Co-authored by Lewis Whales and Najmeh Hassanli, with special thanks to Dr Greg Joachim and the Business School Social Justice and Inclusion Committee for their contributions and support for this work.
Becoming a more inclusive educator doesn’t require an overhaul of your teaching practice, it could begin with something as simple as how you call the roll. The UTS Business School Social Justice and Inclusion Committee Inclusive Teaching Practices video series has a range of practical tips to embed in your teaching practice to make the classroom a more inclusive space for every student to learn.
The first three videos are live now, covering preferred names, pronouns, and academic literacy. Each video is only a few minutes long and built around strategies you can act on immediately, whatever subject you teach and wherever you are in the semester. Here’s a taste of what each video covers.
‘I already use preferred names’ – do you, though?
The first video on preferred names goes beyond the obvious reminder. There are some clever tricks in here for making sure students’ names stick, including one low-tech classroom tool that does double duty for both you and your students. It also covers what to do when students haven’t updated their details in the system, and how to handle pronunciation without making it awkward. Short, specific, and immediately actionable.
Ready for more? Call me by my name shares more on the importance of navigating names, with videos that remind us how it feels for the humans behind the names.
Sharing is the whole point
The pronouns video makes a compelling case for why sharing your own pronouns is just as important as asking for others’. It’s something many educators skip, and the video explains exactly what you’re communicating to the room when you do. There’s also practical guidance on where to indicate pronouns across UTS systems so the work carries through without you having to repeat it.
Extend the conversion: Know me by my pronouns explores more ways to create a safe, welcoming space for everyone to express their gender.
The things we assume students know
The academic literacy video might be the most thought-provoking of the three. It starts from a confronting premise: we can’t assume students know what they don’t know, which means we can’t wait for them to ask for help. The video offers a handful of embedded strategies for addressing this, including one idea for live tutorials that tends to surface far better questions than the usual ‘does anyone have anything they’d like to ask?’
For more perspectives on academic literacy, have a look at law, language and inclusion: who speaks ‘academic’ anyway?, which considers whether we are acknowledging the multilingual strengths our students bring, too.
Watch, share, contribute
All three videos are available now and, while developed within the Business School, are designed to be relevant to educators across UTS. More are planned throughout 2026, with new episodes supported by a Social Impact Grant from the UTS Centre for Social Justice & Inclusion and the Business School.
If you have topics you’d like to see covered, or strategies of your own you’d like to contribute to future editions, the Business School Social Justice and Inclusion Committee would love to hear from you. Please leave us a comment below, or email the Committee direct: bus.sjic@uts.edu.au