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Opinion | Call It What It Is: Anti-Blackness (Published 2020)

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When black people are killed by the police, “racism” isn’t the right word.

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Inside Higher Ed - Disability as a part of the DEI conversation

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Inside Higher Ed - Disability as a part of the DEI conversation

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According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, about 26 percent of people in the United States have a disability. That includes both visible disabilities, such as many mobility impairments, and hidden ones, such as psychosocial or emotional conditions.

But some research shows college students with disabilities have lower graduation and retention rates than their peers without disabilities.

In the past few years, some colleges and universities have started disability studies departments and programs. Others -- such as Syracuse University, Miami University of Ohio and the University of Illinois at Chicago -- have created disability cultural centers or affinity groups. But efforts such as those are still less than common. And although many statements from college presidents and administrations make clear they understand disability to be a part of diversity, scholars and activists say they still don't feel that higher education has accepted that disability is an axis of identity that can be celebrated.

Part of the larger problem, some activists and scholars say, is that disability is often framed as an individual biomedical condition and as a technical problem to be solved rather than as a group identity. Disability is often confined to offices that work through educational accommodations. A study of 23 California State University websites from 2012 to 2014 found that only one associated disability with diversity and inclusion.

"It's predominantly framed as a biomedical issue or a technical one in terms of legal compliance," said Lauren Shallish, a professor of special education, language and literacy at the College of New Jersey. "That framing forecloses any other discussion or experience or identity or social power."

Shallish's research and interviews with university leaders have found the "medicalized" framing of disability to be very prevalent in higher education.

"What I find is with diversity in higher ed, it's all very selectively inclusive," said Syreeta Nolan, a senior at the University of California, San Diego, and co-founder of Disability in Higher Ed. "The Black resource center is inclusive for Black people, the women's center is inclusive for women, the LGBTQ resource is inclusive for those who are LGBTQ themselves. But I don't see that intersectionality and I feel really weird and off when I try to talk about disability in those spaces."

Nolan's university's Strategic Plan for Inclusive Excellence does include people with disabilities, but looking at videos the university has created about the plan, she said, she doesn't see students or faculty with disabilities represented. She has participated in undergraduate research programs for historically underrepresented students, but those have been open to her because she is Black, not because she is disabled.

Though many colleges are engaging in much-needed efforts to diversify their faculty and student bodies, fewer are engaged in efforts to recruit and retain faculty and students with disabilities.

"If diversity actually valued disability, I could have people to look up to as a disabled undergraduate," said Nolan. "There would be such a world change if diversity included disability enough that there was more than 3.6 percent of tenured faculty that consider themselves disabled."

When disability is discussed in higher ed, it's often talked about in the context of educational accommodations that are required by law and allow students with disabilities to participate in class. Though accommodations are important and many activists and scholars are looking to improve the accommodation process, that focus can be limited, some say.

"Being a disabled student, I'm not just a disabled student in the classroom," Nolan said.

Though a human resources webpage at her university makes clear that the administration believes diversity includes disability, the content of public-facing sites at UCSD focuses almost exclusively on accommodations and accessibility, rather than disability as an identity.

Shallish, whose research has involved interviewing students with disabilities about their accommodations, said many are more concerned about other aspects of their college experience than about accommodations.

"[They said,] 'My real question is, does my roommate need to know I'm bipolar?' Or 'does my soccer team need to know I have a learning disability?'" she said.

A focus on educational accommodations can leave out an understanding of other barriers students with disabilities may face, said Harry Paul, an M.D.-Ph.D. student at Johns Hopkins University and communications director for the Alliance of Disabilities and Chronic Illnesses in Medicine.

"Accommodations are usually only available to people who have the means to get testing, to get some kind of doctor's note. Accommodations do not often take care of accommodating people off campus," he said. "You can have someone to help you get to class, but if you can't get your groceries, how can you stay in school?"

Many efforts to recruit or include students with disabilities could be easy, Paul said. Offices for diversity and inclusion could incorporate efforts at improving campus climate for students with disabilities. Administrations could hold listening sessions with disabled students and carry out their recommendations. They could bring disability scholars to talk on campus or add Braille to dining hall menus.

"If you recruit disabled students, are they going to feel like their disability is a burden that the school is complying with as it's the law?" he said. "Or are they going to feel like they are valued for their perspective?"

At UCSD, which Nolan attends, officials said disability is included in commitments to inclusivity, and the university is dedicated to moving beyond simple compliance with the law. "Compliance is the minimum," said Becky Petitt, vice chancellor for equity, diversity and inclusion at UCSD, via email. "Our commitment to scholars and professionals with disabilities involves intentionally facilitating access, active recruitment, thoughtful representation and engagement throughout all areas of university life, and the creation of accountability structures to ensure that we are faithful to our vision of being an institution where all students, faculty, and staff can thrive."

California State University, despite the 2014 study results suggesting that only one campus associated disability with diversity, has said that it does include disability in its programming.

"Efforts to advance diversity, equity and inclusion are definitely inclusive of a wide range of identities, including disability and its intersection with gender, race and ethnicity," said Luoluo Hong, associate vice chancellor for student affairs and enrollment management at Cal State, via email. "We are also dedicated to increasing educational access and accessibility for students with disabilities -- a responsibility which has been made especially salient during our current context, in which instruction on our campuses is predominantly online, remote or virtual. By policy and by practice, the CSU has dedicated time and resources to increase and improve the use of accessible technology. Finally, allegations of discrimination on the basis of disability are taken seriously and fully investigated."
Due for a Reckoning
For some scholars and activists, a shift in higher ed would require greater societal changes and acknowledgment of the intersections between disability and other identities. The disabled community is not a monolith, and how people experience a disability is filtered through their race and other characteristics, and vice versa. For example, both Black and disabled individuals are overrepresented among victims of police killings, creating unique implications for people who are both Black and disabled.

"What I would like to see is a fuller integration and examination of the intersectionality between race and disability. I think diversity is missing an entire aspect when the intersectionality of race and disability is ignored," said Denise Reid, a professor of education at Biola University and co-author of the study on Cal State.

Reid said some universities are making progress. Her university has made a deliberate effort to include disability in statements and conversations about diversity, she said, and has started conversations with faculty about the classroom experience.

But she's not sure that any effort in higher education to fully acknowledge the intersections between race, ethnicity and disability will be realized in her lifetime.

"We continue to investigate issues of race and ethnicity," she said. "However, I am hopeful that at some point the intersectionality of race and disability would just be part of the diversity conversation."

Shallish said that while she believes affinity groups and discussion would be beneficial for higher education, the issue runs deeper.

"Colleges and universities really need to reckon with their own entrenched history around ability supremacy. They've always prioritized the quote normal body or quote normal mind," she said. "Higher ed is defined by who it excludes."

Disability is often closely associated with the criminal justice system and racism, she said, as children of color are overrepresented in special education classes and often are pushed into juvenile justice programs. Colleges could do more work around abolishing current systems of incarceration and punishment.

"Higher ed could really do this work," she added. "So then it comes down to choice. Are you going to choose to do it or not?"

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Could disability be further included in diversity efforts?

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According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, about 26 percent of people in the United States have a disability. That includes both visible disabilities, such as many mobility impairments, and hidden ones, such as psychosocial or emotional conditions. But some research shows college students with disabilities have lower graduation and retention rates than their peers without disabilities.

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Association of American Colleges & Universities

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In America's Unmet Promise: The Imperative for Equity in Higher Education (Witham et al. 2015b), we affirmed that effective higher education reform efforts must be infused with an awareness of the ways in which many groups within US society have been historically excluded from educational opportunities, or marginalized within the structures and institutions that house those opportunities. We have characterized this awareness as equity-mindedness-a way of approaching educational reform that foregrounds the policies and practices contributing to disparities in educational achievement and abstains from blaming students for those accumulated disparities (Bensimon 2007; Dowd and Bensimon 2015). In this article, we elaborate on the five principles for achieving equity by design that we first introduced in America's Unmet Promise, with examples drawn from campuses that have used the Center for Urban Education's Equity Scorecard.

The Equity Scorecard catalyzes a process of sustained change by engaging practitioners in equity-focused inquiry, using tools designed to yield more just, equitable, and effective learning environments for African Americans, Latinos/as, American Indians, and subordinated Asian and Pacific Islander populations. These tools prompt practitioners to integrate equity as a criterion for assessment across all core institutional practices. The scorecard is grounded in a theory of change that relies on the power of practitioner engagement in inquiry. Through a process of discovery that makes inequities visible, practitioners gain motivation to make changes in their own practices and in their institutions.

We believe that every campus has many practitioners with the potential to become "first-generation equity workers," as James Gray of the Community College of Aurora (Colorado) calls himself (Felix et al., forthcoming). These change agents cultivate the ability to see, communicate about, and address inequities through their daily work. As an administrator at the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education (PASSHE) stated, "[Using the Equity Scorecard] has changed my world view.... it has made me really reflective about the perceptions of the world by others. It's been my experience that it's at the individual level where you suddenly realize that your world view has changed, that you really see the change happen.... I don't think it happens as a group; I think it happens as people."

The five principles discussed below provide the architecture that leaders and practitioners need to build equity by design.
Principle 1: Clarity in language, goals, and measures is vital to effective equitable practices.
Clarity in language. Inequality in higher education is a structural problem that is hidden or revealed through the use of language imbued with political and social meaning. Language conveys how individuals, alone and in the company of others, give meaning to numeric patterns; how they talk about race without talking about it (Pollock 2004); how they shape the reality of racial inequity. Language reflects culturally acquired knowledge that forms the schemas of practitioners, leaders, policymakers, and others whose actions can make-or unmake-the antiracism project in higher education (Bensimon, forthcoming).

Clarity of language is especially important because equity is so often confounded with equality. As one practitioner at the University of Wisconsin commented, "I used to think that equity means you treat everyone equally, but now I see it more in terms of outcomes. Are people able to achieve similar results at the end of their education regardless of where they started?" As described by this practitioner, equality is defined as treating everyone the same or giving everyone the same opportunities regardless of their individual attributes. Equity, in contrast, means accounting for differences in individual attributes and experiences for the purposes of achieving equal outcomes.

Clarity is also important when identifying racial and ethnic groups. Shorthand terms such as "URM" and "at risk" are problematic on many levels (Bensimon, forthcoming). Aggregating all groups into single color-blind categories erases the monumental differences in circumstances experienced by black, Hispanic, Asian American, and American Indian populations. Additionally, such aggregation contravenes equity-mindedness as described in Principle 2.

Clarity in goals and measures. Quantitative data are typically not available in user-friendly formats, and individuals who do not routinely work with data may struggle to use them. This can pose an obstacle to the goal of developing clear goals and measures. Practitioners who are unaccustomed to using data-the majority of faculty, staff, and administrators-often feel overwhelmed by long data reports. Worse, they may be too embarrassed to admit that they can't see a "story" in the percentages and numbers.

To make data more comprehensible, the Center for Urban Education designed the Benchmarking Equity and Student Success Tool (BESST). This interactive tool makes the story behind the data visible, understandable, and actionable for practitioners. Using the BESST, practitioners can understand equity gaps longitudinally and by race and ethnicity, and can manipulate the data to determine how many more students of a particular group need to reach particular milestones in order for an institution to achieve its overall goal. Figures 1 and 2 illustrate BESST data for a four-year college examining credit accumulation for a cohort of students who entered college in 2009. Figure 1 shows that 37.8 percent of Hispanic students accumulated thirty credits in the first year of college, 8.1 percentage points lower than the credit accumulation rate for all students. Figure 2 shows that in order for Hispanic students' credit accumulation to equal the current rate for all students, the college needs thirty-nine more Hispanic students to earn thirty credits within the first year.

Data that are disaggregated in this manner can be very effective in increasing practitioners' awareness and their desire to know why equity gaps exist. Seeing data displayed in the format presented in Figures 1 and 2 prompted James Gray, chair of the mathematics department at the Community College of Aurora, to launch several equity-focused reforms, including changing the hiring process to ensure a diverse candidate pool; using data more purposefully to assess success patterns by race, ethnicity, and course section; and offering more intentional coaching for faculty with large equity gaps in outcomes. (For more on data disaggregation, see Witham et al. 2015a; for a detailed description of the changes at the Community College of Aurora, see Felix et al., forthcoming.)
Principle 2: "Equity-mindedness" should be the guiding paradigm for language and action.
The term equity "has been more or less universally embraced by policy centers/institutes, major Foundations interested in reform and the higher education field itself" (Anderson 2012, 134). But the term is not always used in a manner that engages critically with race. An equity-minded approach raises consciousness of the need to consider equity in connection with historical and political understandings of stratification.

Equity-minded individuals are aware of the sociohistorical context of exclusionary practices and racism in higher education and the impact of power asymmetries on opportunities and outcomes, particularly for African Americans and Latinas/os. Equity-minded individuals are

Color-conscious (as opposed to color-blind) in a critical sense. Being color-conscious means noticing and questioning patterns of educational outcomes that reveal unexplainable differences in outcomes for minoritized students (Gillborn 2005); it means viewing inequalities in the context of a history of exclusion, discrimination, and educational apartheid.

Aware that beliefs, expectations, and practices assumed to be neutral can have outcomes that are racially disadvantageous. Racial disadvantage is created when unequal outcomes are attributed to students' cultural predispositions or when practices are based on stereotypical assumptions about the capacity, aspirations, or motives of minoritized populations (Bensimon 2012).

Willing to assume responsibility for the elimination of inequality. Rather than viewing inequalities as a natural catastrophe (Coates 2015), equity-minded individuals allow for the possibility that inequalities might be created or exacerbated by taken-for-granted practices and policies, inadequate knowledge, a lack of cultural know-how, or the absence of institutional support-all of which can be changed.

Aware that while racism is not always overt, racialized patterns nevertheless permeate policies and practices in higher education institutions. When policies have a disproportionate impact on students of color, they have the effect of maintaining racial hierarchies.

As an Equity Scorecard participant at the University of Wisconsin stated, "Equity-mindedness asks us to turn the mirror on ourselves and accept the fact ... that we actually may play a pretty significant role in creating [inequitable outcomes]. So there are barriers that are extant but for many people very difficult to identify, [and] because they seem so normalized, people continue to work with these practices never once considering that these seemingly innocuous practices contribute to inequitable outcomes."
Principle 3: Equitable practice and policies are designed to accommodate differences in the contexts of students' learning-not to treat all students the same.
As we stated in America's Unmet Promise,

Simply put, achieving equality in outcomes does not mean-in fact cannot mean-treating all students as though they are the same. Rather, [equity-focused] policies and practices in higher education recognize and accommodate differences in students' aspirations, life circumstances, ways of engaging in learning and participating in college, and identities as learners and students. (Witham et al. 2015b, 31)

For example, when the director of the honors program at a University of Wisconsin campus was confronted with data showing that the program had no students of color, rather than assuming these students just did not meet eligibility criteria, he asked a few simple questions: What are the criteria for acceptance to the honors program? In what ways might the criteria have disadvantaged students of color? When were the criteria established, and are they still relevant? He found that the criteria had been in existence for more than thirty years and depended on a single factor: ACT scores. In response to this new information, he said, "It was clear that there was a problem and it was also a very concrete thing."

