Inclusive Excellence Resources

In addition to this list, the Brown Center keeps an ever-expanding google document of resources for inclusive teaching.  We invite your contributions!

AAC&U Resources for Campuses

As national champion of liberal learning and the liberal arts, the Association of American Colleges & Universities offers a number of resources for campuses to advance equity, diversity and inclusion.

Agency

Sen A. Development as freedom. New York: Alfred Knopf; 1999.
By the winner of the 1988 Nobel Prize in Economics, an essential and paradigm-altering framework for understanding economic development–for both rich and poor–in the twenty-first century.

Freedom, Sen argues, is both the end and most efficient means of sustaining economic life and the key to securing the general welfare of the world’s entire population. Releasing the idea of individual freedom from association with any particular historical, intellectual, political, or religious tradition, Sen clearly demonstrates its current applicability and possibilities. In the new global economy, where, despite unprecedented increases in overall opulence, the contemporary world denies elementary freedoms to vast numbers–perhaps even the majority of people–he concludes, it is still possible to practically and optimistically restain a sense of social accountability. Development as Freedom is essential reading.

Welzel, Christian, and Ronald Inglehart. “Agency, values, and well-being: A human development model.” Social indicators research 97.1 (2010): 43-63. 
This paper argues that feelings of agency are linked to human well-being through a sequence of adaptive mechanisms that promote human development, once existential conditions become permissive. In the first part, we elaborate on the evolutionary logic of this model and outline why an evolutionary perspective is helpful to understand changes in values that give feelings of agency greater weight in shaping human well-being. In the second part, we test the key links in this model with data from the World Values Surveys using ecological regressions and multi-level models, covering some 80 societies worldwide. Empirically, we demonstrate evidence for the following sequence: (1) in response to widening opportunities of life, people place stronger emphasis on emancipative values, (2) in response to a stronger emphasis on emancipative values, feelings of agency gain greater weight in shaping people’s life satisfaction, (3) in response to a greater impact of agency feelings on life satisfaction, the level of life satisfaction itself rises. Further analyses show that this model is culturally universal because taking into account the strength of a society’s western tradition does not render insignificant these adaptive linkages. Precisely because of its universality, this is indeed a ‘human’ development model in a most general sense.

Dear Colleague Letter

This letter, published on December 31, 2015 by the Education Secretary and Deputy Secretary, outlines the Federal Government’s position on learning environments in which students are free from discrimination and harassment based on their race, religion, or national origin.

Civility and Incivility

Civility in the Classroom
Find at this link an annotated list of resources on civility in the classroom.

Specific Strategies for Dealing with Incivility
Incivility is any kind of disruptive classroom behavior that shows disrespect or disregard for the instructor and fellow-students. It can dramatically diminish the effectiveness of a course and cause great stress for the instructor. This resource offers several sites that describe forms of incivility, suggestions for handling it, and current research on incivility. The remaining links provide practical approaches for reducing and dealing with disruptive classroom behaviors.

Conferences and Institutes

Diversity, Equity and Inclusive Excellence
Stetson University participates actively in a number of AAC&U offerings that directly link the guiding principle of “Aim High, Make Excellence Inclusive” to our work. Find here a host of academic programs, conferences, and institutes ranging from ePortfolios to how general education and assessment.

Inclusive Excellence in Teaching Symposium at Stetson University
As part of our efforts to actively and intentionally engage diversity and inclusive excellence in the curriculum, Stetson University hosts the annual symposium on Inclusive Excellence in Teaching. The aim of this symposium is to provide interested faculty, staff, students from all divisions and Colleges/Schools as well as members of our broader community an opportunity to share how their work actively fosters equity, diversity and inclusion in teaching and learning. The symposium showcases interactive workshops, panels, and other engaging sessions led by our peers.

Difficult Dialogues

Returning to the Classroom after the 2016 Presidential Election
Suggestions from the University of Michigan on how to facilitate post-election discussion.

Difficult Dialogues Resources
This web site hosts resources to help campuses engage with controversy on issues as varied as teaching evolution, gun control, gay marriage, energy policy, and war. It provides strategies, resources, and information about projects that address a wide array of issues and topics, including: fundamentalism and secularism, racial and ethnic relations, the Middle East conflict, religion and the university, sexual orientation, academic freedom, civility in everyday life, and more.

What To Do If You See Islamophobic Harassment
A young artist has created a fantastic comic for anyone witnessing islamophobic harassment in public.

Diversity

Academic Freedom and Educational Responsibility
In the face of new challenges to academic freedom, the tension resulting between the faculty’s freedom to teach—individually and collectively—and the students’ freedom to form independent judgments or be protected from purportedly “liberal” views of faculty, creates additional dimensions of academic freedom and educational responsibility that are examined in this paper.

Achieving Faculty Diversity: Debunking The Myths
The report sets out some strategies and principles of good diversity hiring practice for institutions, strategies for connecting with graduate schools, and networking tools for graduate students in preparation for the job market.

Interrupting the Usual: Successful Strategies for Hiring Diverse Faculty
The literature offers numerous explanations for the low representation of faculty of color in the academy, coupled with suggestions for improving this condition. Using data from approximately 700 searches, this study examines whether specific interventions account for the hiring of diverse faculty above and beyond hiring done in academic areas specifically focused on race and ethnicity.

