Diversity Plan

Strategic Plan for Diversity

ADOPTED AUGUST, 2019

Vision Statement

We aim to create an equitable and inclusive environment for learning, research, and service by honoring, respecting, and embracing diversity within the School of Education (SoE) and the surrounding communities.

Mission Statement

Our mission is to improve teaching, learning, and human development in a global, diverse, rapidly changing, and increasingly technological society. We

Prepare reflective, caring, and highly skilled educational practitioners and scholars who lead in their chosen professions;
Inform educational theory and practice through research;
Work in partnership with a range of constituents to effect change from the local to national levels throughout the world; and
Prioritize diversity, inclusion, and equity in all our work.

Who We Are and What We Value

We are an exceptional and engaged community of educators that believes that integrity and excellence are foundational to our identity as Indiana University’s SoE.
We believe that diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) are vital to who we are and the work that we do as educators.
We believe that the diversity within the SoE should be a reflection of our world and society and utilized to extend and create new knowledge that illuminates the teaching, learning, and research practices needed to engage the world around us and combat educational and social inequalities.
We are committed to ensuring that all SoE stakeholders, especially those from historically underrepresented groups, feel valued and are able to flourish and grow personally, professionally, and intellectually.
We value an environment that is accountable and acknowledges diversity across many dimensions, including race and ethnicity, socio-economic status, sexual orientation, gender expression, religion, (dis)ability, language, citizenship, national origin, and age.
We recognize and acknowledge historical inequities and discrimination within the United States for those from historically underrepresented groups, and are prepared to advocate and provide opportunities and resources that seek to disrupt generational legacies that have been intentionally and unintentionally perpetuated by institutionalized discriminatory and inequitable practices and policies.

Purpose and Scope of the Faculty Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Plan

This DEI plan is a living document that requires vigilance and ongoing engagement to ensure that our mission and values are consistently reflected throughout the SoE. As a living document, this plan will be displayed publically on the SoE’s website, revisited and updated annually by the SoE’s Committee on Diversity, with recommendations for changes reported to the SoE’s Policy Council and shared with the larger SoE community electronically. Further, this plan is designed to hold us accountable and to ensure that we are building a national and international reputation that competitively positions us as a school that not only recruits and retains a diverse faculty, staff, and student body, but also engages in teaching, research, and service activities that address current DEI challenges and issues in the field of education. It is our hope that our plan will facilitate an environment that attracts and supports faculty of color and those from historically underrepresented groups.

During the 2016-17 academic year school, we¹ collected data from various SoE stakeholders, via administrator diversity baseline training, faculty roundtables, an all day faculty diversity retreat, a staff diversity training, and two schoolwide diversity talks. In addition, in 2014, the SoE’s Committee on Diversity conducted a survey to assess SoE faculty, staff and students’ perceptions of the cultural climate and the SoE’s DEI related efforts. In the spring of 2015, a town hall meeting was held in which the findings from this survey were shared with the SoE community, with faculty, staff, and students invited to further share their experiences within the SoE related to DEI and offer feedback. As we developed this plan, we took each of these data points into consideration. More particularly, our approach to developing this plan was not simply to generate a list of best practices that might recruit and retain a more diverse community, but to strategically think about the areas that we needed to examine to do so. Further, we sought to engage in collective action.

Figure 1. Key Domains of the SoE’s Faculty Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Plan

Across this yearlong process, we collectively identified five critical domains for fostering and promoting DEI and have thus developed our plan in relation to these intersecting domains, which include: 1) Climate, 2) Communication, 3) Policies, 4) Hiring Faculty of Color, and 5) Leadership. Figure 1 illustrates how these domains are intersectional and inform one another. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the first domain, Climate, includes the largest number of strategies/actions given that it is foundational to the process of promoting and sustaining DEI within the SoE. In addition, we developed two goals specific to each of these domains, and recognize that the domains and goals are interconnected.

More about the key domains

¹ The Faculty Diversity Plan Subcommittee was developed and charged by the SoE’s Committee on Diversity to lead a schoolwide effort to engage in dialogue about DEI within the SoE and collectively develop a Faculty Diversity Plan.

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