With the appropriate tools, the director was able to see that the program's entry requirements systematically excluded students of color. The concreteness of the problem, along with the authority of his position, empowered him to develop a holistic admissions process. In one year, the all-white honors program became more inclusive with the addition of African American, Latino/a, and Hmong students. The program also began including courses on critical race theory and ethnic studies (Bishop 2014).
Principle 4: Enacting equity requires a continual process of learning, disaggregating data, and questioning assumptions about relevance and effectiveness.
While disaggregated data are necessary to identify and prioritize problems, disaggregated data alone are insufficient to attain equity-focused change. What matters is how practitioners interpret the data. Do they interpret racialized inequities as a symptom of student deficiencies or as an indication of failed practices? The interpretive lenses through which practitioners make sense of data are far more consequential than the collection of the data itself.

Both James Gray at the Community College of Aurora and the director of the honors program at the Wisconsin campus could have looked at their data and concluded that racial differences were attributable to characteristics over which they had no control. But institutional change requires the opportunity and capacity to learn from failure; it means digging into data deeply, purposefully, and systematically. Even though colleges and universities are organizations dedicated to creating and communicating knowledge, most lack the tools needed to support a continual process of learning among practitioners.

To address these limitations, the Center for Urban Education has drawn on the methodology of participatory critical action research, where professionals conduct inquiry into their own practices to learn how those practices work and why they may not be working as intended. According to Kemmis and McTaggart, "change cannot be secured if participants do not change themselves, their understandings, their practices, or their constitution of the setting" (2000, 590). For this reason, "participatory action research is the preferred approach to social and educational change" (590). Through inquiry, practitioners are able to question routines and develop the habits of equity-minded practice.

As an administrator at PASSHE observed, "It's like strategic planning of all types. Strategic planning doesn't have a beginning or an end; it's a continuous improvement process....You circle back. You're continuously looking at data."
Principle 5: Equity must be enacted as a pervasive institution- and system-wide principle.
Instead of thinking about equity as a "targeted strategy" that can be achieved through one particular office or program, institutions should approach equity as a normative standard for all aspects of the institution, from resource allocation to assessment to strategic planning.

Solutions are shaped by the way problems are defined. Embedding equity into the core of institutional work means reframing inequity as a problem created by color-blind practices and procedures and the lack of spaces to talk about race. Enacting equity as a pervasive institution- and system-wide principle requires practitioners to engage in the following:

Let go of traditional schemata that paint student success as a matter of effort, motivation, self-regulation, goal commitment, or other student characteristics. These qualities are important, but focusing on them draws attention away from practices-influential factors that are within practitioners' control. Put simply, practitioners taking the traditional approach to student success may ask: What does this student lack and how can he/she be remediated? From an equity-minded standpoint, the primary question is: Why are our practices failing to produce success for students of color?

Understand the difference between horizontal and vertical equity. The standard of horizontal equity asserts that those with equal needs deserve equal educational resources. Vertical equity, which is more often contested, states that those with greater needs should receive greater resources (Dowd and Bensimon 2015, 10-11).

Learn to make the pursuit of equity a normal practice that is evident in how problems and solutions are defined, implemented, and evaluated. Leaders, administrators, staff, and trustees must demonstrate equity-mindedness through language, reasoning, and action.

Making equity pervasive will require sustained buy-in and ownership across an institution or system. To institutionalize equity as a priority, equity-minded leaders should call practitioners to inquiry and action repeatedly. An administrator at PASSHE summed up the need for sustained commitment: "I think that buy-in around the idea of equity is gained by staying the course and sticking with it for the long term. If you can successfully do that, I think that you will get buy-in."
Conclusion
More than fifty years have passed since the adoption of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. But its promise of a more equal, just, and great society is belied by the evidence, according to every metric of social justice. Inequality, segregation, and racism-both overt and implicit-are intense and continue to grow. In 1903, W. E. B. Du Bois declared the color line the problem of the twentieth century. It is alarming that Du Bois's observation is an apt description of our society and educational system more than one hundred years later. As a society, we are a long way from accepting equity as a goal worthy of investment. As a system of higher education, we are a long way from moving equity from rhetoric to action. The five principles outlined here provide a place to start.
References
Anderson, Gregory M. 2012. "Equity and Critical Policy Analysis in Higher Education: A Bridge Still Too Far." Review of Higher Education 36 (1): 133-42.

Bensimon, Estela Mara. 2007. "The Underestimated Significance of Practitioner Knowledge in the Scholarship of Student Success." Review of Higher Education 30 (4): 441-69.

---. 2012. "The Equity Scorecard: Theory of Change." In Confronting Equity Issues on Campus: Implementing the Equity Scorecard in Theory and Practice, edited by Estela Mara Bensimon and Lindsey Malcom, 17-44. Sterling, VA: Stylus.

---. Forthcoming. The Misbegotten URM as a Data Point. Philadelphia, PA: Center for the Study of Race and Equity in Education.

Bishop, Robin. 2014. "Language and Identity in Critical Sensegiving: Journeys of Higher Education Equity Agents." Doctoral diss., University of Southern California, Los Angeles.

Coates, Ta-Nehisi. 2015. Between the World and Me. New York: Random House.

Dowd, Alicia C., and Estela Mara Bensimon. 2015. Engaging the "Race Question": Accountability and Equity in U.S. Higher Education. New York: Teachers College Press.

DuBois, W. E. B. 1903. The Souls of Black Folk. New York: The Blue Heron Press.

Felix, Eric R., Estela Mara Bensimon, Debbie Hanson, James Gray, and Libby Klingsmith. Forthcoming. "Developing Agency for Equity Minded Change." In Understanding Equity in Community College Practice (New Directions for Community Colleges 172), edited by Erin L. Castro. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

Gillborn, David. 2005. "Education Policy as an Act of White Supremacy: Whiteness, Critical Race Theory and Education Reform." Journal of Education Policy 20 (4): 485-505.

Kemmis, Stephen, and Robin McTaggart. 2000. "Participatory Action Research." In Handbook of Qualitative Research (2nd ed.), edited by Norman K. Denzin and Yvonna S. Lincoln, 567-605. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.

Pollock, Mica. 2004. Colormute: Race Talk Dilemmas in an American School. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Witham, Keith, Megan Chase, Estela Mara Bensimon, Debbie Hanson, and David Longanecker. 2015a. "Moving the Attainment Agenda from Policy to Action." Change Magazine July/August, 6-15.

Witham, Keith, Lindsey E. Malcom-Piqueux, Alicia C. Dowd, and Estela Mara Bensimon. 2015b. America's Unmet Promise: The Imperative for Equity in Higher Education. Washington, DC: Association of American Colleges and Universities.

Estela Mara Bensimon is professor in and codirector of the Center for Urban Education at the Rossier School of Education, University of Southern California; Alicia C. Dowd is professor of education at Pennsylvania State University and former codirector of the Center for Urban Education at the Rossier School of Education, University of Southern California; Keith Witham is assistant professor in the College of Education, Temple University and policy advisor in the Center for Urban Education at the Rossier School of Education, University of Southern California.

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Five Principles for Enacting Equity by Design

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In America's Unmet Promise: The Imperative for Equity in Higher Education (Witham et al. 2015b), we affirmed that effective higher education reform efforts must be infused with an awareness of the ways in which many groups within US society have been historically excluded from educational opportunities, or marginalized within the structures and institutions that house those opportunities.

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20 Things I Will Do to Be an Equitable Educator

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20 Things I Will Do to Be an Equitable Educator

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The Seven Steps To Complete Your Curriculum Scorecard

1. Get your child's/school's curriculum.
Go to your teacher, principal, or district office, and ask to see your child's or school's curriculum. In many districts, there is a Parent Bill of Rights that gives parents the right to access their child's curriculum. If the school is using a commercial curriculum, ask for a copy or the name and publisher so you can look it up online. (If you need to purchase it, NYU Metro Center can help). If the school is using a homemade curriculum, ask for a copy, or at least a sample of a few months of lesson materials. If they refuse to give you the curriculum, take your request to a higher level in the district, or discuss with your team to decide next steps.

2. Select your curriculum evaluation team.
The curriculum scorecard will work best if you have a team of at least 3 people with diverse identities (racial, gender, age, sexuality, class, national origin) and roles (parent, student, teacher, administrator, community member) who work together to evaluate the curriculum. These people do not have to be education professionals or have prior experience with evaluation. The more people, the better!

3. Choose the grades, units, and lessons to analyze.
Curricula can be thousands of pages, so you will need to select one or a few grades, units, and lessons to focus on (a sample of the larger curricula). The units you choose should not focus specifically on diversity and multiculturalism; they should be typical units. If you are able to cover more than one grade, select at least one lower and one upper grade.

4. Pull out keywords that represent each statement that the evaluation team can look for.
Once you have your curriculum and the scorecard in hand, review the statements for the scorecard you will begin with (Representation, Social Justice or Teachers Materials). Make sure the team understands each statement, and refer to the Glossary and Explanations with any questions. Chart key words, ideas and qualities from the statements that you will be looking for as you read the curriculum. This will help ensure that as you read, you are focused on the information you'll need in order to effectively score.

5. Conduct the evaluation.
The scorecard asks for your level of satisfaction with the curriculum on various measures. There is no right answer; this is just your opinion as someone who cares about culturally responsive education. As you answer each statement, use the Scoring Guidelines to help you decide your ratings.

6. Score the evaluation.
Tally your score for each section of the scorecard. A curriculum may excel in one area and fall short in another, and it is important to record those differences. You should come out with one score for each of the following sections: + Character Tally + Author Tally + Representation + Social Justice + Teachers Materials

7. Discuss with your team.
Discuss the process with your team: Did anything new come up? What was easy and what was hard? Did some items seem more important than others? This is also an opportunity to strategize about next steps: Do you think this evaluation provides an accurate picture of the curriculum? Does additional information need to be collected? Is there anyone you want to meet with to discuss the results?

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Please share the results of your scorecard through
This Link

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Culturally Responsive Curriculum Scorecard - EJ-ROC

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Get your child's/school's curriculum. Go to your teacher, principal, or district office, and ask to see your child's or school's curriculum. In many districts, there is a Parent Bill of Rights that gives parents the right to access their child's curriculum.

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Overview: How To Use This Toolkit

Digital inclusion requires evaluating student needs in remote learning environments, which are often also living spaces. The following resources are designed with a commitment to examining how biases and assumptions that instructors may hold, as well as inequities and exclusive practices in the living and learning environment, impact students' ability to thrive. We provide flexible teaching strategies to address instructor bias and to mitigate the challenges that students may encounter, towards the goal of ensuring that all students can successfully meet course learning goals.

This toolkit synthesizes key research in the fields of inclusive teaching, online teaching, and teaching and learning in order to provide faculty with concrete strategies they can incorporate into their teaching practice. Each section provides an overview, strategies, and further resources for each topic area. We have also included sections on how to connect students with resources on and beyond NYU's campus, as well as resources for faculty to consider to practice self-care. The last section of the toolkit has general teaching resources and an abbreviated bibliography so that you can continue to further your knowledge about digital inclusive teaching practices. We invite you to visit our website regularly for updates and thank you in advance for fostering an inclusive learning environment.

The development of this toolkit was originally led by Dr. Karen Jackson-Weaver and Dr. Chandani Patel.

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Digital inclusion requires evaluating student needs in remote learning environments, which are often also living spaces. The following resources are designed with a commitment to examining how biases and assumptions that instructors may hold, as well as inequities and exclusive practices in the living and learning environment, impact students' ability to thrive.

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Intentionally Equitable Hospitality in Hybrid Video Dialogue: The context of virtually connecting

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Intentionally Equitable Hospitality in Hybrid Video Dialogue: The context of virtually connecting

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Being intentional, we, the Virtually Connecting (VConnecting) community, do not assume that saying "welcome" will mean people feel welcome. We are intentional about every step in our process. By equitable, we intend our practice to challenge power structures that contribute to unfair access and opportunities, in favor of emulating different power structures that promote greater equity. We constantly assess whether our processes and outcomes actually do this within our own community and others who use VConnnecting, including people who have critiqued us publicly and privately [ 1]. We agree "Equality is not a credential. Equality is a task. It is what we have to do, because we are not there yet" [ 2], yet we strive toward it. Equal access does not result in equal outcomes [ 3] and inviting people to participate is not equity without parity of participation [ 4].

VConnecting is a connectivist learning movement [ 5]. Using synchronous video technology, VConnecting hosts informal conversations between people who are attending academic conference onsite and people who are unable to attend. These conversations are livestreamed and recorded. We call these "hybrid conversations" since we seek to give equitable weight to onsite and virtual participation. VConnecting's purpose is to extend the onsite conversation, allowing the marginalized voices of those who are not present to participate (such as adjuncts, unaffiliated academics, graduate students, parents of young children, people with health issues, Global South scholars, or others who cannot regularly travel to conferences), while also allowing those who cannot attend an opportunity to network and learn from those who are present.

Online interaction in informal learning spaces, such as VConnecting, is reflected in communities of practice [ 6], affinity spaces [ 7], connected learning [ 8], and personal learning networks (PLNs), but these forms of community do not call out hospitality as a fundamental tenet. Online informal learning spaces (OILS) are often distributed and less hierarchical than formal learning spaces. This characteristic obscures power dynamics and lines of responsibility. In OILS it is not always obvious who invites whom and what are the entry points to these spaces. However, there is almost always implicit hospitality taking place. There are ways of inviting new members in, welcoming them and helping them become active members once they join, ways of recognizing and encouraging different modes and levels of participation, and considerations of whom to include and exclude-even when the space claims to be "open to all."

Among the Merriam-Webster definitions of hospitable, we find words like "generous and cordial reception," "generous and friendly welcome," "pleasant and sustaining environment," and "readily receptive; OPEN." In this article, we call VConnecting's dimension of community building "intentionally equitable hospitality " (IEhospitality) to differentiate it from hospitality that is superficially generous, friendly, or welcoming. Further, in order to be considered intentionally equitable hospitality it must question its own values and how this works in practice within power structures.

In the following sections, we describe (1) the benefits of intentionally equitable hospitality, (2) challenges with hospitality in hybrid video conversations, (3) VConnecting hospitality practices, and (4) conclusions and remaining challenges.

Benefits of Intentionally Equitable Hospitality

Hospitality is not the default in academia. Bonnie Stewart suggests "scholarship has never been particularly open to the public" it is "a carefully-managed ecosystem of gatekeeping measures" [ 9]. VConnecting is an intentionally inclusive space, an intercultural space meant to break down access barriers: "inclusive intercultural digital pedagogy is not a luxury, and can no longer be an afterthought. This time of walls and travel bans demands conviction and ingenuity from critical digital educators concerned with gestures of openness and hospitality" [ 10]. Being hosts of an informal, synchronous, and audiovisual conversation breaks down academic barriers as it allows interaction between established scholars and graduate students, for example, in ways not possible in most professional contexts [ 11, 12].

VConnecting challenges academic gatekeeping via rendering private hallway conversations that build social capital at face-to-face conferences into public hybrid conversations in which people who cannot attend conferences are able to participate. There remains a power differential between high-profile speakers and virtual participants, and the technical and location differences create a further power imbalance, all of which requires intentionally equitable hospitality in order to host a conversation that indeed challenges academic gatekeeping rather than reproduces inequalities.