Making Diversity Work on Campus: A Research-Based Perspective
This paper is the first of a series of three commissioned by the AAC&U to examine how colleges and universities connect their educational quality and inclusion efforts more fundamentally and comprehensively than they have in the past. The paper discusses recent empirical evidence that demonstrates the educational benefits of diverse learning environments. The evidence, gathered on behalf of the University of Michigan in its defense of its affirmative action policies before the Supreme Court, indicates that diversity must be carried out in intentional ways in order to accrue educational benefits for students and for the institution.

Organizational Learning a Tool for Diversity and Institutional Effectiveness
Organizational learning, along with a framework for diversity, is an effective approach for campuses seeking sustained institutional change with regard to diversity.

The Imperative for Diversity and and Institutional Transformation
In this article and others in this special issue of the American Journal of Education, authors demonstrate diverse approaches to institutional transformation to build capacity for ensuring the education of a racially and ethnically diverse society.

The Challenge of Diversity: Involvement or Alienation in the Academy?
While higher education has changed profoundly, many of the same challenges remain: access and success for historically underrepresented groups and basic institutional issues such as curriculum, climate, and hiring, creating a climate of alienation, not involvement. At the same time, societal factors indicate that higher education needs to become more proactive in responding favorably to diversity. The country’s changing demographics require reframing diversity to focus on institutions’ capacity to educate and involve an increasingly diverse student population.

Scholarship of Teaching & Learning (SoTL)
The scholarship of teaching and learning applies evidence-based, rigorous research, analysis and reflection across the disciplines to identifying and disseminating effective teaching and learning practices in higher education. SoTL advances and applies knowledge about how to teach or how to promote learning. This series of workshops recaps how to engage in SoTL work.

Equity

Achieving Equitable Educational Outcomes with All Students: The Institution’s Roles and Responsibilities
This paper is the second of a series of three commissioned by the AAC&U to examine how colleges and universities connect their educational quality and inclusion efforts more fundamentally and comprehensively than they have in the past. The paper discusses the responsibility that institutions have to examine the impact that traditional higher education practices have on historically underserved  students.

Assessing Campus Diversity Initiatives
This monograph on campus diversity issues uses research findings that chart college and university efforts to move from the rhetoric of inclusion to the practice of equity.

Step Up and Lead for Equity
For generations, the United States has promised universal access to opportunity. But opportunity in America continues to be disproportionately distributed. What are strategies for leading equity?

Strategic Governance: Making Big Decisions Better
This publication focuses on a representative council model to organizational goal setting and decision making to address strategic planning in the face of changing environments by colleges and universities.

To Form a More Perfect Union: Campus Diversity Initiatives
This monograph on campus diversity issues uses research findings that chart college and university efforts to move from the rhetoric of inclusion to the practice of equity.

Why Aren’t We There Yet?
This book, by Vashti Torres (Stetson alumna) focuses on guiding individuals and groups through learning how to have difficult conversations that lead us to act to create more just campuses, and provides illustrations of multiple ways to respond to difficult situations. It advocates for engaging in fruitful dialogues regarding differing social identities including race, ethnicity, religion, gender, and sexual orientation, to lead readers through a process that advocates for justice, and for taking personal responsibility for contributing to the solution.

Global Citizenship & Global Learning

AAC&U Global Learning Publications
AAC&U Shared Futures: Global Learning and Social Responsibility
Exploring Our Roles as Global Citizens – An educators guide (2013)
Global Citizenship – Towards a Definition
Global Citizenship: A Bibliography 
Education, Equity, and Global Citizenship
Qualities of a Global Citizen
AAC&U Shared Futures: Global Learning and Social Responsibility
Assessing Global Learning – AAC&U Toolkit Resources
Global Learning: Defining, Designing, Demonstrating
Global Learning and the Curriculum: Nurturing Student Efficacy in a Global World – 2016 AAC&U Conference materials and resources

Inclusion

Rethinking Educational Practices To Make Excellence Inclusive
What is the academy’s role in preparing every college student to join in creating “a more perfect union”?

Making Excellence Inclusive
This article calls for greater attention to the education of our country’s broadening diverse population and for expanded efforts to transform how diversity initiatives are conceived and enacted. The article summarizes previous and current educational equity efforts, which are inadequate as currently crafted to address the needs of our stratified communities. It then focus on implementing strategies to achieve high levels of education for all students by first changing the public’s perceptions about diversity from a shameful burden to an opportunity to utilize our inherent differences for leaming-a change that is necessary to fulfill America’s democratic ideals of equal justice and equal opportunity for all. Finally, the article discusses the consequences for educational institutions, the larger society, and our system of justice if the nation continues “business as usual,” including failing to educate the full population at a time when our nation needs appreciably more educated persons for our own democratic vitality and to fuel the global economy

Toward a Model of Inclusive Excellence and Change in Postsecondary Institutions
This paper is the third in a series of three commissioned by the AAC&U to examine how colleges and universities connect their educational quality and inclusion efforts more fundamentally and comprehensively than they have in the past. The paper offers a framework for comprehensive organizational change to help campuses achieve inclusive excellence. 

Investing in Quality: Tools for Improving Curricular Efficiency
This ground-breaking publication presents creative and practical financial models that illustrate the costs and benefits of learning-centered innovations. The document cites evidence demonstrating: that financial resources are locked up in the curriculum and can be reallocated to more effectively support student learning; that campuses have many more options about how to deploy their financial resources than is usually realized; and that significant improvements to increase quality and constrain cost require new forms of collaboration on campuses.

LGBTQ+

Queer Workplace Exchange for Employee Retention & Student Success: Gender Pronouns – A How-To Guide