Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Educational Programs

"Color Brave" campus dialogues aim to educate and empower faculty to have a purposeful discussion and address the issue of racial inequities that exist in America today. By being "color brave," we can address the issues that Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) and other people from marginalized groups face on our campuses, while increasing awareness and mutual understanding. Acknowledging and discussing race and other topics surrounding diversity is a first step to developing and sustaining an inclusive culture.

This session features interactive discussions regarding different life experiences to enhance participants' understanding of experiences that are different from theirs.

Audience: Faculty, Professional Staff, Students.

EIC offers two workshops on allyship: 1) "LGBTQ+ Allyship" and 2) "Allyship in the Fight Towards Racial Equity and Justice." Members of the community can request either, or both workshops.

Faculty search committee members are considered the "gatekeepers" of the academy and bear responsibility for recruiting from a robust and diverse faculty applicant pool. During this workshop, an overview of inclusive faculty recruitment processes and practices will be provided, with a focus on how search committees can diversify applicant pools by discipline. Participants will discuss diversity and inclusion terms including, implicit bias, microaggressions, and others. Relevant departmental, institutional, and national data will be explored, and participants will examine best practices for inclusive faculty searches.

Audience: Faculty Search Committee Members

Understanding and effectively managing conflict is an important part of creating and maintaining an inclusive campus culture. This workshop provides an overview of conflict, highlighting a variety of sources of conflict and their impact on member satisfaction and retention. Participants will be introduced to the concept of moving from differentiation (acknowledging difference) towards integration (superordinate goal) by moving beyond positions towards interests. Participants will explore strategies and techniques to manage conflict in the Drexel community.

Audience: Faculty, Professional Staff, Students

With the national reckoning around racial injustice, faculty and professional staff have the responsibility to create an inclusive environment for students and members of the Drexel community. However, it is not always easy to productively engage in conversations about race. This interactive workshop engages participants to work through difficult and uncomfortable conversations that sometimes emerge both in the classroom and campus community around race. Activities and scenarios focus on race, racial identity development, and racism. Drexel specific cases will be highlighted, and participants will explore strategies that faculty and professional staff can employ to lean into these sometimes-difficult conversations.

Audience: Faculty, Academic Advisors, and Professional Staff

Communicating effectively across difference is an important part of making sure that all our students and colleagues feel welcome, included, and empowered to excel. In this interactive workshop, participants will work together to understand how speech and behavior can be implicitly invalidating or demeaning, and how to learn from and lead through those moments.

Audience: Faculty, Professional Staff, and Students

The purpose of this workshop is to broaden the dialogue beyond "White Privilege" to include other forms of privilege that might sometimes be taken for granted. The Diversity Iceberg metaphor will be used during this interactive session to explore identity and intersectionality. Participants will be able to classify parts of their identities that are privileged and explore how one identity might be privileged in one setting and not in another. Participants will also examine how different forms of privilege can be leveraged to advocate on behalf of self and others, and advance inclusion in their academic units and beyond.

Audience: Faculty, Professional Staff, Students

This workshop aims to explore the interplay between individuals' unique social identities and others as part of a team and any campus group. Activities will focus on personal/interpersonal education and self-awareness, and will explore topics on dimensions of identity, continuum of racial identity development, bias, microaggressions, etc. We will use scenarios, cases, and other activities to identify how these emerge in our interactions with each other. Participants will engage in activities that enhance empathy and inclusion.

Audience: Faculty, Professional Staff, Students

As we work towards building an inclusive culture of excellence, academic units and departments are seeking ways to establish initiatives and priorities that are sustained beyond present-day calls for racial equity. This workshop lays the foundation for departments to identify key areas of focus relative to departmental culture including inclusive hiring practices, social justice and anti-racist curriculum, incentive and reward systems, power dynamics, and more. The primary goals are to co-create a departmental culture of inclusion and for participants to identify tangible, actionable items that will be prioritized moving forward.

This workshop is typically offered in combination with "Working Through Social Identities Towards Empathy and Inclusion."

Audience: Academic Departments

The growing research on racial and other microaggressions cite the harm it can impose on faculty, professional staff, and students from marginalized groups. The hierarchical structure of academic institutions may exacerbate this harm, with microaggressions evolving into microbullying and bullying, and contributing to a loss of productivity, poor health and high turnover. During this workshop, participants will engage with a variety of case studies underscoring microaggressions and bullying as well as the identity, power and status dynamics at play. We will discuss strategies to productively confront microaggressions and bullying, and how to mitigate these in everyday interactions with students and colleagues.

Audience: Faculty and Professional Staff