For VConnecting, hospitality is a verb and a value which has complex underpinnings that are always impacted by context. Virtual participants are the center of why VConnecting exists, and ensuring they have a meaningful experience and opportunity to converse with onsite guests is key. Virtual participants are often people who are otherwise marginalized (global South scholars, graduate students, unaffiliated educators, and alt-academics are frequent Vconnecting participants and volunteers who would not normally be able to attend many conferences regularly), and intentionally equitable hospitality dictates that their needs and experiences are privileged. At the same time, onsite guests are taking time away from the precious onsite experience and we must also be hospitable to them and appreciative of their time and their choice to spend the time in conversation with virtual participants. Additionally, VConnecting considers the needs of conference organizers who may have concerns about the use of physical space, engagement with their paying participants, or the online attention that the conference may get because of a VConnecting session. Juggling all of the hospitality needs of multiple constituents is an ongoing, reflective process that is necessarily social justice focused.

Challenges with Hospitality in Hybrid Video Conversations

Through our experience, VConnecting has identified several challenges while conducting hybrid video conversations. These challenges are both logistical and related to intentionally equitable hospitality. We address each of these issues in VConnecting hospitality section of this paper.

Logistically, onsite audio is essential. Onsite participants must adequately hear virtual participants and vice versa. The challenge is caused in part by the chaos that often occurs at conferences when in public spaces. In addition, inadequate onsite audio, typically a personal laptop, make it difficult for clear communication.

Additionally, there is a visual imbalance. Some participants are physically together in a room, while others are individually joining from different locations, with their own microphone and camera. Images of the onsite and virtual participants differ in size and clarity, making it difficult to read body language, which leads to challenges in knowing when to speak, or even who wishes to speak.

Onsite there is a physical presence, especially if there is a group, which privileges feelings of togetherness among the onsite participants. This can cause onsite participants to lose sight of those who are virtual. Specifically, they see each other with equal space, make eye contact while speaking to each other, but they see all of the virtual people together as "one" person on a screen. When allotting time in a conversation, it is too easy for the onsite group to not allot equitable time for the virtual participants. This is an empathy issue, as the onsite participants have an easier time feeling connected to the conversation.

On a similar front, the virtual participants sometimes want to listen and not speak. Occasionally this is the result of power dynamics. The onsite guests may be prominent speakers and participants feel unable to interrupt the conversation in order to contribute. Silence has multiple interpretations and we must be sensitive to them.

VConnecting Hospitality Practices

"One of the fundamental principles of a pedagogy of hospitality: that however a gesture is conceived and offered, there are those who must receive it differently." -Kate Bowles [ 10]

Intentionally equitable hospitalit y requires a combination of facilitation skills, digital literacies, and intercultural sensitivities. The role of the facilitators as hosts is an important part of intentionally equitable hospitality that VConnecting strives toward. This role is called a "buddy." We use the term buddy as both a noun and a verb. To be viable, VConnecting sessions require, at minimum, one onsite buddy (at the conference) and one virtual buddy (not at the conference). Buddying a session entails more responsibilities than participants, including a wide array of logistics, only some of which are in this article. Specifically, we focus our discussion on the responsibilities around intentionally equitable hospitality. In the following sections, we have divided intentionally equitable hospitality practices of VConnecting into the following phases (1) pre-conference planning, (2) during-conference planning, (3) facilitating, and (4) sustaining community.

Pre-conference planning. The virtual planning phase takes place before an event begins. In this phase, we mobilize interested volunteers to lead the virtual and onsite activities (as virtual and onsite buddies).

The choice of which events we conduct VConnecting at are driven by what virtual participants are interested in rather than onsite participants or conference organizers. However, onsite participants and organizers can offer or initiate discussion about hosting a possible upcoming VConnecting event, and virtual participants may agree to engage. Ultimately, if no virtual person is interested, the event cannot run.

Inviting onsite participants takes place as part of the virtual planning phase and includes a focus on: (1) marginal onsite voices we would like to amplify, (2) high profile participants such as keynote speakers with which the virtual participants wish to converse, and (3) onsite participants who are familiar with VConnecting and wishing to hear voices from virtual participants. Combinations of these in one session helps everyone network and hopefully build community. Experienced VConnecting onsite participants and buddies help make new onsite participants comfortable.

Clear communication around planning and logistics is an important part of intentionally equitable hospitality for VConnecting. This includes scheduling across time-zones and cross communication between multiple channels. Though sometimes overlooked as a form of hospitality, clear communication during the planning process is vital to creating a hospitable environment.

Finally, we are intentional about inviting new voices into the conversation, as people often need the initial invitation to be personal not general. Marginalized people don't always see "anyone is welcome"to mean "you are welcome." Intentionally equitable hospitality implores us to extend personal invitations to marginalized persons. For example, if someone likes or shares our blog post, we intentionally reach out to invite them to participate. If we see someone on Twitter mention they are unable to go to a conference they wish they could go to, we invite them to participate.

During-conference planning.The planning phase during the conference occurs once the conference starts. Onsite, this involves finding an appropriate location, appropriate equipment, and notifying onsite participants of the location. IEhospitality considerations for onsite location include limiting background noise and visual interference (such as people walking behind the participants who don't wish to be on camera or windows that glare). Over time we have found a dedicated room is most effective. It also includes clear communications between onsite and virtual buddy, as well as between onsite buddy and onsite guests and virtual buddy and virtual participants.

Facilitating. The facilitation phase occurs during VConnecting sessions. The responsibility of intentionally equitable hospitality is held mostly by the virtual and onsite buddies but others pick up these responsibilities as they continue to participate with the community. These responsibilities are social, technical, and logistical.

Logistical: timely communications about the session including physical location and virtual details such as the link to join the session.

Technical: troubleshooting audio/visual issues that may present.

Social: greeting participants as they arrive in the virtual space (which also serves as a technical form of hospitality as this serves as an audio/visual check), being a good conversationalist to help amplify the voices of others, juggling the public/private tension, inviting participants to introduce themselves, etc., and using the text chat both to backchannel and to amplify the voices of those who are shy or have audio difficulties.

Intentionally equitable hospitality during these sessions is multicontextual, complex, and often paradoxical [ 13]. Though calling on someone to speak up might be empowering to some, it can be troubling to those who are shy and prefer to listen. Recording the session allows those who cannot make it at that time to listen afterward but may create an environment of high pressure for those who are participating live. These paradoxes abound, however, the perspective of intentionally equitable hospitality is not to resolve paradoxes but rather to embrace a multiplicity in an attempt to maximize affordances.

Sustaining community. Occurring all the time, sustaining community is standard ongoing operations of the community. One important point to add is that much of what makes VConnecting work is sustained interaction within the volunteer community semi synchronously, privately, and mostly textually via Slack. The community is sustained through other community specific activities such as larger planning projects, writing and scholarly opportunities, and modeling hospitality with new members, which is complicated when the entire team are volunteers. But it is also sustained through broader interactions that are outside of the community itself but which have cross-over membership.

For Whom Is VConnecting Equitably Hospitable?

Following the work of Hodgkinson-Williams and Trotter [ 14], which builds on the social justice model of Nancy Fraser, we would like to be explicit that equitable hospitality is contextual. Fraser's model looks at social justice in three dimensions: economic, cultural, and political. She also discusses how solutions to social justice can be transformative, but sometimes they are only ameliorative, and sometimes neutral, or even have a negative impact. Different individuals engaging in VConnecting (or not) experience these in different ways. For example, a graduate student has economic barriers to attending conferences and experiences exclusion from the culture and power of conferences, therefore, VConnecting can address all three dimensions of social justice for them. However, if the graduate student does not speak English, or does not have access to good internet infrastructure, or is too shy to participate in a session, VConnecting may have a negative effect, as it is one more space they are not allowed to participate in. VConnecting may also have a neutral or ameliorative effect if they are able to watch recordings (because this would still seem like broadcasting, or enhancing access, but not directly addressing cultural or political injustice as their voice does not get heard). However, VConnecting would have a transformative effect when it enables graduate students to have equitable conversations with high-profile conference participants, become heard, gain confidence, and develop reciprocal relationships with them over time, which empowers them as scholars [ 11, 12]. Another group of people who benefit from VConnecting are global South scholars, who benefit economically but also culturally and politically, particularly in terms of inserting their global South perspectives into conference experiences that often lack their presence, and if these global South scholars are involved in choices related to who is invited into a VConnecting session, for example. Again, as with graduate students, those who lack English, internet access, or willingness to participate in synchronous video will not be affected positively by VConnecting, and may indeed be affected negatively. In some countries, they are excluded because, for example, YouTube is blocked. If they speak English less fluently than other participants, or they have lower-quality internet connections, they may struggle to get heard in sessions. There may, indeed, be onsite guests who are not willing to listen to virtual participants, or who are disrespectful to others, and occasionally the virtual and onsite facilitators are unable to redress this inequality in the dialogue. But when global South scholars are able to participate fully, the impact can be transformative in redressing epistemic injustice at conferences, and addressing political issues (of representation) and influencing conversations across conferences sometimes.

There are potential participants with disabilities that would be completely excluded from VConnecting, such as those with hearing disabilities. However, there are those who lack mobility due to permanent or temporary health issues who have benefited from VConnecting to conferences they could not attend. In these cases, VConnecting ameliorates injustice by offering access but not challenging culture or power at conferences.

In terms of onsite buddies/volunteers, they benefit mainly from the ability to make connections and cultural capital at conferences, as many of them are not powerful academics in the traditional sense, even if economically, they are able to attend conferences.

It is also important to recognize VConnecting may lay outside of traditional academic hierarchies, but as Bonnie Stewart says of Twitter [ 1], develops new hierarchies of its own. And therefore, despite the intention to be equitably hospitable to new volunteers and participants, there are emergent power structures related to personalities, histories and social and cultural capital within the community.

Finally, there are many who participate in and benefit from VConnecting who are already well-connected and not particularly disadvantaged. For these people, VConnecting is beneficial as a community but does not serve a social justice purpose related to their own privilege. However, they become allies who care about redressing social justice issues of others in the community, and using whatever power and connections they have to support others, and in many instances, they have spoken about how VConnecting has made them more aware of the voices of those not regularly present at events.

In practice, VConnecting cannot and does not challenge academic gatekeeping in every instance, but strives to create an intentionally equitable environment of hybrid dialogue in which this can thrive. Not every volunteer practices intentionally equitable hospitality in every moment, and not every conversation redresses epistemic injustice, but there are opportunities to do so that did not exist without VConnecting.

Conclusions and Remaining Challenges

What we have learned about IEHospitality in hybrid spaces can be useful to other learning contexts. For example, those of us who teach online making aspects of equity and hospitality explicit within online group work, helps to prevent many of the common problems students face [ 15]. What volunteers learn and practice in VConnecting often transfers to our teaching and professional practice, a reminder how we can benefit greatly from using online learning techniques and technologies in our own learning first. In addition, buddies often gain social capital of their own through greater communication with each other and with guests who are often high-profile academics.

Cronin suggests openness is personal, contextual, cultural, and constantly negotiated [ 16]. Our notion is that VConnecting as individuals and as a community strive towards this understanding of openness as VConnecting's hospitality is growing in the same direction.

A group of us [ 17] recently asked the community what they expected from a radical hospitality of VConnecting. Kuhn [ 17] reminded us to consider those who stay in the margins, or who have no technical access, and how we might include them. Zamora [ 17] reminded us to continue "paying attention and not making assumptions about whether a person feels included or not" and "cultivating a keen awareness of the way power and privilege shape our inclusion."

"But a wall does not appear to those who do not come up against it," explained another [ 18]. As a hybrid space, VConnecting makes some of the walls of academic gatekeeping visible to everyone, and has been a bridge that aims to change the landscape of both the privileged conference-goers and the perpetually virtual participants (and everyone in between) via intentionally equitable hospitality.

References

[1] Bali, M., Beckingham, S., Zamora, M., Caines, A., Hogue, R. J., and Weller, M. Breaking the physical presence barrier: Virtually Connecting as an approach to open, inclusive conferences . Open Educational Resources (#OER17), London, UK. April 5, 2017.

[3] Czerniewicz, L. Considering inequality as higher education goes online [keynote address]. Association for Learning Technology Conference. Manchester, UK. September 9-10, 2015.

[5] Bali, M., Caines, A., DeWaard, H., and Hogue, R. Ethos and practice of a connected learning movement: Interpreting virtually connecting through alignment with theory and survey results. Online Learning 20, 4 (2016). DOI: https://doi.org/10.24059/olj.v20i4.965

[6] Wenger, E. Communities of practice and social learning systems: the career of a concept."In Blackmore, C. (Ed.) Social Learning Systems and communities of practice. Springer Verlag and the Open University, 2010.

[8] Ito, M., Gutiérrez, K., Livingstone, S., Penuel, B., Rhodes, J., Salen, K., and Watkins, C. Connected learning: An agenda for research and design [report]. Irvine: Digital Media and Learning Research Hub. 2013.

[15] Roberts, T.S. and McInnerney, J.M. Seven Problems of online group learning (and their solutions). Educational Technology & Society 10, 4 (2007), 257-268.

[17] Angell, N., DeWaard, H.J., Hogue, R. J. and Taleo, W. Help us define and give examples of "radical hospitality" #2. GITHUB issue. October 15, 2018.

Acknowledgment

The authors would like to acknowledge the feedback the VC community gave over the years that helped influence this paper, including most recently the team who worked with Mozilla Open Leaders program to develop community definitions of VC hospitality, among other things: thank you Nate Angell, Wendy Taleo, Helen J. DeWaard, and Rebecca J. Hogue. Thank you especially to VC community members who volunteer and embody this hospitality and extend it to others.

About the Authors

Maha Bali is Associate Professor of Practice at the Center for Learning and Teaching at the American University in Cairo. She is an editor at Hybrid Pedagogy journal, and editorial board member of: Teaching in Higher Education; Online Learning Journal; Journal of Pedagogic Development; Learning, Media and Technology; and Journal of Educational Technology in Higher Education. She has blogged for the Chronicle of Higher Education's Prof Hacker, DMLCentral blogs and Al-Fanar media. She is co-founder of virtuallyconnecting.org and co-facilitator of Equity Unbound. She is former International Director of Digital Pedagogy Lab. She is a learnaholic, writeaholic and passionate open and connected educator. She can be found on Twitter at @bali_maha and blogs at http://blog.mahabali.me

Autumm Caines is an instructional designer at the University of Michigan - Dearborn who has worked in the field of academic technology for 15 years. Her work focuses on online community, faculty development, educational technology, open education, and online security and privacy. Prior to her current position Autumm held appointments at St. Norbert College in De Pere, WI and Capital University in Columbus, Ohio, both in the USA. Autumm is a co-director of the online connected learning movement Virtually Connecting, which helps her to better understand presence and spontaneity in virtual synchronous conversations as well as equity and inclusion in online community.

Rebecca J. Hogue is an associate lecturer at University of Massachusetts - Boston. She is pursuing a Ph.D. in health professions education at the University of Ottawa, Canada and is co-founder of Virtually Connecting. Her professional background is in instructional design and software quality assurance. She holds a Master of Arts degree in distributed learning, and a Bachelor of Science degree in computer science. Rebecca teaches courses on instructional design foundations, the design and instruction of online courses, building educational multimedia, and designing online professional presence. She has more than 15 years of experience as an instructional designer in a variety of contexts (private sector, higher education, and medical education).

