The SAS Teaching & Learning team wanted to center first-generation student voices as we support faculty in designing accessible, equitable, and inclusive courses.
The Being First Collaborative includes first-generation undergraduate college students and members of the SAS teaching and learning team. Through this project we aimed to encourage deeper awareness and understanding of the diversity represented in college classrooms and to provide guidance on how best to design and deliver courses to support all learners. Over the 2023-24 academic year, we reflected on and discussed learning experiences and the challenges of the classroom to identify the most important teaching tips to support Rutgers instructors in creating first-generation friendly courses.
As a diverse group of first-generation learners, the group worked to capture as wide a range of experiences as possible. The collaborative also held focus groups with instructors to gauge what they wanted to know regarding how to best show up for the first-generation learners in their classes and how to best present this information to instructors.
The result is The Being First: Teaching First Generation Learners website framed by four main themes, each with a handful of relatively easily implementable strategies.
Being First: An Instructor Resource Co-created by First-gen Learners at Rutgers is funded by a grant from the Educational Equity and Excellence Collaborative (E3C) to produce an instructor-facing resource on how best to support first generation learners in the college classroom.
