- and post-surveys of course participants to assess their sense-of-belonging and resilience to failure.


Tepper School of Business

Meredith Meyer Grelli headshotMeredith Meyer Grelli
Assistant Professor
Entrepreneurship
Course: 45819 | Family Business

 


DEI Goal: 
Engaging students in their own diverse experiences by instituting peer to peer consulting, which encourages students to step out of their own experience and into a classmates’ in a supportive way.

This course explores family businesses through a series of frameworks which consider ownership, capitalization and succession structures and pathways.  My PITF project is designed to engage the diverse experiences of our students who come from family firms. We have implemented a peer to peer advising model in class, which we have piloted with family businesses in the Western PA community. Students have the opportunity to apply frameworks to their own family business and then receive feedback from their family business peers. We are surveying students about the effectiveness of the peer learning groups in an Early Course Feedback session through Eberly. In addition, my hope is that a portion of students in the course will opt into our community peer learning groups once the course has ended.