Helen DeWaard teaches digital and media literacy at the Faculty of Education, Lakehead University, Orillia. She has completed a master's of educational technology from the University of British Columbia, a master's of education from the University of Toronto, OISE and is currently pursuing a Ph.D. Her passions include teaching and learning with technology, digital storytelling, critical digital literacy and media literacy, connecting to global contexts, and digital badges. She volunteers with Virtually Connecting and the ISTE Inclusive Learning network, and has participated in the Mozilla Open Leaders project. Helen has served as an Open Education Fellow with eCampus Ontario and engages as a mentor through UNESCO to support others in open teaching and learning. She can be found at http://www.hjdewaard.com/. Helen actively tweets about education related topics @hj_dewaard and blogs at Five Flames for Learning

Christian Friedrich is the education and science advisor at Wikimedia Deutschland. As a member of the team "Education, Science & Culture," Christian is committed to work towards openness and freedom of education and science. Christian has led various higher education projects in the context of "open" and "digital and connected learning." He is also part of the vibrant Virtually Connecting community, which aims to provide virtual participation and representation at academic conferences. In 2018, Christian was named one of the Virtually Connecting Co-Directors. Christian works as a freelance consultant with organizations to foster organizational change and learning while considering meaningful use of technology. Together with colleagues and friends from academia and activism, Christian conceived Towards Openness, a knowledge base and platform for critical conversations around openness and education. Christian blogs erratically on his website christianfriedrich.org, and tweets as @friedelitis. He also hosts various German podcasts on technology, learning, and open education.

© ACM 2019. 1535-394X/19/06-3331173 $15.00

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Intentionally Equitable Hospitality in Hybrid Video Dialogue: The context of Virtually Connecting

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eLearn Magazine is a leading source of high-quality information on the uses of online learning and training strategies in a variety of contexts for K-12, higher education, and the corporate workforce.eLearn Magazine presents new technologies and approaches for creating, delivering, and supporting online instruction and workplace performance.

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 Moving applied learning online: Creating engaged and inclusive spaces

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 Moving applied learning online: Creating engaged and inclusive spaces

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University of Wisconsin-La Crosse | uwlax.edu

Introduction

Culturally responsive (or culturally relevant) teaching theory originated in K-12. It tasks instructors with developing and then using cross-cultural competence: learning about the lives, cultures, languages, and group histories of the students in your classes and then integrating those perspectives, histories, values, practices, and issues into the structure, materials, interactions, and relationships of your course. K-12 discussions of culturally responsive teaching often focus on teacher engagement with students' families and communitites as a means of empowering students in school by facilitating their ability to draw on their own cultural identity in educational settings. Universities need broader and deeper methods for developing both our own, and our students', cross-cultural competencies, and keeping ourselves focused on building relationships with students.

Gloria Ladson-Billings (1995) laid out the initial theoretical underpinnings of culturally responsive teaching, and they are still relevant. She argued that a precondition for instructors was caring about the whole student, not just students' intellectual development. Given that, then, culturally responsive teaching includes setting high expectations, helping students develop positive cultural identities, and helping students learn critical skills that empower them to critique and address social and historical injustices.

Culturally responsive teaching, like anti-bias education, universal design, feminist pedagogies, and social justice education, moves beyond the "diversity model" that sometimes overemphasizes the benefits of diversity for all students. The goal of culturally responsive teaching is to enpower students from sociocultural backgrounds that higher education often ignores or devalues. For many instructors, then, culturally responsive teaching is " just good teaching."

Summary of Research

Much of the research on culturally responsive teaching has examined the means by which instructors have implemented the theory. One primary method has been " curricular infusion," including, for example, reading assignments by a diverse array of authors. As disciplines have transformed, curricular infusion is an obvious form of culturally responsive teaching in higher education. As is true of all inclusive pedagogies, practices tend to fit a wide range of good teaching practices (see CATL's Teaching Improvement Guide and the Equity Strategies section of this Guide for more on this).

Academic disciplines challenged by critical race theory and feminist theory have transformed, and for many instructors, the transformation of their discipline through inclusivity is both intellectually stimulating and challenging, and engaging students in these disciplinary conversations is fun. Those that transformed earliest and most clearly have been in the arts and humanities: literary studies has expanded its "canon" of great literature and in that process challenged its own traditions defining "greatness;" historical analysis today is much more complex and nuanced because it not only includes the voices, experiences, and perspectives of those previously excluded but also tries to synthesize meaning from often-contradictory experiences. The social sciences have also transformed through inclusivity. Research methods in the sciences have also been impacted. Inclusivity is one force in creating new disciplines and both cross- and interdisciplinary research.

Ladson-Billings' charge to set high expectations responds to research indicating that instructors often praise students of color for work the student knows is sub-par. "Wise feedback" (see "The Mentor's Dilemma" linked under Resources below) is a well-studied response to this problem that advocates setting a high external bar (one attributable to someone or something other than you, such as a journal's publishing standards) along with a message from you prior to students reading your feedback. This video explains what is crucial to include if you plan to use this intervention. Here's a worksheet you can download to help you design your "wise" assignment. Note that while studies have not applied the intervention to all students (most commonly, they have excluded those who had already achieved the high standard and those with no reasonable hope of reaching it), they did not test this element. Particularly in first-year courses, assume that admission to UWL indicates that students can achieve your standard unless it is so late in the course that their performance on earlier learning tasks places them too far behind.

Other research on culturally relevant teaching focuses on establishing an inclusive climate, constructing a motivational climate that engages a broad range of students, and on the benefits of cross-cultural collaboration. That research does support the "diversity model" over the "deficit model," since it indicates very clearly that all students benefit from culturally responsive approaches. The theory also implies a feminist pedagogy, anti-bias education, and a social justice framework for higher education.

Students from historically underserved groups benefit when classroom interactions centralize respectful engagement and clear ground rules that everyone learns how to enforce.

Strategies

Develop your own plan for learning: Where are the most important gaps in your base of knowledge? Your goal is for your students to value their own cultural identity and their groups' histories. To do that, you might need to know more about some of your students than you currently do. No one will be expert on every group; but everyone can learn more than we know right now. You might also need to know more about how stereotypes develop, how they are maintained, how they are learned, how they are unlearned, how they are institutionalized, how they function particularly in higher education. Fortunately, we have an excellent library at UWL with access to all UW System resources.

Show up for students: building rapport happens outside the classroom as much as inside it. If you want students from historically underserved groups to come to view you as an ally, you will likely have to build trust. One way to begin is by attending the events hosted by student organizations and by the offices in Diversity and Inclusion. Here's how to add the D&I calendar to Outlook Online so that you can pop it on and off without needing to go to the university website.

Infuse your course. Here are some strategies to explore.

Develop authentic and relevant assignments: Explore CATL's googlesite on authentic assignments for more.

Address climate issues.

References/Resources

Ladson-Billings, Gloria (1995). Toward a theory of culturally relevant pedagogy. American Research Journal. 32(3) 465-491.

The Education Alliance (n.d.). Cultural responsive teaching, in Teaching diverse learners. Brown University.

Ginsberg, M., & Wlodkowski, Raymond J. (2009). Diversity and motivation : Culturally responsive teaching in college. 2nd ed. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Wise feedback:
Cohen, G. L., Steele, C. M., & Ross, L. D. (1999). The mentor's dilemma: Providing critical feedback across the racial divide. Personality and Social Psychology, Bulletin, 25, 1302-1318.

Yeager, D. S., Purdie-Vaughns, V., Garcia, J., Apfel, N., Brzustoski, P., Master, A., Hessert, W. T., Williams, M. E., & Cohen, G. L. (2014). Breaking the cycle of mistrust: wise interventions to provide critical feedback across the racial divide. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 143:2.

Hoskins, D. (2017). Culturally responsive teaching. In Instructor's Guide to Inclusive Excellence. Center for Advancing Teaching and Learning, University of Wisconsin at La Crosse. https://www.uwlax.edu/catl/teaching-guides/instructors-guide-to-inclusive-excellence/designing-and-teaching-inclusive-courses/culturally-responsive-teaching/

Introduction

Culturally responsive (or culturally relevant) teaching theory originated in K-12. It tasks instructors with developing and then using cross-cultural competence: learning about the lives, cultures, languages, and group histories of the students in your classes and then integrating those perspectives, histories, values, practices, and issues into the structure, materials, interactions, and relationships of your course. K-12 discussions of culturally responsive teaching often focus on teacher engagement with students' families and communitites as a means of empowering students in school by facilitating their ability to draw on their own cultural identity in educational settings. Universities need broader and deeper methods for developing both our own, and our students', cross-cultural competencies, and keeping ourselves focused on building relationships with students.

Gloria Ladson-Billings (1995) laid out the initial theoretical underpinnings of culturally responsive teaching, and they are still relevant. She argued that a precondition for instructors was caring about the whole student, not just students' intellectual development. Given that, then, culturally responsive teaching includes setting high expectations, helping students develop positive cultural identities, and helping students learn critical skills that empower them to critique and address social and historical injustices.

Culturally responsive teaching, like anti-bias education, universal design, feminist pedagogies, and social justice education, moves beyond the "diversity model" that sometimes overemphasizes the benefits of diversity for all students. The goal of culturally responsive teaching is to enpower students from sociocultural backgrounds that higher education often ignores or devalues. For many instructors, then, culturally responsive teaching is " just good teaching."

Summary of Research

Much of the research on culturally responsive teaching has examined the means by which instructors have implemented the theory. One primary method has been " curricular infusion," including, for example, reading assignments by a diverse array of authors. As disciplines have transformed, curricular infusion is an obvious form of culturally responsive teaching in higher education. As is true of all inclusive pedagogies, practices tend to fit a wide range of good teaching practices (see CATL's Teaching Improvement Guide and the Equity Strategies section of this Guide for more on this).

Academic disciplines challenged by critical race theory and feminist theory have transformed, and for many instructors, the transformation of their discipline through inclusivity is both intellectually stimulating and challenging, and engaging students in these disciplinary conversations is fun. Those that transformed earliest and most clearly have been in the arts and humanities: literary studies has expanded its "canon" of great literature and in that process challenged its own traditions defining "greatness;" historical analysis today is much more complex and nuanced because it not only includes the voices, experiences, and perspectives of those previously excluded but also tries to synthesize meaning from often-contradictory experiences. The social sciences have also transformed through inclusivity. Research methods in the sciences have also been impacted. Inclusivity is one force in creating new disciplines and both cross- and interdisciplinary research.

Ladson-Billings' charge to set high expectations responds to research indicating that instructors often praise students of color for work the student knows is sub-par. "Wise feedback" (see "The Mentor's Dilemma" linked under Resources below) is a well-studied response to this problem that advocates setting a high external bar (one attributable to someone or something other than you, such as a journal's publishing standards) along with a message from you prior to students reading your feedback. This video explains what is crucial to include if you plan to use this intervention. Here's a worksheet you can download to help you design your "wise" assignment. Note that while studies have not applied the intervention to all students (most commonly, they have excluded those who had already achieved the high standard and those with no reasonable hope of reaching it), they did not test this element. Particularly in first-year courses, assume that admission to UWL indicates that students can achieve your standard unless it is so late in the course that their performance on earlier learning tasks places them too far behind.

Other research on culturally relevant teaching focuses on establishing an inclusive climate, constructing a motivational climate that engages a broad range of students, and on the benefits of cross-cultural collaboration. That research does support the "diversity model" over the "deficit model," since it indicates very clearly that all students benefit from culturally responsive approaches. The theory also implies a feminist pedagogy, anti-bias education, and a social justice framework for higher education.

Students from historically underserved groups benefit when classroom interactions centralize respectful engagement and clear ground rules that everyone learns how to enforce.

Strategies

Develop your own plan for learning: Where are the most important gaps in your base of knowledge? Your goal is for your students to value their own cultural identity and their groups' histories. To do that, you might need to know more about some of your students than you currently do. No one will be expert on every group; but everyone can learn more than we know right now. You might also need to know more about how stereotypes develop, how they are maintained, how they are learned, how they are unlearned, how they are institutionalized, how they function particularly in higher education. Fortunately, we have an excellent library at UWL with access to all UW System resources.

Show up for students: building rapport happens outside the classroom as much as inside it. If you want students from historically underserved groups to come to view you as an ally, you will likely have to build trust. One way to begin is by attending the events hosted by student organizations and by the offices in Diversity and Inclusion. Here's how to add the D&I calendar to Outlook Online so that you can pop it on and off without needing to go to the university website.

Infuse your course. Here are some strategies to explore.

Develop authentic and relevant assignments: Explore CATL's googlesite on authentic assignments for more.

Address climate issues.

References/Resources

Ladson-Billings, Gloria (1995). Toward a theory of culturally relevant pedagogy. American Research Journal. 32(3) 465-491.

The Education Alliance (n.d.). Cultural responsive teaching, in Teaching diverse learners. Brown University.

Ginsberg, M., & Wlodkowski, Raymond J. (2009). Diversity and motivation : Culturally responsive teaching in college. 2nd ed. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Wise feedback:
Cohen, G. L., Steele, C. M., & Ross, L. D. (1999). The mentor's dilemma: Providing critical feedback across the racial divide. Personality and Social Psychology, Bulletin, 25, 1302-1318.

Yeager, D. S., Purdie-Vaughns, V., Garcia, J., Apfel, N., Brzustoski, P., Master, A., Hessert, W. T., Williams, M. E., & Cohen, G. L. (2014). Breaking the cycle of mistrust: wise interventions to provide critical feedback across the racial divide. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 143:2.

Hoskins, D. (2017). Culturally responsive teaching. In Instructor's Guide to Inclusive Excellence. Center for Advancing Teaching and Learning, University of Wisconsin at La Crosse. https://www.uwlax.edu/catl/teaching-guides/instructors-guide-to-inclusive-excellence/designing-and-teaching-inclusive-courses/culturally-responsive-teaching/

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University of Wisconsin-La Crosse | uwlax.edu Culturally responsive (or culturally relevant) teaching theory originated in K-12. It tasks instructors with developing and then using cross-cultural competence: learning about the lives, cultures, languages, and group histories of the students in your classes and then integrating those perspectives, histories, values, practices, and issues into the structure, materials, interactions, and relationships of your course.

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George Lucas Educational Foundation

Find and share resources and explore strategies to engage students by connecting to and honoring their cultures, experiences, and backgrounds.

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Understanding students' lives can help teachers foster a sense of belonging and ensure that all students feel respected and challenged.

A primer on the impact of implicit biases in schools and how they can be expressed by students and faculty.

Five ways teachers can celebrate and extend the linguistic expertise of young students who speak two or more languages.

Influenced by the pandemic and social unrest, two teachers recommend books to read this summer on topics like wrestling with loss, addressing inequity, and recharging for the school year ahead.

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Find and share resources and explore strategies to engage students by connecting to and honoring their cultures, experiences, and backgrounds.

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This collection holds materials from the Education Alliance at Brown University. The Education Alliance was a reform support organization committed to advancing equitable educational opportunities that prepare all student populations to succeed in the 21st century. From 1975-2021, the Alliance partnered with schools, districts and state departments of education to apply research findings in developing solutions to educational challenges. Its mission was to enhance learning for culturally and linguistically diverse students and focused on district and school improvement with special attention to underperformance and issues of equity and diversity. DOI: https://doi.org/10.26300/7eez-dz04

The Education Alliance archived website can be found here

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Brown Digital Repository | Collection | The Education ...

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This collection holds materials from the Education Alliance at Brown University. The Education Alliance was a reform support organization committed to advancing equitable educational opportunities that prepare all student populations to succeed in the 21st century. From 1975-2021, the Alliance partnered with schools, districts and state departments of education to apply research findings in developing solutions to educational challenges.

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Intercultural Competence - Scott and Stephanie Hamm

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Intercultural Competence - Scott and Stephanie Hamm

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A person signs the word "now" in ASL. (Washington Post photo illustration;iStock)

About US is a new initiative by The Washington Post to cover issues of identity in the United States. Sign up for the newsletter.

