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Improving Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in Environmental Studies - strategies at the undergraduate, graduate and faculty levels
Type of Session
Individual Paper Presentation
Abstract
In this presentation we will share strategies we have implemented over the past six years to support diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) within the Environmental Studies Program at the University of Oregon. The Community-Building and Diversity Committee in the Environmental Studies Program formed in Fall 2013 at the request of Environmental Studies graduate students in marginalized groups who wanted to elevate diversity issues throughout our program. This committee developed a multi-tiered approach – developing and implementing DEI strategies at the undergraduate, graduate, and faculty levels. We’ll discuss the results of an external curriculum review that identified how Environmental Studies courses are (or are not) directly addressing issues related to diversity, as well as the subsequent efforts to strengthen our undergraduate curriculum. We will highlight our new Summer Academy to Inspire Learning (SAIL) camp, a pipeline program geared toward recruiting first-generation college students. At the graduate level, we’ll share how we developed and implemented an ally training program that is now required for all incoming graduate students, as well as discuss changes made to the selection criteria used by the graduate admissions committee to more explicitly address issues of equity and diversity. In addition, our graduate students requested a new seminar on pedagogy to create more inclusive classroom learning spaces, and we’ll share the lessons learned from that effort. At the faculty level, we’ll discuss our new faculty diversity grant that has supported a training focused on de-colonized collaborative research projects with communities of color, as well as 12 presentations by community organizations about their work during our faculty meetings over the next two years. To conclude, we’ll situate our efforts within the larger UO context, which includes the campus-wide IDEAL Framework (Inclusion, Diversity, Evaluation, Achievement, Leadership) and the Social Science Diversity Action Plan.