The 20 were the inaugural participants in the Kovener Teaching Fellows Program, which is funded by IU alumni Gary Kovener (B.S. ’68, Physics ) and Sharon Kovener (B.S. ’68, Business; B.S. ’68, Education). Carmen Henne-Ochoa, the College of Arts and Sciences’ assistant dean for diversity and inclusion, created the program. She charged the Kovener fellows with no less a task than devising new curricula and teaching techniques to ensure that all students in a classroom feel welcome and receive the attention they need.

Plenty of committees, task forces, and academic studies over the years have sought to do this, of course. But the Kovener program had a twist: Henne-Ochoa deliberately flipped the traditional academic hierarchy.

“I wanted students to serve as mentors to the faculty, not the other way around,” she says. “l wanted students to feel comfortable and courageous enough to tell the faculty, ‘Look. I know that you’re trying to do your best in the classroom. But when you do X that doesn’t benefit me.’”

It turned out that this novel approach worked. “It’s been nothing but transformative for the faculty,” Henne-Ochoa says.

Exciting news came in the spring of 2021, after six of the fellows presented the Kovener program at an Association of American Colleges and Universities conference. Soon other academic institutions began asking Henne-Ochoa how they could set up Kovener-style programs of their own. 

The emphatic success of the first group of fellows will guide their successors, who, says Henne-Ochoa, are already excited about beginning work this fall.

In order to get the program underway, the 20 original fellows were organized into five-person pods, each consisting of one senior faculty member, one junior faculty member, one graduate student, and two undergraduate students. The smaller groups were designed to encourage candid discussions and a range of perspectives. One pod drafted concrete proposals for reform. Another produced a syllabus with an inclusive reading list for the English department’s writing course (ENG W-131) that all IU students are required to take. A third pod prepared materials on race and gender that illuminate the impact of colonialism and slavery on a country’s wealth or poverty that can be incorporated into introductory economics courses.

The first order of business was for the fellows to ponder how their own backgrounds—social, economic, religious, geographic, ethnic, racial—influence their behavior in the classroom. Together, they read Teaching to Transgress by feminist activist and cultural critic bell hooks. In it, hooks traces her own path through academia as a working-class black student from the South and the ways in which school became alienating and repressive.

The personal essays the fellows wrote in response are courageously revealing. Several faculty members admitted that they had not previously understood how precarious classrooms can feel to people who do not share their privileged background. One student fellow wrote his essay in the form of a test that is graded by a professor who gives him a C- for not supplying conventional responses. He wanted to illustrate how an exam can be used to shame, humiliate, and categorize students instead of helping them learn and grow.

The essayists’ variety of tone and approach is unsurprising, because Henne-Ochoa strove for diversity as she chose the fellows. She balanced considerations like race, economic class, rural/urban origins, year in college, and military status, among others. She also made sure that the fellows came from disciplines across the College, including psychology, chemistry, English, and folklore and ethnomusicology.

Arranging for two undergraduate students in each pod was intentional, with Henne-Ochoa figuring that the undergraduates might be intimidated by the faculty and so would appreciate a fellow student as back-up. She was right. Kovener Fellow Caliel Hines, a rising senior from Indianapolis, who’s majoring in neuroscience, admits that his pod was intimidating at first. “One of the vulnerabilities for me was not having degrees attached to my name. The professors were experts in their subjects. It felt like the imposter syndrome. But what debunked that was that the professors allowed my personal experience to be equal to their academic experience. That broke down the wall.”

The vulnerability went both ways. Henne-Ochoa mentions an older, white male professor who agreed to participate. “He was trepidatious,” she says. “At the first meeting of all the Kovener fellows, both students and faculty, he candidly said, ‘I’m really nervous. I just don’t feel I have anything to contribute. I’m scared of making mistakes.’ You could see the undergrads in the room thinking, ‘Oh my gosh, should I be hearing this?’”

Hines, a Hudson and Holland Scholar who plans to attend medical school, says that, through the pod discussions, “I started to get the other side. It wasn’t just my peers and me complaining about our teachers. It was me actually talking to the teacher, on leveled ground, face to face, about how you make the classroom better.”

The discussions flipped the perspective of Jim Drummond, a professor of molecular and cellular biochemistry, who was in the same pod as Hines. “The group really taught me to think about how students are impacted by what I do in ways I didn’t think about.”