Felecia Redd always communicates more than the words she hears when interpreting in sign language. She enlarges and dramatizes her gestures when conveying the soaring rhetoric of a black preacher. She shifts her facial expressions to reflect a speaker's emotions and vocal styles.

"I try to match them," said Redd, a sign language interpreter for 19 years.

Redd, who is black but was taught to sign by white teachers, said she did what came naturally, not thinking about the racial aspect of her signing.

A 30-minute documentary changed that. "Signing Black in America" describes how a distinctive black signing system, or Black ASL, has evolved, reflecting the historic isolation of members of the black deaf community and their contemporary sense of solidarity.

The signs are often larger, involving two hands when white signers use one, and gestured closer to the forehead than the chin. Some words are represented by completely different signs.

"I did it. But I didn't know it was a thing, that it was Black ASL," said Redd, explaining how moved she was to understand the system's enduring cultural importance for users who are marginalized by both race and hearing loss.

"I'm always told by deaf African Americans, 'I am black first; then I'm deaf,'" Redd said. "White deaf people are deaf first and then white."

The new film is the 14th in a series produced by North Carolina State University's Language & Life Project, which celebrates the linguistic diversity of the United States and examines how people use language to define themselves. "First Language" documents the Eastern Band of Cherokee's attempts to save their mother tongue; "Mountain Talk" records the songs and stories of Southern Appalachia; and "Speaking Black in America," which won a Midsouth Regional Emmy Award this week in the documentary/cultural category, traces how a history of segregation and the contemporary sense of shared identity shape the ways African Americans communicate.

The project also has deeper sociolinguistic goals that are key for users of Black ASL - to investigate why people often "code switch," changing the way they speak when they move from one social setting to another, and why one form of a language is sometimes considered "better" than another.

Those questions prompted lively interaction among students, teachers and interpreters who gathered last week at D.C.'s Gallaudet University to watch the film and discuss it with a panel that included several people who were featured.

Sign language, like spoken language, has regional variations (people sign more slowly in the South, for example), as well as features that reflect gender, age, socioeconomic status and, it turns out, race.

A history of educational and social segregation set black signers apart in the 1860s, when schools opened for them, leading to the development of separate grammatical features and vocabulary, in much the way that spoken black English (known as African American English or AAE by linguists) is distinct.

Q&A: Race matters in deaf communication

Carolyn McCaskill, a professor in Gallaudet's Department of ASL and Deaf Studies, who grew up signing at the Alabama School for the Negro Deaf and Blind, spotted differences 50 years ago that went way beyond the size and style of signing.

At 15, McCaskill transferred to an integrated school, where she saw white students using one hand rather than two to convey terms such as "why" and "don't know" and employing entirely different signs for everyday words such as "pregnant," "boss," "flirt" and "school." McCaskill began to imitate them.

When she went home, she switched again to reassimilate to her own black culture, recalled McCaskill, who was on the panel.

McCaskill's code-switching remains a common experience for deaf black students, who often change to accommodate whites, according to Solimar Aponte-Huertas, a deaf student from Puerto Rico.

"It's kind of sad," she said through an interpreter, adding that there is a common belief that "black signing isn't as good."

Still, there is rising pride in the dynamism and almost dance-like style of Black ASL at Gallaudet, where about 13 percent of the students are black.

"It's just beautiful," said Candas Barnes, an African American interpreter, describing how body language derived from hip-hop and other aspects of contemporary black culture have infused the signing.

"It's not so hidden anymore," said Ceil Lucas, a retired professor of linguistics, who, with McCaskill, was part of a team of researchers who formally described the structure of black sign language in their 2011 book, " The Hidden Treasure of Black ASL."

On-screen, Warren "WaWa" Snipe, a deaf writer and performer, sums up the significance of a signing style that reflects who he is.

"That's my culture," says Snipe, who graduated from Gallaudet in 1994. "That's a sense of identity. That's where I belong."

Traveling with a disability: How I've explored 13 countries in a wheelchair

Still, the bigger, more expressive gestures associated with Black ASL can cause confusion. Franklin Jones, an African American lecturer in the Department of ASL and Deaf Studies, said his signing sometimes made white students think he was angry.

"I had to explain," he said.

"White people say it's 'attitude,' but it's just their style," said Aponte-Huertas.

Navigating that style can be a challenge for nonblack interpreters.

Naveh Berner-Kadish, who is majoring in interpretation, looked for guidance from the panel: How should he, a white, Jewish man, interpret for people whose background and culture he does not share?

There are simply some assignments a white interpreter should not take, the panelists said, burdened as the interaction is with the implications of a white person speaking for a black person, as well as the potential for cultural appropriation. In other cases, it might make sense to work with a black interpreter to avoid those pitfalls. Taking the time to learn about the linguistic and cultural differences is key, they agreed.

"It's a fine line, giving the linguistic and meta-linguistic features without crossing the line over to appropriating that style," Berner-Kadish said later. "I would have to make sure I was very much in tune with the community."

I'm an environmentalist opposed to single-use straws. My disability has challenged my views.

The troubling history of blaming Asian Americans for public health scares

Mike Bloomberg ignored early evidence that 'stop-and-frisk' could be racially biased

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Perspective | How America developed two sign languages - one white, one black

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About US is a new initiative by The Washington Post to cover issues of identity in the United States. Sign up for the newsletter . Felecia Redd always communicates more than the words she hears when interpreting in sign language. She enlarges and dramatizes her gestures when conveying the soaring rhetoric of a black preacher.

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You may have heard that many companies are stepping up their efforts to hire people with disabilities. In this webinar, we'll here from representatives at Microsoft and Google about what they're companies are doing. Neil Barnett started Microsoft's Autism hiring program in 2015 and is leading the efforts to improve the experiences for Microsoft employees and their customers with disabilities.

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Faculty and instructional designers can employ a number of strategies to create courses and learning environments where students feel welcome and conn

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Dr. Tiffany Jana has helped orchestrate TMI's growth over the past 16 years. This includes leading the merger of three companies that resulted in the launch of TMI in 2010. Dr. Jana subsequently established a national network of consultants and spearheaded the company's transition into the world's first Certified Benefit Corporation with a diversity and engagement focus. Dr. Jana has positioned TMI Portfolio as a global leader in metrics-based engagement. Dr. Jana has been featured in numerous publications and media including Fast Company, Inc.com, and Forbes for their work on diversity, equity, empowerment, and inclusion.

As the Founder of TMI's Portfolio of companies, Dr. Jana oversees the development of the firm's strategies, client relationships, and people. Dr. Jana serves as a strategic advisor on client engagements, and has deep expertise in diversity and inclusion, using metrics to gauge organizational equity and unconscious bias. Dr. Jana's vision is to help clients optimize their workplace and community environments based on stated values.

Dr. Jana is the proud mother of three children, a quirky VCU computer science major, a charismatic Harvard economics major, and a musically gifted middle schooler.

Awards

Inc.com 2018 Top 100 Leadership Speaker

Enterprising Women of the Year Award 2017 from Enterprising Women Magazine

Style Weekly's 2013 Top 40 Under 40

Diversity Journal's 2013 'Women Worth Watching'

Metropolitan Business League's 2014 Entrepreneur of the Year

Finalist for the National Association of Women Business Owners 2014 Entrepreneur of the Year

Memberships

Member of Board of Directors, Richmond Economic Development Authority

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Social Venture Circle, Lifetime Member

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Talks

Publications

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Dr. Tiffany Jana has helped orchestrate TMI's growth over the past 16 years. This includes leading the merger of three companies that resulted in the launch of TMI in 2010. Dr. Jana subsequently established a national network of consultants and spearheaded the company's transition into the world's first Certified Benefit Corporation with a diversity and engagement focus.

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About Jennifer's Speaking

Jennifer Brown's presentations are high-energy, interactive dialogues with audiences that awaken and inspire leaders to step forward more proactively on behalf of diversity, and to set a tone that seeks and celebrates inclusion as a core business driver.

Jennifer has spoken at many top conferences and events worldwide, such as the International Diversity Forum in Paris and the inaugural Global D&I Summit in India, as well as the Forum for Workplace Inclusion, the Out & Equal Workplace Summit, Emerging Women, and the Better Man Conference in the United States. She has also spoken at organizations such as Expedia, the NBA, Google, IBM, and many more.

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Jennifer Brown | Diversity & Inclusion Expert, Keynote Speaker & Author

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Jennifer Brown is an author, thought leader and sought-after speaker who advises Fortune 500 companies and many others on how to build more inclusive workplaces which allow all kinds of talent to feel welcomed, valued, respected, and heard.

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Mapping

We strive to map Indigenous territories, treaties, and languages across the world in a way that goes beyond colonial ways of thinking in order to better represent how Indigenous people want to see themselves.

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Native Land is a resource to learn more about Indigenous territories, languages, lands, and ways of life. We welcome you to our site.

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Unconscious Bias - References to Erasing Institutional Bias by Jana and Mejias

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Unconscious Bias - References to Erasing Institutional Bias by Jana and Mejias

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Diversity and Inclusion in the Workplace - Coursera Course

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Diversity and Inclusion in the Workplace - Coursera Course

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Diversity is a fact. It is also paradoxical. We need to be capable of seeing and hearing differences in order to reap the benefits of diversity. But seeing and hearing differences hone our discriminating reflexes and can also lead to discrimination. If you take this MOOC, you will: 1. understand this paradox, 2. understand its dynamics, and 3. identify ways to manage it, so that you can better channel the diversity potential in the workplace for greater performance and innovation.

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Diversity and inclusion in the workplace | Coursera

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Learn Diversity and inclusion in the workplace from ESSEC Business School. Diversity is a fact. It is also paradoxical. We need to be capable of seeing and hearing differences in order to reap the benefits of diversity. But seeing and hearing ...

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I enjoy collaborating to help build a culture of inclusion that increases engagement, and by extension, increases innovation. My work embodies Servant Leadership, and begins with digging deep to answer a fundamental question: "What are you asking people to be included in?"

I also support individuals who are struggling with oppressive or exclusive circumstances in and outside of the workplace.

As an Inclusion Coach ™, I'm committed to help overcome barriers associated with the -isms, utilizing individual and group coaching. Working hand in hand with organizations, we come together to build an inclusive framework for ideation exploring unconscious bias, conscious choice and courageous action.

Helping others grow, transform, and transcend is my way of contributing to meaningful solutions relative to injustice and oppression.

If you're committed to moving beyond the mainstream narrative of diversity and inclusion, I look forward to collaborating with you. There is strength in solidarity as we link arms with like-minded people along our journey towards a holistic culture of inclusion!

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I enjoy collaborating to help build a culture of inclusion that increases engagement, and by extension, increases innovation. My work embodies Servant Leadership, and begins with digging deep to answer a fundamental question: "What are you asking people to be included in?"

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During the Hawkins Leadership Roundtable at the 2019 EDUCAUSE Annual Conference, higher education IT leaders discussed practical steps that CIOs and hiring committees can take to be deliberate about addressing diversity, equity, and inclusion during the hiring process.

Credit: Pure Imagination / Shutterstock.com © 2019

The need for innovation in higher education has never been greater: with pressure to provide more meaningful, targeted, and responsive learning opportunities for twenty-first century students, we, as higher education professionals, are being challenged to envision and enact models of teaching that are fundamentally different than anything we have seen before. At this transformational moment, ensuring that the best thinking is brought to bear is critical. David Komlos and David Benjamin, authors of Cracking Complexity: The Breakthrough Formula for Solving Just about Anything Fast, explain in a recent opinion piece that diverse teams are better at tackling complex challenges than are teams that lack diversity. In the article, Komlos and Benjamin provide a framework for developing diverse teams.

And yet, it is no secret that IT leaders struggle to increase diversity among their teams. EDUCAUSE has begun addressing this challenge head-on by championing diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) at its conferences and in its publications. EDUCAUSE is also engaging directly with organizations such as the College and University Professional Association for Human Resources (CUPA-HR) and the Center for Higher Education CIO Studies, Inc. (CHECS) to provide resources and disseminate knowledge about how to increase diversity in the higher education IT profession.

Most recently, the 2019 EDUCAUSE Annual Conference spotlighted the importance of inclusive hiring and diverse teams for innovation and business success. The opening and closing keynote sessions focused on the roles inclusion and diversity play in enabling transformative innovation. The keynote sessions specifically emphasized the very practical side of opening up the playing field to groups that have traditionally been marginalized from IT roles-especially IT leadership roles. In addition to the keynote and multiple conference sessions, the thread of DEI was woven throughout the special conference offerings, such as the New IT Managers Program, the Senior Directors Seminar, and the Hawkins Leadership Roundtable.

Key Takeaways for Inclusive Hiring

During the Hawkins Leadership Roundtable, participants shared practical steps that CIOs and hiring committees can take to be deliberate about addressing DEI during the hiring process. The discussion included the multiple dimensions that are important to building a strong, diverse team, including demographic diversity, skill set variety, and experience.

1. Job description: Review the job description for gendered language that could be off-putting to female candidates and that may imply characteristics or traits that may be stereotypically associated with the IT field but that are not, in fact, required. For example, Danielle Gaucher, Justin Friesen, and Aaron Kay identified "challenge," "lead," "boast," and "active" as terms that may dissuade women from applying.

2. Explicit statement of DEI values: Be sure the job description explicitly states that the institution values diversity. Likewise, the CIO and the search chair should speak with the committee members about the importance of having a diverse applicant pool and a diverse team.

3. Recruitment strategy: Find ways to expand the reach of your announcement; for example, through social media, special professional organizations, or special interest groups for different professional populations, and by proactively recruiting candidates.

4. Search committee: Ensure that the search committee is made up of members from a variety of units and technical and non-technical backgrounds. Have someone outside the IT department or in the specialized area on the committee.

5. Implicit bias training: Have a discussion with members of the search committee about implicit bias or ask them to read a related article or view a video. Then, ask them to take one of the Harvard implicit bias surveys for self-awareness. The results do not necessarily need to be shared.

6. Human resources (HR) support: Conduct equity reviews during the search process. HR departments administer these reviews to ensure that the pool of candidates invited for interviews meets equity criteria. If this service is not automatic, CIOs can ask their HR office if it is available.

7. Résumé review: Conduct a blind review of résumés-that is, have the candidates' names and dates of degrees removed from their résumés before the search committee reviews them.

8. Rubric: Have the search committee members use a rubric to evaluate key skills and experiences for each candidate.

9. CIO Commitment: Sign the CIO's Commitment on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.

Only the Beginning

These suggestions focus primarily on the pre-interview stage of recruitment. There are certainly many more inclusive hiring strategies to consider once the candidates are identified and invited on campus for interviews. Best practices suggest using a competency-based interview processes and standardizing the interview agenda so that each candidate has as close to the same experience as possible. Additionally, once you have hired a more diverse team, equal attention must be paid to how you support those new team members; inclusivity begins with hiring but must extend into the workplace as well, especially as an institution becomes more diverse. Only then will higher education professionals be able to maximize the diversity of thinking to solve the complex problems that universities are faced with today.

