Climate

Goal 1a: SoE community members will work to foster a diverse and equitable climate through their teaching, research, creative works, volunteerism, service, and/or advocacy activities.

Goal 1b: SoE community members will cultivate an inclusive climate that welcomes diversity, particularly as it relates to race, ethnicity, socio-economic status, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, religion, (dis)ability, language, citizenship, national origin, body size, age or job title.

Strategic Actions/Initiatives¹

• Maintain informal social networks utilizing lunches and/or gatherings with rotating subgroups of faculty (e.g., faculty of color luncheon, women’s luncheon).
• Establish and maintain social networking opportunities for staff and students and / invite staff and students to join faculty groups when appropriate.
• Maintain a faculty DEI Ambassador Program, where a dedicated group of faculty, staff, and students serve as a welcoming committee to assist in community onboarding.
• Continue to develop and provide annual professional development for faculty, staff, and students that is focused on DEI.
• Support and continue to refine a structured mentoring program, which gives attention to concerns specific to hyperraced² members of the School of Education community, and includes accountability processes that ensure this mentoring is taking place.
• Expand mentoring efforts to include NTT faculty and associate professors.
• Support a continued exit interview or survey process to ascertain feedback from employees leaving the SoE and students transferring schools or withdrawing from the university.
• Support the Martha Dawson Award for Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion Achievements on an annual basis. Evaluate the success of this award in promoting DEI efforts and accomplishments.
• Explore other methods of incentivizing DEI efforts and accomplishments.
• Evaluate, on a regular basis, the physical spaces within the building to determine:
  • Who/what is represented;
  • Who/what is not represented;
  • Who can/cannot access the various spaces;
  • How the physical spaces may be repurposed to facilitate ongoing a sense of community.
• Partner with campus and university programs aimed at attracting and supporting diverse faculty (e.g., DEMA UNITS: NMBCC, LaCasa, LGBTQ+ Culture Center, Asian Culture Center, CRRES, Black Faculty & Staff association; Latino Council, Affinity Alumni Assoc. Safe).
• Establish a process for auditing service loads for pre-tenure and NTT faculty to ensure that service burdens are reasonable, with a particular focus on invisible service taken on by hyperraced and other historically excluded faculty and crossdepartmental equity.
• Develop a generic survey for briefly and easily evaluating success of major DEI efforts to support our ongoing efforts at evaluating progress. Note that reference to surveys below are now intended to be this generic survey whereas references to a targeted survey are intended to use a unique context-specific survey.

Best Practices³

• Ensure that all faculty have spaces to be heard. Provide opportunities for faculty to anonymously voice concerns and receive feedback.
• Create opportunities that provide support and recognition to ensure that faculty engaging in DEI work feel valued.
• Create monetary incentives and awards for faculty teaching, research, and service focused on DEI and social justice.
• A diversity of mentoring activities beyond the one-on-one are encouraged, including peer groups, mentoring activities, including seminars and workshops.
• Mentorship should continue beyond tenure for associate professors.
• Mentoring tasks should include discussion of professional goals, scientific leadership, access to professional opportunities for advancement, including funding and speaking opportunities, and ways to balance priorities and expectations in the academic environment.
• Mentoring should address work-life balance issues and techniques for effective time management.
• Build informal social networks such as: departmental social events, lunches with rotating subgroups of faculty.

Planned Actions and Metrics

Next: Communication

¹ We seek to address climate challenges specifically related to recruiting and retaining faculty from historically underrepresented groups, specifically faculty of color. Research shows that historically many faculty of color feel that they work in isolation and are not part of an intellectual community that affirms and values their scholarship, particularly if their research is about issues of race and ethnicity. Additionally, research has shown that isolation is compounded, due to a lack of mentoring and knowledge on how to navigate university and cultural politics and/or support the challenges that arise due to racial and cultural dissonance in their teaching and research. This lack of mentoring might also restrict access to networks and resources, which can hamper opportunities to advance leadership levels with decision-making and influence. Further, because faculty from historically underrepresented groups are often in the minority, they often have a disproportionate amount of service and serve in a representational capacity without being allowed to have a substantive roll. The IU SoE is no stranger to the challenges highlighted in the literature. Our climate survey, faculty roundtables, and historical track record speak to the necessity for us to not only acknowledge how faculty from historically underrepresented groups might experience the SoE, but to create a plan that outlines how we might strategically address our challenges and monitor our progress.

² Drawing from an article on racial literacies, we use the term hyperraced as an alternative naming that includes multiple racial groupings such as Black/African American, Indigenous, Latiné/x, Asian, Pacific Islander, Desi-American, and multiracial (Croom, 2020). This term helps to highlight how these individuals are subjected to negative stereotypes and treatment because of their actual or perceived racial identity.

³ Some of the best practices included were informed by the following: http://www.ems.psu.edu/faculty_staff/faculy_mentoring and https://diversity.umn.edu/idea/sites/diversity.umn.edu.idea/files/BestPracticesHandbook-v2016sm.pdf.

⁴ Note that in each table, the intent is that the party designated as “Lead” with coordinate with the parties designated as “Support” to develop a productive process for accomplishing the stated goals.