What's in it for them?

As we are asking colleagues to change their views and be inclusive of all students, as we know more than half are first-gen students regardless if their parents went to college, it is the right thing to do. We need to be sensitive to our own implicit biases, to know that if we each received any training of pedagogy that it was not inclusive of the first-gen experience, that we indeed can be parental figures to these students which help them to change and grow out of an inclusive, safe learning environment. As professors, we should never feel safe that our practices are the best--that we need to continue to seek out best practices that are inclusive and be open to changing and seeing the faults in ourselves. Really, if you see this generation of students different now than ten years ago, what are you doing to compensate for this difference? We need to first be the most critical of ourselves and the implicit biases we all hold, and changing to meet our first-gen students' needs for an education can truly earn us the privilege of saying we are educators--that we educate ourselves first and never stop learning.