Notes

1. David Komlos and David Benjamin, "How Highly Diverse Teams Can Help Untangle Complexity," [email protected], September 5, 2019. ↩

2. "Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Resources," EDUCAUSE (website), n.d., accessed November 1, 2016. ↩

3. Keith McIntosh, Jeff Pomerantz, Helena Rodrigues, Craig Smith, and Melissa Woo, "Expanding Your Recruitment Pool through Increasing Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion," EDUCAUSE Review, June 5, 2017; Adam Pritchard, Keith McIntosh, and Jasper McChesney, Diversity in Higher Education Information Technology: From Today's Workforce to Tomorrow's Leaders, research report, (Knoxville, TN: CUPA-HR, July 2019). ↩

4. Danielle Gaucher, Justin Friesen, and Aaron C. Kay, "Evidence that Gendered Wording in Job Advertisements Exists and Sustains Gender Inequality," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 101, no. 1 (2011): 109-128. ↩

5. For example, Gail Tolstoi-Miller, "Unconscious Bias: Stereotypical Hiring Practices," filmed May 4, 2017, at TedXLincolnSquare, New York, NY, video, 10:32. ↩

Heather McCullough is Associate Director, Center for Teaching and Learning, at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.

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During the Hawkins Leadership Roundtable at the 2019 EDUCAUSE Annual Conference, higher education IT leaders discussed practical steps that CIOs and hiring committees can take to be deliberate about addressing diversity, equity, and inclusion during the hiring process.

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This series will explore concepts, practices, and organizational shifts that are central to inclusive pedagogy in higher education.

Credit: Bent Chang / Shutterstock.com © 2019

Before you read further, we'd like you to consider how you define inclusion. What does it mean to you? Please enter a brief (three to five words or up to forty characters) definition of inclusion into the Answer Garden text field below and click Submit to view a word cloud with other responses.

We asked you to share your definition of inclusion because, if you are reading this post, it is likely that you are in some way connected to a community with a vested interest in teaching and learning, and you value student experience, persistence, retention, and satisfaction. The responses collected from you, our teaching and learning community, will inform the discussion in our next post about what inclusion might look like in practice. Compositionist Claire Lauer explained that definitions are important to a community because they represent "the collective interests and values of the community for which the definition matters." Especially when our community values placing students at the center of the educational experience, the terms we use to think, talk, and collaborate matter.

This initial post defines three important terms- disclosure, accessibility, and inclusion -in the hope of contributing to a common vocabulary in our community around accessible and inclusive teaching and learning. These terms are a starting point for a larger conversation and a shift in design practices.

Attempting to define nuanced concepts brings with it a risk or reductionism, which is why the definitions that follow draw from cognitive science, universal design, and disability studies.

Disclosure or Self-Identity

Have you heard of the WYSIATI principle? Coined by Nobel Prize laureate Daniel Kahneman and pronounced "whiz-ee-yaht-tee," this acronym stands for What You See Is All There Is. It's theorized as a common, unconscious bias that even well-intentioned educators make: "I can't see it, so it doesn't exist." It's the idea that our minds are prone to making judgements and forming impressions based on the information available to us. In teaching and learning, the WYSIATI principle is an idea with consequences. That is, the students in our classes have all kinds of invisible circumstances that can impact their learning. Some of these circumstances include the following:

Attention or comprehension problems because of an emotional hardship or learning disability

Using a single device, like a phone or a tablet, for doing all of their digital coursework

Familial or other work obligations outside of school

A long commute to and from campus

Homelessness, or food or housing insecurities

Low vision, but not blindness; difficulty looking at a screen for extended periods of time

Difficulty hearing, but not deafness

A lack of experience or experienced mentors in higher education or in particular disciplines

Returning to school after a period of time and feeling rusty, insecure, or experiencing imposter syndrome

While campuses are required to provide services (e.g., alternative formats for course materials, extra exam time, etc.) for students with disabilities and may have additional support for students with various other challenges, unless students self-identify or disclose their circumstances, courses and associated materials may contain barriers to student learning-even if those barriers are inadvertent. A faculty colleague shared with us that she had favored the use of a particular color to emphasize important ideas in her documents for nearly an entire semester before a student revealed to her that he could not see that color. Had she known, she would have made a simple change so that the student could read or understand the most important parts of the course documents. This is the WYSIATI principle at work: this faculty member couldn't see that her student was color blind, so she didn't know that she needed to do anything about it.

Whether or not students need to self-identify or disclose their circumstances is not the point. The point is that invisible circumstances exist regardless of disclosure, and, collectively, we can all do a better job of awareness: identifying and removing barriers from courses can benefit everyone, but doing so can also be critical to those who need it.

Accessibility

Colloquially, the term accessibility is often used to describe items or spaces that are available for use. One can expect an accessible road to be open as an option for safe, unobstructed travel for most vehicles. Here's another example of an email from Dropbox, an online file storage tool, after a user reached the free storage limit.

In this email, the term accessible refers to availability. The user will not be able to access files because they will not be available on other devices. In both of these examples, however, the term accessible is limited to able individuals-those who are able to access material in its current form. In teaching and learning, as well as in universal design, accessible means that materials and spaces are not only available but also free from invisible barriers-even unintended ones-for anyone who needs to access those materials.

For example, an accessible text is one that is clearly organized, uses an unembellished font, and incorporates headings to separate sections. Online images should contain alternative text for moments when pages don't load properly or for readers who use assistive devices. Videos should include closed captions or transcripts for people with hearing issues or attention/tracking problems, as well as for those who multitask (watch while exercising, for example). Even certain colloquial terms and cultural references that are used without context or explanation in a lecture or course material can function as barriers to learning.

The term accessible is evolving and currently connotes disability services and accommodations. Citing a keynote address by Andrew Lessman, a distance education lawyer, Thomas Tobin and Kirsten Behling explain why accessibility as accommodation is a problematic way to think about design: "'accommodations are supposed to be for extraordinary circumstances'" and, paraphrasing him, added the following:

[I]t should be very rare for people to need to make specific requests for circumstances to be altered just for them [. . .] all of these environments, whether physical or virtual, should be designed so that the broadest segment of the general population will be able to interact successfully with materials and people.

This idea applies to course design and instruction just as much as it applies to physical spaces. Practicing accessible course design and instruction is an opportunity (and a necessary imperative) to develop a pedagogy of inclusion.

Inclusion

The previous two definitions have tried to articulate the idea that students carry intersecting invisible circumstances with them into the classroom. Whether or not students disclose their circumstances-or whether faculty members invite students to disclose them-does not determine their existence. From this perspective, inclusion means designing and teaching for variability. Faculty can practice inclusive pedagogy by following universal design principles and offering multiple options for representation, engagement, and expression:

Options are essential to learning, because no single way of presenting information, no single way of responding to information, and no single way of engaging students will work across the diversity of students that populate our classrooms. Alternatives reduce barriers to learning for students with disabilities while enhancing learning opportunities for everyone.

In a Nutshell . . .

Inclusive pedagogy can be an act of intention-something that is initiated before and during the course design process-rather than being an act of revision or omission.

Contribute to the Conversation!

Tweet your favorite inclusive design practices and resources, and be sure to tag @TLIatCI, @a11ygal, and @lgonzalez1

Notes

Special thanks to Amanda Timpson, Sarah Lohnes Watulak, and Tara Hughes for contributing their time to this post.

1. Clair Lauer, "Contending with Terms: 'Multimodal' and 'Multimedia' in the Academic and Public Spheres," Computers and Composition 26, no. 4 (2009): 225-239. ↩

2. Valerie Young, "Finding a Name for the Feelings," Imposter Syndrome (website), October 23, 2017; Megan Dalla-Camina, "The Reality of Imposter Syndrome," Psychology Today, September 23, 2018. ↩

3. Thomas Tobin and Kirsten Behling, Reach Everyone, Teach Everyone: Universal Design for Learning in Higher Education (Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 2018). ↩

Lorna Gonzalez is an Instructional Designer for Teaching and Learning Innovations and a Lecturer at California State University Channel Islands.

Kristi O'Neil is the Instructional Technologist-Accessibility Lead for Teaching and Learning Innovations at California State University Channel Islands.

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a taxonomy of inclusive design: on disclosure

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A Taxonomy of Inclusive Design: On Disclosure, Accessibility, and Inclusion

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This series will explore concepts, practices, and organizational shifts that are central to inclusive pedagogy in higher education. Before you read further, we'd like you to consider how you define inclusion. What does it mean to you?

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What Is the Singular "They"?

The singular "they" is a generic third-person pronoun used in English. It's not the only third-person singular pronoun-other third-person singular pronouns are "she" and "he" as well as less common options such as "ze" or "hen."

Although the term singular "they" may be unfamiliar, you've probably heard and used the singular "they" in conversation throughout your life. Here is an example:

A person should enjoy their vacation.

The noun in this sentence is "person," and the pronoun is "their."

Before the seventh edition, people might have written the aforementioned sentence like this in a scholarly paper:

A person should enjoy his or her vacation.

However, this second sentence presumes that a person uses either the pronoun "he" or the pronoun "she," which is not necessarily the case. For example, some people use other pronouns, including "they," "zir," "ze," "xe," "hir," "per," "ve," "ey," and "hen."

Why Use the Singular "They"?

When readers see a gendered pronoun, they make assumptions about the gender of the person being described (Gastil, 1990; Moulton et al., 1978). APA advocates for the singular "they" because it is inclusive of all people and helps writers avoid making assumptions about gender.

When Should I Use the Singular "They"?

Writers should use the singular "they" in two main cases: (a) when referring to a generic person whose gender is unknown or irrelevant to the context and (b) when referring to a specific, known person who uses "they" as their pronoun.

When referring to a generic person whose gender is unknown or irrelevant to the context, use the singular "they" as the pronoun. For example, if you use nouns like "person," "individual," or "everyone" or phrases like "every teacher" or "each nurse" in a sentence, use the appropriate form of the pronoun "they" as needed.

Each student submitted their art portfolio to the committee.
not
Each student submitted his or her art portfolio to the committee.

If you are writing about a specific, known person, always use that person's pronouns. The person's pronouns might be "she/her," "they/them," "he/him," or something else-just ask to find out! It is also good practice for an individual to volunteer what pronouns they use so that others do not have to ask.

If a person uses "she" or "he," do not use "they" instead. Likewise, if a person uses "they," do not switch to "he" or "she." Use the pronouns the person uses.

Kai is a nonbinary person. They attend university in their home state of Vermont and are majoring in chemistry. Kai's friend River is a transgender woman. She attends the same university and is majoring in physics.

What Verbs Do I Use With the Singular "They"?

When "they" is the subject of a sentence, "they" takes a plural verb regardless of whether "they" is meant to be singular or plural. For example, write "they are," not "they is." The singular "they" works similarly to the singular "you"-even though "you" may refer to one person or multiple people, in a scholarly paper you should write "you are," not "you is." However, if the noun in one sentence is a word like "individual" or a person's name, use a singular verb.

Every individual is unique. They are a combination of strengths and weaknesses.
not
Every individual is unique. They is a combination of strengths and weaknesses.
Every individual is unique. She or he is a combination of strengths and weaknesses.

Read more about plural verb forms for the singular "they" from the folks at Merriam-Webster.

What Is a Generic Person, Anyway?

Some people write about a generic person but give that generic person gendered qualities. For example, someone might write about "Jane Doe" and intend that Jane be a woman who uses "she/her" pronouns. In that case, it would be acceptable to use the pronoun "she" to refer to Jane because Jane is meant to be a generic woman who uses "she/her" pronouns, not a generic person who might use any pronouns.

Use the singular "they" when the generic person is truly generic-devoid of gendered qualities. When describing generic people, it is easiest to avoid names (or to pick names without an obvious gender association) to avoid this confusion.

What If I Don't Like the Singular "They"-Do I Have to Use It?

If you are writing about a person who uses "they" as their pronoun, then yes, you have to use it. Respectful and inclusive language is important. And it's part of APA Style.

If you are writing about a generic person, you should use the singular "they" if your sentence includes a pronoun. However, there are many ways to write grammatical and inclusive sentences. For example, you can rewrite a sentence in the plural to use plural pronouns, or you can rewrite a sentence so that it does not use pronouns at all.

Here are some examples:

People should enjoy their vacations.
A person should enjoy vacations.
A vacation should be enjoyable.

These sentences are just as grammatical and inclusive as "A person should enjoy their vacation."

Where Did the Change Come From?

Questions?

To learn more about the singular "they," read the style and grammar guidelines page on singular "they." It includes more examples of the proper forms and ways to write inclusive, grammatical sentences.

You can also find guidance on the singular "they" in Section 4.18 of the Publication Manual (7th ed.).

If you have other questions or feedback, leave a comment!

References

Gastil, J. (1990). Generic pronouns and sexist language: The oxymoronic character of masculine generics. Sex Roles, 23(11-12), 629-643. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00289252

Moulton, J., Robinson, G. M., & Elias, C. (1978). Sex bias in language use: "Neutral" pronouns that aren't. American Psychologist, 33(11), 1032-1036. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003066X.33.11.1032

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The singular "they" is a generic third-person pronoun used in English. It's not the only third-person singular pronoun-other third-person singular pronouns are "she" and "he" as well as less common options such as "ze" or "hen." Although the term singular "they" may be unfamiliar, you've probably heard and used the singular "they" in conversation throughout your life.

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Everyone has a diversity story... even those you don't expect. Hear from leading CEOs, bestselling authors and entrepreneurs as Jennifer uncovers their true stories of diversity and inclusion.

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Everyone has a diversity story... even those you don't expect. Hear from leading CEOs, bestselling authors and entrepreneurs as Jennifer uncovers their true stories of diversity and inclusion.

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I've spoken at dozens of conferences, institutions, and universities across the country, including The US Department of Education, The American Education Research Association, New America, Education Writers Association, TEDxNYED, Georgetown University, University of Pennsylvania, Columbia University, American Federation of Teachers, National Education Association, and many more.

If you'd like to book me, click on the button below.

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The Jose Vilson | Teacher - Author - Activist - Father

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I've spoken at dozens of conferences, institutions, and universities across the country, including The US Department of Education, The American Education Research Association, New America, Education Writers Association, TEDxNYED, Georgetown University, University of Pennsylvania, Columbia University, American Federation of Teachers, National Education Association, and many more.

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Social media has served as our primary platform for community and coalition. With over 21,000 followers on Twitter and over half a million views to our hashtag, we've mobilized the digital community towards concrete action on equity, justice, and anti-racism. Every last Thursday of the month, we host a townhall-style conversation with our participants all over the world. In addition, the hashtag #EduColor has allowed for hundreds of participants to ask questions, provide resources, and answer questions across any number of identity markers.

We pride ourselves on having the difficult conversations while centering the most vulnerable and racially marginalized with a student-centered perspective.

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EduColor - The Organization and the Movement: This Is Our Moment

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Social media has served as our primary platform for community and coalition. With over 21,000 followers on Twitter and over half a million views to our hashtag, we've mobilized the digital community towards concrete action on equity, justice, and anti-racism. Every last Thursday of the month, we host a townhall-style conversation with our participants all over the world.

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Podcast: Diversity & Inclusion

Posted on August 23, 2018 by Alexis Morton

We recently reviewed two compelling Inside Higher Ed articles with Jada Hebra, Southern New Hampshire University's (SNHU) Senior Vice President and Chief Diversity and Inclusion Officer. Each article explores the intersection of race and online instruction in a different way. In the article Does Online Reinforce the Color Line, Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs) are highlighted as being "an engine of racial inequality" due to the lack of support built into their model of instruction and the delivery platform. The article Forging New Territory Online highlights benefits that innovations in online education can bring to underserved populations and learners who are focused on "upskilling" sometimes referred to as "stranded workers."