As a result of the pod discussions, Drummond made one simple change in a class he was teaching that had a big impact. “The single most important thing you can do as a teacher is to care about your students, not just their performance,” Drummond says. “I thought I was already doing that. But I decided to really tell students. So, on the first day of class, I walked in and said, ‘You know, I really care about each of you. I want you to succeed and if I can help you in any way, ask me. My door is open and I’m ready to help you.’”

Although not as many students took advantage of his invitation as he had hoped, Drummond was pleased to see that on the course evaluations at semester’s end, “every single student of color wrote to me and said, ‘You know, it was really important to me that you said that. I felt like I could talk to you. I felt like I was part of the group.’”

Hines and Drummond were in a pod with Martha Oakley, a chemistry professor who recently became associate vice provost for undergraduate education. Their pod redesigned an introductory chemistry course that was offered in the spring 2021 semester—with remarkable results.

Academic administrators talk about a course’s DFW rate, meaning the percentage of students who earn grades of either Ds or Fs, or who withdraw entirely. Those rates can run to a discouragingly high 30 to 40 percent in introductory science courses. In contrast, the DFW rate went down to 8 percent in the chemistry course that the Kovener pod reconfigured.

Oakley identifies the successful formula for the redesigned class: “The main thing we did is to decide that the way we do grading is stupid,” she explains. “We don’t incentivize perseverance and creativity. In science, if an experiment goes wrong, you try it again. But on science exams, we only give students credit if they get it right the first time.”

So, the pod came up with a list of competencies that students needed to prove they’d mastered through biweekly quizzes. There were no exams, and students were given as many chances as they needed on the quizzes to prove their competency.

A team of undergraduate teaching assistants worked closely with the 50 students in the redesigned course. Hines, a chemistry minor, was one of those teaching assistants, a position that he never would have dreamed of holding when he was in high school.

“I sucked at chemistry,” Hines admits. “It was my worst subject in high school, beyond physics.” He credits his turnaround to strong teachers and his own determination to master chemistry so well that he could teach it to others. “As a STEM major, it was really easy for me to get stuck in grind time—learn, test, repeat. The Kovener program was a breath of fresh air because it allowed me to think more critically about what I’m doing now.”

For her part, Oakley gives Hines credit: “Caliel made me really understand the pain of exams for some students. One of the things I learned is just how quickly students who have been told—either implicitly or explicitly—that they don’t belong in science will give up. I’d say the key takeaway of this new course is that students will keep working hard as long as we incentivize them to do so. I am so proud of my students and the teaching team who supported them.”

While some skeptics might try to dismiss the Kovener program as overly idealistic, the results were revelatory, both for each fellow individually and for the fresh and effective changes in teaching style and curricula that the fellows were able to jointly devise.

“I’ve always talked to my students. But the Kovener program made it clear that you hear so much more from students when the power structure isn’t there,” says Oakley. “Having graduate students in the room who could talk about both sides of the equation as interpreters and moderators was really important, too. And having people from a number of different fields helped you break out of the box of your own field.”

Executive Dean Rick Van Kooten, who attended the final Kovener Fellows session last spring, agrees with Oakley. "Having small pods with both faculty and students is a brilliant approach," he says. "The pods allowed intimate discussions and multiple perspectives. That's important when you're discussing sensitive issues like inclusivity in teaching."

As associate vice provost, Oakley hopes to implement the insights she gained as a Kovener fellow.  “We’ve got to throw out incremental changes,” she argues. “We’ve got to make much bigger changes. We can do that by starting out with small pilot programs to show that they work. Mostly it’s about fostering a culture of trying things and sharing ideas and experiences.”

However much the Kovener Fellows learned and however much other institutions may want to copy the program, there is one key component of the program’s success here that all the fellows agree simply can’t be cloned. “Carmen is amazing,” says Oakley. “Working with her was one of the joys of my career.”  And Jim Drummond seconds the thought: “Carmen models what she wants others to do: to make people feel welcome and part of a group. I have an extraordinary respect for her.”

Finally, the Kovener Fellow experience brought about a personal revolution for Oakley, who says, “I basically decided to go into administration because of it. The power of the Kovener program is that it shows that there are tons of faculty out there who are interested in teaching equitably.”

Story by Julie Gray