Examples at Seneca | Curriculum Integration | Seneca Polytechnic

Take a moment to step into your students’ shoes. When you were a student, can you remember a time when you may have asked yourself, “Do I belong here?” How might this have affected your experience, your behaviour, and your achievement at school?

• Belonging has been shown to play an important role in the classroom (Cohen, 2022). It significantly boosts students' motivation, academic performance, and overall well-being. When students feel connected and valued, they are more engaged and resilient, leading to better learning outcomes. Even brief interventions promoting belonging can have lasting, positive effects, especially for equity-deserving groups on campus.

What might this look like in a Seneca classroom? One simple tip is to start your next class off with a “Community Agreement.”

• According to Akeisha Lari, our Manager of Reconciliation and Student Inclusion, a Community Agreement is “a chance for everyone to share information about how they learn in the classroom, what would make them feel comfortable and productive in the space, and what may act as a barrier to their education.” Enjoy this video from the Curriculum Integration Newsletter on how to implement a Community Agreement into your class, and you’ll be one step closer to building belonging for all your students.

"As an instructor, I take time every semester to review and refresh my slides, incorporating the latest current events and research findings. This year, I'm adding an important new focus: digital accessibility.

Taking the time to make your digital materials accessible is critical for removing barriers faced by students with disabilities. Simple changes, such as using readable fonts, adding alt text for images, and ensuring clear heading structures, can make a world of difference.

Every student deserves equal access to education, and accessible documents help create a more inclusive and equitable learning environment. Plus, accessible materials benefit everyone, not just those with disabilities. Let’s ensure our digital spaces are as inclusive and welcoming as our classrooms."

Senior Instructional Designer at Seneca, Gina Catenazzo, has a tip sheet that provides a great place to start. To dig deeper and really polish your digital documents, explore WebAim, an organization working to “expand the potential of the web for people with disabilities by empowering individuals and organizations to create accessible content.”

Community of Practice: Facilitate a Curriculum Integration circuit (virtual or in-person) to generate small, yet effective, integration strategies faculty can incorporate into their course content or teaching practice. 

Strategies

• Participants rotate through stations representing each of the curriculum integration pillars. Each station interval is approximately 15 minutes long.
• At each station, participants are asked to consider integration through the lens of the respective pillar and share their ideas or current integration practice(s).
• Facilitators can provide prompting questions at each station to help faculty consider the area of integration. 

Deliverables

• Participants share their integration strategy ideas in different ways (post-its, whiteboard markup, chart paper, digital whiteboard, Padlet, etc.).
• Facilitators will collate the ideas collected at each station and provide them to the faculty in the course cluster/program/school through the Community of Practice hub.
• Here is an example of some integration ideas generated from the Teaching & Learning Day, Spring 2025 CI Circuit.

References

Cohen, G. L. (2022). Belonging: The science of creating connection and bridging divides. W. W. Norton & Company.

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