November 6, 2018

The Center for the Advancement of STEM Teaching and Learning Excellence (CASTLE) received the Drexel University President's Award for Diversity and Inclusive Community for Faculty and Professional Staff on Monday, November 5th.

This award recognizes and honors significant contributions that promote awareness of and
respect for diversity, create opportunities for intercultural engagement, and build upon Drexel's founding principle of inclusion.

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As a center, we are appreciative of the support of a variety of colleagues and administrators who have helped to support CASTLE during the past four years since our inception.  We are enthusiastic to receive the President’s Award for Diversity and Inclusive Community since one of the core values of CASTLE is diversity and inclusion.  Our initiatives emphasize the use of pedagogical approaches that are known to be inclusive of all populations.  An appreciation for diversity and an understood need for emphasizing inclusive practices underlies all of our work on STEM education.

It is critical that we recognize the people that work tirelessly every day to develop initiatives and programs that are inclusive and recognize diversity. We want to acknowledge support from offices including the Offices of the President and Provost, the Office of Equality and Diversity, and the Office of Institutional Advancement, as well as the current and former Deans of CoAS, CoE, and the School of Education.  We would like to acknowledge our colleagues and our students who have enthusiastically pushed at our boundaries to encourage our interest in initiatives relating to diversity and inclusion.

We are so honored to receive this award, because it acknowledges the conversations that we share in the center every day, and our collective efforts to create an environment that acknowledges and explores diversity issues. However, it is important to acknowledge that our work as a community around diversity and inclusion is far from done. We want to encourage Drexel to continue to work hard towards equality for all communities that are underserved, underrepresented or underprivileged. And we want to encourage our community to work towards finding ways to acknowledge the places where we have privilege, be open to hearing about others’ oppression without feeling threatened, and work towards not speaking about these challenges within echo chambers. Instead, as a community we should strive for an environment where underrepresented groups feel comfortable sharing their concerns within a diverse community of supporters who stand to learn and grow from hearing these concerns.

Again, on behalf of the CASTLE faculty and staff, and other members of the CASTLE community, thank you.  We are honored and ready to continue our work in STEM in a variety of ways to include all members of the larger Drexel community.


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Thank you from the CASTLE team