The Psychology Department has established this Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Plan to support all of our current and potential students—particularly those who are BIPOC, first-generation, low income, and/or disabled. The plan is intended to be a living document and has the following specific features:
- Our faculty will collectively review our syllabi and course materials using an inclusive syllabus toolkit such as Dr. Kim Case’s syllabus challenge for inclusive practices.
- Our faculty will read, discuss, and implement pedagogical practices, such as those described in Addy, Dube, Mitchell, and SoRelle’s (2021) What Inclusive Instructors Do: Principles and Practices for Excellence in College Teaching.
- Our faculty will review our practices and policies related to departmental opportunities such as participation in research labs, preceptorships, etc.
- Our faculty will develop and review our goals and metrics for student success in the psychology department and track our progress in ensuring that all students are well supported to reach those goals.
- We will also implement suggestions such as those provided in Meyers (2008) Putting Social Justice into Practice in Psychology Courses.
- We will review the Introduction to Psychology curriculum using Toward an Inclusive Psychology: Infusing the Introductory Psychology Textbook with Diversity Content.
- Our faculty will continue our work as part of the Challenging Complicities Project initiated by the Kofi Annan Institute for Global Citizenship during the 2020 International Roundtable, through which all colleagues in the department have been reading articles that help us understand and counteract the ways in which the discipline of psychology is steeped in ideologies based in white supremacy and colonialism. In addition, white colleagues in the department will continue reading and discussing articles about racism in psychology as well as work that encourages us to examine our own white identities and white privilege.
- Tenured and tenure-track members of the department attended Radical MacACCESS events on April 16th and April 22nd, 2021.
- As a department we will support initiatives at the institutional level that are intended to address concerns related to grading practices, workload, and well-being. We recognize that change at the individual and department level is useful, but systemic problems call for systemic solutions.