2021 - 2022 Activites
Throughout 2021-2022, we spent considerable time revising all aspects of our work to advance equitable and antiracist organizational and educational practices. We developed our own knowledge related to racial equity and justice, made substantial revisions to better center equity and justice in our programming, and revised policies and processes around our internal culture. Specific steps included:
Forming a steering committee to guide the planning and accountability of our DEI work.
Working with DEI consultant, Dr. Whitney Peoples, Director of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion at the University of Michigan’s School of Public Health (and formerly of Michigan’s Center for Research on Learning and Teaching), to conduct interviews with key stakeholders, review our programming through a DEI lens, facilitate a two-day retreat centered on Whiteness, and to thus lay the foundation for advancing racial equity and justice in our Center.
Undertaking major revisions to key CTE programming, including our signature program, the Course Design Institute.
Dedicating our biweekly faculty meetings to advancing our equity and justice work.
Working on infrastructure to support departments in data-informed and equity-minded reviews of degrees and curricula, in collaboration with our colleagues across Grounds.
Developing or revising CTE onboarding materials to ensure a more equitable and transparent welcome for new colleagues.
Collaborating with our colleagues to create a permanent exhibit in Hotel D to share the history of the space and the stories of its inhabitants, particularly the enslaved individuals.
Missions and Values
During the 2021-22 academic year, we began explicitly articulating our values and commitments to racial equity and justice in our work. We completed revisions to those draft values as well as to our CTE vision and mission statements in Spring 2023. Read our updated Mission page.
Programming
We are committed to revising all CTE programs to center equity and justice, including through drawing more heavily on the work of BIPOC scholars, advocating for and modeling critical and anti-oppressive pedagogies, and designing programming that surfaces and aims to counteract the structures that have failed to serve BIPOC and other minoritized students and faculty.
For the first half of 2022, we tackled major revisions to key CTE programming and will continue to make ongoing improvements:
c3Design. We redesigned all 13 animations (57 minutes) throughout the online environment to improve the content and better center equity and inclusion.
Course Design Institute. We updated the program’s values and description to better signal our commitment to racial equity and justice. We also significantly revised the curriculum around an equitable course design framework.
Curriculum (Re)Design. We built checkpoints into our initial meetings with units to prompt teams to center equity in their revisions and identify related needs for each project.
Ignite. We updated the program’s goals, description, and curriculum to reflect diversity, equity, and inclusion and a racial justice orientation.
For the second half of 2022, we focused on revising the following programs:
c3Design
Innovations in Pedagogy Summit
SoTL Scholars and SoTL Faculty Learning Community
Teaching as a Graduate Student (TAGS)
Pedagogies and Practices
Much of our work as educational developers relies on core practices, including facilitation and consultation. We are also active teaching faculty, and we practice in our own classrooms the pedagogies we advocate in our programming. In both of these arenas, we recognize that disrupting whiteness, surfacing power imbalances, centering the experiences of BIPOC faculty and students, and other anti-racist practices are skills that must be developed and practiced.
During the 2021-2022 academic year, we dedicated our biweekly faculty meetings to advancing our equity and justice work, specifically in the form of developing knowledge and practices around equitable educational development, supporting our accountability with this work, and workshopping our program revisions.
Internal Culture and Workplace Practices
To complement the initiatives focused on revisions to our programs and other participant-facing work, in our Inclusive Excellence (IE) plan (linked below), we emphasized revisions to better attend to equity and justice within CTE internal culture and our workplace practices, guidelines, and policies.
In this area, we have developed or revised our onboarding materials to ensure a more equitable and transparent welcome for new colleagues.