CATL announces 2019-20 Diversity and Inclusion Grant recipients

The Center for the Advancement of Teaching and Learning is pleased to announce the recipients of the Diversity and Inclusion Grants for the 2019-20 academic year, as well as their project descriptions.

Human Service Studies Podcast Assignments for Social Problems – HSS faculty members Vanessa-Drew Branch, Carmen Monico and Phil Miller will implement and assess student podcast assignments in first-year (111) and senior-level (481) Human Service Studies service-learning courses. The assignment will highlight a community agency’s work to reduce a social problem with a marginalized group while also providing students an opportunity to reflect on and share their experiences working within the community. The podcast content will be assessed and compared to evaluate growth over four years in student understanding and competence in working with vulnerable groups within human service settings. Specifically, the project will examine whether and how the assignment increases students’ understanding of the experience of oppression and privilege, expands their knowledge of social justice activities occurring in the local community, and promotes self-appraisal of one’s own biases.

Investigating and Comparing Disparities within Elon’s Engineering Program, Part II –  Engineering professors Rich Blackmon and Sirena Hargrove-Leak will build on a previous DIG project that implemented evidence-based teaching and learning strategies in Elon’s engineering program and investigated possible changes in the new four-year degree program to enhance student learning, particularly around diversity and inclusion. In Stage II, they will more thoroughly analyze the data for evidence of possible correlations, contradictions, and distributions in students' attitudes and beliefs. The results of this complete Matlab analysis will lead to the exploration and generation of targeted strategies to address attitudes and beliefs about diversity and inclusion unique to Elon Engineering students.

Critical Whiteness Course Investigation and Mapping – Charles Irons, professor of history and chair of the Department of History and Geography, and Assistant Director of the Center for Race, Ethnicity, and Diversity Education Brandon Bell will gather information about the current curricular and co-curricular offerings that consider whiteness, race, equity and inclusion to better ascertain the scope and depth in which the institution seeks to engage these concepts in various ways. They plan to first map out the constellations of course, activities, dialogues and experiences related to concepts of whiteness, race, equity and inclusion to develop a more comprehensive picture of the mechanisms in which Elon University engages concepts of History and Memory. The project will create a new resource for faculty, staff, and students seeking to engage concepts of history and memory, race, equity, inclusion and identity and offer new and promising practice for exploring and teaching these subjects effectively.

Creating a Resource Guide for Accessibility in Multimedia in the School of Communications – Faculty in the School of Communications, Sana Haq, Staci Saltz, and Nicole Triche will create a resource to guide students on how to make their videos accessible to a variety of audiences. They will publish electronic and paper copies for easy distribution and share with faculty colleagues suggestions for implementing the guide in classes. This guide will be relevant to all majors within the Department of Communications and help infuse accessibility standards throughout the undergraduate and graduate levels to align with industry standards. Implementing these guidelines into the curriculum will teach students a deeper understanding of diverse audiences and the steps needed to ensure their work can reach them. This resource will concentrate on video projects but they hope that it will grow over time to include other forms of multimedia.

Meeting the Learning Needs of Diverse Students in Math & Statistics Courses – A team of Math & Statistics faculty members, Aaron Trocki, Mark Weaver, Laura Taylor, Kirstie Doehler, and Ryne VanKrevelen will explore evidence-based pedagogies to meet the learning needs of diverse students in Statistics in Application (STS 212). They will create a curricular resource to guide the implementation of selected evidence-based pedagogies, including heterogeneously mixed groups for in-class and out of class statistical tasks and projects. The team will implement those pedagogies in the fall and spring and gather data to analyze and document effectiveness in order to refine and then share the curricular resource.

This year’s diversity and inclusion grant winners were selected from a highly competitive application pool. Consistent with Elon University’s unprecedented commitment to diversity and global engagement, the diversity and inclusion project’s purpose is to develop and implement strategies to infuse the curriculum and pedagogies of the university with the best practices related to human diversity, broadly defined.

For questions about the Diversity and Inclusion Grant, or the Center for the Advancement of Teaching and Learning, email catl@elon.edu or visit our website.