Our initial conversation was inspiring and compelled us to podcast a similar discussion with SNHU instructional designers Emily McCarron and Natalia Mejia Escobar. Together we explored the call to action for online educators and administrators, as well as the considerations and intentionality that is built into our online culture, curriculum, and courses.

As you listen to Academic Alchemy, the podcast from SNHU's Center for Online Learning and Teaching, reflect on these questions:

How can I begin or continue a conversation about inclusion?

How can I intentionally model inclusion and empower learners through my work?

What biases do I have, and are they positively or negatively impacting students and colleagues?

What actions can I take as an individual and member of my community to become more inclusive?

About Alexis Morton

Alexis Morton has an MEd and is the Program Manager of Faculty Training & Development at Southern New Hampshire University.

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Posted on August 23, 2018 by Alexis Morton We recently reviewed two compelling Inside Higher Ed articles with Jada Hebra, Southern New Hampshire University's (SNHU) Senior Vice President and Chief Diversity and Inclusion Officer. Each article explores the intersection of race and online instruction in a different way.

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When I was in college I participated in a social justice workshop and during which we did what's often referred to as a "privilege walk". The privilege walk has become a go-to social justice activity, to my point here Buzzfeed doing one. For those of you who haven't participated in one, here are some of the essential components.

How it works: All participants line up in a horizontal line. The facilitator reads out statements and people move according to whether the statement is true for them or not. The statements have to do with privilege, typically all different aspects, but sometimes centered on a theme.

The statements may be something like, "take a step forward if you were raised by two parents," or "take a step back if you've wondered where your next meal was coming from." "Take a step forward if you're comfortable holding your partners hand in public." "Take a step back if people accuse you of using the wrong bathroom." Etc.

After the statements are read sometimes there is a final prompt like, "see who can cross this finish line first," or sometimes the activity simply closes. Sometimes, not all the time, the facilitator will debrief the activity ask how people felt, what the activity was like, what it's meant to represent. Sometimes there is no debrief and folks are left to reflect on their experience alone.

Now many people have different experiences and thoughts when it comes to privilege walks. Many folks, both those with highly marginalized experiences and those with a lot of privilege dislike the activity a lot. Others find it enlightening and eye opening. One thing privilege walks do really well is create opportunities for us to get real with the people we are with about our history and experiences. When done with in-tact groups (like a class in a school or team in a business) it can create ways into conversations that may be hard or take longer to get to otherwise.

The main reason that I don't facilitate privilege walks
is that I believe privilege walks rely on the experiences of people with marginalized identities to create a powerful learning experience for people with privilege.
Participants who have less privilege are asked to publicly share many of their experiences of being marginalized so that people (like me, who have had a lot privileged experiences) could learn from that difference. So we could be aware of the privilege that we have and they do not.

I first participated in a privilege walk almost a decade ago, and the memory is still vivid. I grew up quite privileged (white, upper class, high income, two-parent household) and I had some awareness of that. I had often been told by my parents that I was "lucky" and should be grateful for what I had. I barely took any steps backwards during the walk. Aside from questions about sexuality and gender it was smooth sailing. It felt awful. I felt guilty and shameful every time I took a step forward, it was powerful.

But, not all moments that are powerful are helpful or good. The memory of doing that privilege walk isn't tied to a profound awakening or a call to action to use my privilege, it's tied to shame. "I'm wrong for this, people are going to judge me for this, they are going to think that I'm bad." For those of us with (a lot of) privilege it can often feel like this shame-riddled experience.

Not only are marginalized people having to put their stories out there in order for me to learn but the way that I'm learning can leave me in places of shame. Shame can be incredibly corrosive and often stops us from seeking out more information or believing that we can change. Shame makes us feel like bad people, not people who are part of bad systems.

So was it a powerful experience, yes. Did I learn from the experience? Yes. But at what cost?

The last thing about privilege walks that compels me to avoid them is that privilege walks quite literally create a divide in the room and in the group. This divide can in turn generate a sense of us vs. them and an accompanying we-could-never-understand-each-other's-experiences-feeling. Instead of feeling empathetic towards those with less privilege, we may feel more disconnected. Instead of standing next to someone in a moment of injustice, we are no where near each other.

Us vs. them mentality has been used to continue to justify and perpetuate injustices. The belief that one person should see another person as 'the problem' is one of the fundamental truths social justice education works to undermine. Instead of highlighting how the systems negatively affect all of us and how systems encourage us to blame each other, privilege walks can instead are invited again to look at each other as the problem.

TL;DR

While I'm very much for conversations that invite folks to examine privilege, creates an opportunity for empathy, and that experientially brings about powerful realizations, for me privilege walks are not worth the cost.

They relies on people with marginalized experiences to share and name either experiences in order for some →much of the learning to happen.

They can generates shame without creating clear outlets, ways to process it, and ways to transform privilege for the good.

They continues to perpetuating an us vs. them divide.

A truth (don't facilitate privilege walks), however, is never that simple. There are ways/times that folks in my life, those with heavily marginalized identities who would have been in the back of the room have shared powerful stories about privilege walks in their life. A friend of mine who has a host of deeply marginalized identities participated in a privilege walk when they were in high school and thought the experience was deeply powerful, helpful, and uniting. That it brought their class closer together, allowed them to surface a lot of truths they wouldn't have otherwise, and created fodder for deep conversation. The conditions that we do these activities in change how the activities land. Their group knew each other, trusted each other, had been working together and had a whole semester to unpack the different emotions and realities that the walk brought up.

I think a lot of people facilitate privilege walks because they want to do something to bring up or discuss privilege and they don't know what else to do. Not because they feel it is specifically the right activity for the job or the moment. That is what I want to challenge us on and why I want to share my go-to privilege activity. To increase the options we have in our toolbox.

There is one perfect activity to replace privilege walks. I think as social justice educators when looking for something new we need to get curious. Get curious about our goals, about our intended outcomes, and about what we believe is important. What metrics are we using to assess our activities? Are we considering what emotions we are inviting into the space? Do we have enough time to honor those emotions? What is the cost of the educational route we are taking? Is the hard experienced simply part of the work? These questions are important to ask ourselves and to consider when building our trainings.

Instead of facilitating privilege walks I usually enter the conversation through a different door. My favorite activity to get a group examining and talking about privileges is Privilege for Sale. This activity has always created powerful learning opportunities (like privilege walks) but does not require personal disclosure for that power. It also allows people to engage emotionally with something that can often feel academic or highly political. While I don't believe there is any one single activity that is always the right one, Privilege for Sale is my go to.

In the end there is no one way to do social justice education. I'm so grateful that more and more of us are dedicating our time, energy, and resources to having these important conversations. Thank you, it's helping create a more beautiful, just, and equitable world. Let's get back to it.

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Why I don't facilitate privilege walks anymore and what I do instead

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When I was in college I participated in a social justice workshop and during which we did what's often referred to as a "privilege walk". The privilege walk has become a go-to social justice...

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The following is a list of the activities that we've shared in the Social Justice Toolbox. (Read more about how we classify our activities here)

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After professor-provocateur Camille Paglia made some especially offensive comments, student activists at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia demanded that she be dismissed (or put on the academic equivalent of 'administrative duty') and replaced by a queer person of color.

I see lots of suggestions along those lines these days. It seems to be a staple of student activist demands to campus administrations.

Certainly, some version of this makes good sense. In a diverse democracy, having campus administrations and faculties dominated by people from any particular race, religion, ethnicity, gender or geography is a problem.

But what solution are we hoping for when a demand for a specific identity hire is issued?

After all, the problem that student activists have with Camille Paglia is not with her identity, it's with her views.

What if the university acquiesced to the students' demands and hired a queer person of color, and that person turned out to be Jason D. Hill - a tenured professor of philosophy at DePaul who is black, gay, an immigrant, a scholar of cosmopolitanism and someone who is in hot water for a whole series of statements that appear to be aiming for the same standard of offensiveness (and notoriety) that Paglia occasionally achieves.

Demanding that someone of a certain identity be hired when what you really want is someone of a particular ideology is a little like breaking your foot and telling the surgeon your arm hurts and requires an operation. It is both the wrong description of the problem and a potentially disastrous solution.

Why do I find such proposals disastrous? Because they put minorities in an 'identity/ideology box' where having certain physical characteristics means that the audience (your political party, your administration, your students) feels like it can expect (sometimes even demand) particular ideological views. Refusing to stay in your box opens you up to banishment and other forms of punishment.

Why would anyone agree to those terms? Would you take a job that, on the surface, hired you for your identity, but where you were pretty sure that what people really wanted was for you to be a jukebox of a particular ideology? All they needed to do was put a quarter in and they could get you to play the ideological song they wanted to hear.

I remember reading something by Judith Butler when I was an undergraduate. If memory serves, she had agreed to speak at a lesbian feminist rally and opened her remarks by saying that she was fine appearing as a lesbian feminist as long as she was free to define what that meant for herself, and change her definition depending on the time, place, situation and stage of her life.

It's taken me twenty-five years to see the deep wisdom in that statement.

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What Do We Really Mean When We Say We Are Hiring For Identity | Conversations on Diversity

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After professor-provocateur Camille Paglia made some especially offensive comments, student activists at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia demanded that she be dismissed (or put on the academic equivalent of 'administrative duty') and replaced by a queer person of color. I see lots of suggestions along those lines these days.

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Eye on A.I.- How To Fix A.I.'s Diversity Crisis

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Research group AI Now, at New York University, released a study of artificial intelligence's diversity crisis and how it affects society.

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Workshops & Training
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About Paul C. Gorski Also Visit:

"Our struggle today is not to have a female Einstein get appointed as an assistant professor. It is for a woman schlemiel to get as quickly promoted as a male schlemiel." -Bella Abzug

[Full Quotation Collection]

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Multicultural Education Pavilion - Diversity, Equity, & Social Justice Education Resources

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Multicultural education, diversity, equity, and social justice education resources.

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Paul C. Gorski for equity, social justice, diversity, and multicultural education.

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Exchanging Stories--Names
Preparing and Assigning:

Ask participants to write short (one or two page) stories about their names. (You may have to assign this prior to the class in which you want to use it.) Leave the assignment open to individual interpretation as much as possible, but if asked for more specific instructions, suggest some or all of the following possibilities for inclusion in their stories:

Who gave you your name? Why?

What is the ethnic origin of your name?

What are your nicknames, if any?

What do you prefer to be called?

Ecourage students to be creative. In the past, some have written poetry, included humor, listed adjectives that described them, and so on. Also be sure to let them know that they will be sharing their stories with the rest of the class.
Facilitator Notes:

In order to ensure that everybody has an opportunity to share her or his story, break into diverse small groups of five or six if necessary. Give participants the option either to read their stories or to share their stories from memory. Ask for volunteers to share their stories.

Points to remember:

1. Because some individuals will include very personal information in their stories, some may be hesitant to read them, even in the small groups. It is sometimes effective in such situations for facilitators to share their stories first. If you make yourself vulnerable, others will be more comfortable doing the same.

2. Be sure to allow time for everyone to share, whether reading their stories or sharing them from memory.

3. When everyone has shared, ask participants how it felt to share their stories. Why is this activity important? What did you learn?

Sample--My Personal Name Story:
According to my mother, "Paul" means "small". When I say that to other folks, they tell me it doesn't mean "small," though no one seems to know what it means.

My parents wanted to name me "Cameron." "Paul" goes back three or four generations, I'm not sure which. My father and his father and his father are all named "Paul." But my mother liked "Cameron," so "Cameron" it was. But then I was born...five weeks prematurely. I was a tiny baby. I was the itsy-bitsiest baby in the new baby room at the hospital. According to my mother, that was a sign. Remember, "Paul" means "small".

So I am Paul Cameron Gorski. My father is Paul Peter Gorski. The exception, of course, is when someone calls my parents' home for one of us. At that point we become Big Paul and Little Paul, the father Paul and the son Paul, or the older one and the younger one (my Dad doesn't appreciate that one too much). Sometimes people call and I'm too exhausted to explain to them the whole idea that there are two Pauls living in one house, so I just pretend to be Paul Peter, and give my Dad the message later. He doesn't seem to mind that, especially when the caller is trying to sell us something. Still, I hope he doesn't do the same thing.

Paul lends itself well to rhyming nicknames. Bill, a good friend of mine, calls me "Tall Paul". He does so sarcastically, usually after blocking one of my shots in a basketball game. I often have to remind him that the whole irony of that nickname is that, according to my mother, "Paul" means "small," which is very nearly the opposite of "tall." In high school, I was often called "Paul Mall" in reference to a brand of cigarettes, because, as they said, my ball handling skills were smokin'. And again, the irony is that generally the small players have better ball handling skills.

The truth of the matter is that I really don't know whether or not "Paul" means "small". Perhaps it means "Jedi warrior" or "sunflower" or "career student". No matter. I've never looked it up, and never will. According to my Mom, "Paul" means "small." That sounds good to me.

[ Return to the Awareness Activities Page ]

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Exchanging Stories--Names Preparing and Assigning: Ask participants to write short (one or two page) stories about their names. (You may have to assign this prior to the class in which you want to use it.)

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Use identity charts to help students consider the many factors that shape their own identity and that of groups, nations, and historical and literary figures.

Advisory

English & Language Arts

History

Social Studies

Using the strategies from Facing History is almost like an awakening.

- Claudia Bautista, Santa Monica, Calif

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Use identity charts to help students consider the many factors that shape their own identity and that of groups, nations, and historical and literary figures.

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Introduction What Is Social Justice? Communal Agreements Icebreaker: Respect Activity Activities: Introducing Identity: "My Fullest Name" Understanding Privilege and Systems of Power: "Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack" Gender and Sexuality Workshop: Creating Gender-Free Nouns Race and Ethnicity: Diversity Profile Intersection Identity and Privilege: Crossing the Line Recap and Closing Activity Closing and Recommended Resources
Introduction

This toolkit is meant for anyone who feels there is a lack of productive discourse around issues of diversity and the role of identity in social relationships, both on a micro (individual) and macro (communal) level. Perhaps you are a teacher, youth group facilitator, student affairs personnel or manage a team that works with an underserved population. Training of this kind can provide historical context about the politics of identity and the dynamics of power and privilege or help build greater self-awareness.

The following activities are intended for groups of 10 to 60 people. For larger groups, you can break into multiple sessions with additional facilitators to ensure the conversations and activities remain focused. The diversity toolkit outlined here may be used as a guideline and can be modified to better fit your group's unique needs.

A note on facilitators: Facilitators should be well versed in the topics and themes we will be discussing, but they do not need to be experts. This workshop is organized as a popular education activity where the majority of the outcomes are learned from the experiences and knowledge of the individuals participating rather than a teacher/student relationship.

Facilitator Sensitivity

Facilitators will be experiencing and addressing the feelings that come with confronting participants' notions of identity, privilege, race and sexuality. Some participants may be required to attend this workshop (through work or school, etc.), so facilitators should be clear that participants are there because these are issues that affect everyone and that there will not be personal judgment of anyone's feelings about a particular issue. Facilitators should remind participants that:

Facilitators should emphasize that what is shared during the workshop is private and confidential. Participants can talk about how the workshop affected them personally and what they learned generally, but they should respect the privacy of the personal information of the other participants.

What Is Social Justice? Setting a Stage for Discussion

Before beginning, it's important that everyone have a basic understanding of two core concepts related to privilege and identity. This will allow everyone to start the conversations on the same page and ensure that the participants have a foundation upon which to build future knowledge.

The first core concept is culture, which is:

The second core concept is identity, which is:

Everyone Has Many Identities

Age, gender, religious or spiritual affiliation, sexual orientation, race, ethnicity and socioeconomic status are all identities. Some identities are things people can see easily (like race or assumed gender), while other identities are internalized and are not always easy to see (like a disability, socioeconomic status or education level). There are two types of identities that need to be defined in order to spark a discussion on social justice. The first type deals with identities that are part of a majority status - or "agent" - while the second includes identities that are part of the minority status - or "target."

Agent: Members of dominant social groups privileged by birth or acquisition who knowingly or unknowingly exploit and reap unfair advantage over members of the target groups.

Target: Members of social identity groups who are discriminated against, marginalized, disenfranchised, oppressed, exploited by an oppressor and oppressor's system of institutions without identity apart from the target group, and compartmentalized in defined roles.

After participants understand the difference between agent and target groups, the facilitator can begin a discussion on oppression. The key features of oppression are:

But remember:

When the facilitator talks about these concepts with the group, it is helpful to start with an understanding that everyone experienced being a target or agent at some point in their lives. This helps create a dialogue of understanding. This is not to say that some target statuses are more salient (for example, people can see I am a woman, or a Black woman, before they even speak with me) and others may be easier to conceal (for example, if I am lesbian). But each creates a burden on the individual and each has its own set of challenges to overcome.

Communal Agreements

Before initiating any activity, it is critical that the group builds communal agreements. Rather than naming these "rules" that are then placed upon the group, we will call these "agreements" because these are the guidelines built by the group that all members agree to follow during the course of the workshop. Once an agreement has been put forward, the facilitator should then ask for a definition of what that agreement means to ensure that there is a communal language. Below are several suggested agreements.

Icebreaker: Respect Activity

Source: Critical Multicultural Pavilion

Ask participants to find someone in the room they don't know and make an introduction. Talk for five to 10 minutes about respect. What does it mean to you to "show respect?" How do you show respect to others? After the allotted time, ask all participants to sit and open the discussion. How did people define respect? What were some of the core concepts discussed?

Common responses will likely include:

All responses are worthy of reflection in terms of their cultural and hegemonic influences. Ask participants where their ideas of respect come from and whom they are meant to protect. If the group raises any of the common responses above, challenge them to answer the following questions:

The point of the discussion is to reflect critically on assumptions and socializations regarding respect. The point is not to agree and to learn from each other's differences.

This activity helps to establish a basis of respect within the group, helping the participants take the first steps toward creating and maintaining a constructive discussion of social justice and equity. At the very least, participants meet someone new and exchange ideas with that person. The group also gets its first look at the similarities and differences between participants, potentially in ways that reflect privilege and power.

Activity One: Introduction Identity

Definition
Everyone has a personal and social identity. Personal identities include an individual's name, unique characteristics, history, personality and other traits that make one different from others. Social identity includes affinities one has with other people, values and norms that one accepts, and the ways one has learned to behave in social settings.

Objective
The following activity is particularly useful when working with participants who don't know one another very well. The goal of this activity is to warm up participants to sharing about themselves and start revealing a bit about each participant's background.

Materials
Markers and 8-by-10-inch sheets of paper folded horizontally.

Instructions
Write out your fullest name and tell your story. On the back of the piece of paper write the top three identities you feel closest to. The facilitator encourages participants to go around the circle to share any meanings, significance, culture, significant ancestors and the top three identities they hold dearest. Everyone will have a chance to share and be heard by the group.

Suggested questions if participants need help getting started:

Facilitators should encourage students to be creative. Make it clear that it is acceptable to write poetry, list adjectives that describe them, include humor, etc.

If your group is large, break into diverse small groups of five or six to make sure everyone has an opportunity to share their story. Ask for volunteers to get the group started and tell participants they can share their stories from memory, or read them.
Facilitator Notes

Discussion
When everyone has shared, ask participants how it felt to share their stories. Why is this activity important? What did you learn?

Activity Two: Understanding Privilege and Systems of Power

Activity
"Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack"

Objective
The objective of this activity is to confront entrenched systems of power and privilege, and identify common situations when privilege is not acknowledged, to the detriment of the disadvantaged and oppressed.

Discussion
What is privilege? We all have privileges. What are yours? Were you surprised by any of the privileges you found in your invisible knapsack?

Activity Three: Gender and Sexuality

Group Definition
Have the group describe what they believe to be the definition of the terms "gender" and "sexuality."

Objective
The objective of this activity is to reconsider male-gendered nouns that we consider "generic." Generating gender-free nouns and pronouns will help participants incorporate more inclusive language in their daily speech and writing.

Instructions
Break participants into small groups and give them a printout of the chart below. Instruct participants to convert the suffixes of the nouns into gender-free, inclusive terms by changing the noun root word or substituting a non-gender-specific root word from another language. Tell participants that since male endings are so pervasive, it is OK to invent new words by replacing the endings of existing words with something non-gendered.

Discussion Questions
The facilitator should ask the following questions of the group while also encouraging them to share personal experiences that speak to their point. What are characteristics of what society believes a [woman/man/girl/boy] should be? What are the norms for appearance/behavior? What happens when someone falls outside of this norm? How do the words we use influence the way we think about certain professions?

Activity Four: Race and Ethnicity

Definition
Race is a social construction that has real consequences and effects. Race is colloquially used to refer to a person's skin color, religion or area of origin (e.g., Black, Jewish or African). Technically, however, race is based on national origin, sociocultural groups and self-identification. The U.S. government, including the Census Bureau and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, does not attempt to identify race according to biology, anthropology or genetics. Religious belief is not considered a race, but can be a factor in identifying one's sociocultural group. (For a full explanation of how each racial category is defined, refer to the U.S. Census About Race page). In a historical context, race has played a large part in how our society has evolved, and it shapes the way we see others and how we experience our lives. (For more on race from a historical perspective, read " A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America," by Ronald Takaki.)

Objective
The objective of this activity is to help participants take stock of the multicultural diversity in their lives. It should help participants get a clear image of how diverse or homogenous their surroundings are and identify ways to improve their exposure to multiculturalism on a daily basis.

Instructions
Fill in the appropriate boxes:

Activity Five: Intersectional Identity and Privilege

Activity
Crossing The Line

Objective
The purpose of this activity is to explore the diversity among the members of our community. How a person identifies can affect many facets of his or her life. We will use this activity to get to know one another on a deeper level. What are our values, backgrounds, and visible and invisible labels? This activity requires everyone to step outside of his or her comfort zone. Participants being vulnerable can help the group learn more about the identities they do not share.

Instructions
Have all participants line up in a straight line facing the facilitator. If the room is too small to have each participant standing shoulder to shoulder, an alternative is to have the group stand in a circle and step into the circle. The facilitator should explain that they will read a statement. If the statement describes you, then silently step across the line. Everyone should quietly notice who stepped across the line and who did not. After a moment, the facilitator will thank those who stepped forward and will then have everyone step back in line.

Discussion
Activity Six: Recap and Closing Activity

This toolkit was designed to address human issues that everyone faces and help participants recognize how they can better understand and work toward solving, or at least improving, these issues. Participants were often forced to confront socialized and entrenched notions of privilege, identity and social justice. Anything that was difficult to confront during the training will be even more difficult to confront in practice, but if these were easily solvable issues, they wouldn't be issues for long. Participants should feel better equipped with newfound knowledge and empathy, and prepared to apply the lessons they learned in their own lives and communities.

Objective
To practice giving positive feedback and to have participants leave the workshop feeling energized.

Instructions
Have participants mingle randomly in a large group and then instruct them to stop and share with the person in front of them one way in which that person "shined" during the workshop. Repeat several times so that each person gets feedback and support from different people in the group. If there are an odd number of participants, the facilitator should address the odd person out each time.

Completing this training is not the end, but merely the beginning. Hopefully, this toolkit has helped to create new understanding among your participants. Individuals should have learned about their own identity and of those around them, as well as the implications of socially constructed labels and stereotypes of an individual's experience. Those interested in this type of work may be interested in a career in social work, facilitation, advocacy or sociology. At the end of the training, facilitators should be prepared to provide additional resources for participants who want to learn more about issues of identity, power and privilege. Below we cite several resources to help you get started.

Recommended Resources

Resources for Additional Activities

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Citation for this content: The MSW@USC, the online Master of Social Work program at the University of Southern California.

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Diversity Toolkit: A Guide to Discussing Identity, Power and Privilege

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This training is meant for anyone who feels there is a lack of productive discourse around issues of diversity and the role of identity in social relationships, both on a micro (individual) and macro (communal) level.

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DEI is an important contributor to one of the themes of the 2019 Top 10 IT Issues: 21st-Century Business Strategies.

Credit: Cienpies Design / Shutterstock

Each year EDUCAUSE members select Top 10 IT Issues for the coming year. These are the issues members anticipate will be the most important IT-related issues facing their institutions and higher education. From that list, EDUCAUSE identifies a primary focus and set of themes that encapsulate the state of our field. This year's focus is "The Student Genome Project" because in 2019 higher education is focused on organizing, standardizing, and safeguarding data so that we can use those data to address our most pressing priority: student success. The three themes for 2019 are Empowered Students, Trusted Data, and 21st-Century Business Strategies. This is one of a series of three Data Bytes blogs exploring how another pressing priority of higher education and of EDUCAUSE-diversity, equity, and inclusion-pertains to each of the three themes of the 2019 Top 10 IT Issues.

Everyone's diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) lens is shaped by their personal experience. I grew up in an ethnically diverse but racially and socioeconomically homogeneous environment. My education at a state university gave me opportunities to meet, become friends with, work with, and learn from people of many different races, religions, sexual orientations, socioeconomic levels, military experience, and prison records. It was perhaps the most richly diverse period of my life. My college education opened my eyes, my mind, my heart.

I have come to view higher education as a critical gateway for diversity, equity, and inclusion. It may be the last melting pot we have. Higher education can provide numerous benefits to individuals from historically disadvantaged and underserved groups. At the same time, higher education can cultivate empathy among individuals from all walks of life, demonstrating the value of diversity and the need to expand access and equity to everyone.

Technology can amplify higher education's potential benefits, or it can stymie them. In this series of blogs about DEI, EDUCAUSE staff are asking how the 2019 Top 10 IT Issues reflect and ought to support the expansion of DEI in higher education. Two other blogs address the Top 10 IT Issues themes of empowered students and trusted data. Here we examine the theme of 21st-century business strategies.

Three of this year's Top 10 issues relate to the role of technology in institutional funding and strategy:

Sustainable Funding: Developing funding models that can maintain quality and accommodate both new needs and the growing use of IT services in an era of increasing budget constraints

Integrative CIO: Repositioning or reinforcing the role of IT leadership as an integral strategic partner of institutional leadership in supporting institutional missions

Higher Education Affordability: Aligning IT organizations' priorities and resources with institutional priorities and resources to achieve a sustainable future

No organization can survive without an effective set of business strategies, and few business functions are independent of information technology in the 21st century. The effective and cost-efficient use of IT solutions is a major source of value, serving as a critical success factor in achieving institutional goals and objectives. This dynamic calls for strong IT leaders who can work effectively across the institution, which requires accommodations from both IT and institutional leadership. IT organizations that are predominately aging, white, male, and straight are at a disadvantage when trying to partner effectively with the institutions they serve, which represent a broader and growing range of diversity. Institutions that sideline IT leadership or that silo investments within academic or administrative fiefdoms are implicitly emphasizing cost savings at the expense of value.

DEI is a 21st-century business strategy. If higher education is to survive, it must be able to serve an increasingly diverse set of students, faculty, and communities. IT leaders can no longer set priorities without understanding institutional objectives, timelines, and constituents. Colleges and universities need a high-functioning IT organization and leadership that understands the needs of its constituents, empathizes with them, and reflects their cultural and demographic diversity. The emphasis here is on alignment between the IT and institutional missions and areas. An integrative CIO who is an inclusive partner can make all the difference in helping institutional areas use technology effectively and embrace collaboration with IT and with each other.

Technology can either facilitate more diverse constituencies within an institution or impede them. A website with images and stories that reflect strong diversity among faculty, students, and staff indicates a welcoming and inclusive institution. Institutional websites and online resources should adhere to accessibility standards to attract and support students and faculty with disabilities. An integrative CIO understands the needs of the institution and how to apply technology to meet them. An IT funding model that accommodates the needs of an increasingly diverse institutional community-by, for example, building accessibility requirements into project and service funding criteria-can advance an institution's DEI priorities; an IT funding model that can't accommodate DEI needs will undermine them. An IT leader who anticipates the institution's future needs and recognizes that diversity is necessary to achieve a sustainable future can begin to make the technology, funding, and IT workforce course corrections to support a more diverse and inclusive institution even before institutional leaders have set explicit DEI priorities. This is not premature-it's wise. It can take years for an organization to become meaningfully diverse, meaningfully equitable, meaningfully inclusive.

An emphasis on DEI means an emphasis on people. And an IT organization that loses sight of its customers will quickly fail to meet their needs and never quite align IT strategy with organizational strategy. Neglect of DEI might in fact be associated with the kind of IT organization that privileges technology over business value. This is particularly important for institutions that aspire to serve diverse and global populations.

Higher education affordability is reflected in this year's Top 10 as alignment of the IT organization's priorities and resources with the institution's. The clearest opportunity for alignment is between IT goals and institutional goals. But a different, subtler kind of alignment is equally important: alignment between the makeup of the IT organization and the institution's existing and aspirational community. The more closely our institutions and the departments within them mirror and adapt to the changing populations we serve (and aspire to serve), the better we can make decisions that will advance the institution. Today's IT organizations are whiter and more male than today's students, and they are failing to attract a Millennial workforce.

This lack of diversity not only makes it harder for IT organizations to understand their customers, it limits their effectiveness. Twenty-first-century business strategies rely on high-performing organizations. IT organizations need to be innovative and productive, and diverse teams have been shown to be more innovative and productive. Inclusivity is not only a baseline employer requirement for most of the younger workforce; it is also a necessary quality for organizations to get the most out of their staff: inclusive work environments have the best financial performance.

It's time to play catch-up. Things look hopeful: half of IT organizations are already incorporating DEI into their IT strategy, and at another third DEI at least is exerting a minor influence on the IT strategy. These are the institutions that are best poised to accommodate not only 21st-century business strategies but 21st-century needs.

Notes

1. Joseph D. Galanek, Dana Gierdowski, and D. Christopher Brooks, The Higher Education IT Workforce Landscape, 2019, research report (Louisville, CO: ECAR, February 2019). ↩

2. Sylvia Ann Hewlett, Melinda Marshall, and Laura Sherbin, "How Diversity Can Drive Innovation," Harvard Business Review, December 2013. ↩

3. "Appendix: Why Diversity and Inclusion Matter: Financial Performance," Catalyst, August 1, 2018. ↩

Susan Grajek is Vice President of Communities and Research at EDUCAUSE.

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dei and 21st-century business strategies

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
DEI and 21st-Century Business Strategies

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
DEI is an important contributor to one of the themes of the 2019 Top 10 IT Issues: 21st-Century Business Strategies. Each year EDUCAUSE members select Top 10 IT Issues for the coming year. These are the issues members anticipate will be the most important IT-related issues facing their institutions and higher education.

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Promoting diversity today for a more inclusive tomorrow In recognition of Women's History month in March, NCCJ's Youth Action Coalition (YAC) is going to focus our session on Influential, Important Women That Were Erased From History. ... By Jason Papallo, NCCJ E-Communications and Marketing Specialist The NCCJ ANYTOWN experience changes lives.