Diversity, Equity and Inclusion at Bay Path University

At Bay Path, maintaining a welcoming campus community for our diverse, pluralistic population has always been a top priority.  We firmly believe that individuals of all religions, nationalities, races, gender identities, sexual orientations, abilities, neurodiversities, and socioeconomic statuses have the right to a safe, accepting, and enriching higher education experience.

Bay Path University is committed to the well-being and success of all staff, faculty and students. The university provides a variety of internal resources designed to encourage community members to excel in their personal, professional and academic lives.  Bay Path is committed to ensuring that all members of their community feel included, valued, and appreciated.

DEI and Course Development

We aim to foster a community that celebrates and welcomes diversity, and as a faculty member in our community, it is important that you cultivate a classroom environment that feels safe and accepting for your students.

This section provides concrete strategies and examples for how to intentionally enhance Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) in your teaching. These are organized by elements of course design and course delivery, illustrating the numerous ways that one can infuse DEI into your courses and teach more inclusively. Each element of course design and delivery contains numerous strategies, broadly applicable across disciplines and course formats.

Course Design

Learning Objectives

• Review and adapt existing learning objectives to support inclusion.
• Add new learning objectives to call out how your course or program engages with DEI.
• Incorporate learning objectives that intentionally combine both disciplinary and DEI goals.
• Write learning objectives that explicitly include all students by challenging assumptions or biases regarding shared norm and behaviors.

Assessments

• Incorporate low stakes (formative assessments) opportunities for practice and feedback.  To avoid overwhelming student workload, substitute (rather than add) by replacing existing high stakes assignments (or part thereof) with low-stakes practice and feedback.
• Reduce stereotype threat by communicating high standards, along with confidence in students’ abilities to reach those standards (and then provide associated support for student success).
• Avoid assignment prompts that may marginalize students (e.g., designing the interface for a dating website that assumes heterosexual, cis-gendered users).
• Provide choice, creativity, flexibility for assignments (UDL).  When appropriate, incorporate student choice, creativity, and flexibility regarding the deliverables for assigned work.
• Respect “different ways of knowing.”  Recognize and respect different “ways of knowing” and methods of inquiry across disciplines and cultures. Often they are complementary, rather than at odds.

Course Content

• Seek out “hidden figures” in the field. Seek out disciplinary journals, magazines, and websites to find stories on “hidden figures” in the field who contributed significantly but rarely receive credit for their work or discoveries.
• Show modern, diverse practitioners.  Show not only classic authors and examples, but also modern, diverse practitioners who use that technique or theory.
• Highlight authors’ gender or ethnic diversity. Use first and last names when listing authors of journal articles and books (to better highlight gender or ethnic diversity). Show images of authors and practitioners to highlight diversity.
• Check your course materials for gaps in perspective.  Conduct an audit of your course materials, with or without student participation. What perspectives are missing or implicitly valued and prioritized? How can gaps be mitigated, consistent with your learning goals?
• Organize course content by theme.  Organize and sequence course content by theme rather than chronology. Highlight why classical works are important within each theme while emphasizing more recent work from different sources, scholars, or artists.
• Avoid examples that rely on detailed knowledge/experience with a single culture or time period.
• Make no assumptions about students’ familiarity.  Do not assume all students are familiar with idioms or particular pop-culture or sports references.
• Use examples that represent an array of students’ identities.  Use varied examples, metaphors, and analogies to illustrate concepts and ideas such that an array of student identities and backgrounds are represented.
• Be transparent about content choices and associated goals, particularly when those choices engage directly with issues that may seem counter to diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts.
• Discuss examples identified by students.  Crowdsource and discuss examples identified by students as an activity during or between class sessions.
• If teaching statistical, mathematical, or computational principles that rely on data, let students choose datasets that reveal broader societal issues they are invested in.

Course Delivery

Grading and Feedback

• Make expectations clear to students.  Provide rubrics with criteria for success in advance of the assignments and create space to discuss them, including anonymized examples of deliverables when possible.
• Don’t reward or penalize perspectives or opinions.  Use objective rubrics that measure component skills that students should demonstrate, but do not reward or penalize the perspective or opinion itself.
• Grade anonymously.  To reduce the influence of implicit bias, grade anonymously (i.e., “blind” to student identity).
• Grade one question at a time rather than one student at time.  Grading exams, quizzes, or homework one question at a time is more efficient and equitable, promoting consistency in both grading and feedback.
• Provide flexibility in grading/late policies and due dates, when possible.

Active Learning

• Think-Pair-Share.  Have students answer a question or complete a short task individually (Think), then compare their answers with a partner and synthesize (Pair) before calling on a subset of pairs to debrief with the entire class (Share).
• Minute Paper/Muddiest Point.  Students write independently, for 1-5 minutes, in response to an open-ended prompt.
• Many other approaches are possible for in-person, remote, and hybrid teaching across disciplines, including:
  

  Examples: 

  1. Concrete strategies for and in-person courses.
  2. Concrete strategies for remote/hybrid courses.

Discussion

• Establish norms for how students and instructors will interact.  Adopt inclusive discussion guidelines to establish community norms for how students and instructors will interact, especially regarding controversial topics or difficult dialogues. Use these guidelines to address non-inclusive behaviors if/when they arise.
• Provide ways for students to contribute their perspectives.  During class sessions, provide multiple opportunities and formats for students to contribute their perspectives.
• Highlight submissions from a variety of students and perspectives.  Between class sessions, employ asynchronous discussions boards, blog posts, or other pre-class submissions that can be leveraged strategically during class sessions.
• Avoid assumptions about any student based on identity or generalizations about particular identity groups. Have a plan for addressing generalizations or assumptions that arise in discussion and include this plan in discussion guidelines.
• Avoid marginalizing individuals.  Do not ask individuals to speak for an entire identity group.

Group Work

• Create heterogeneous, rather than random or self-selected, groups or teams. If possible, avoid isolating single students from underrepresented identities within a team.
• Assign and rotate roles within teams to ensure all students have opportunities for different group tasks and to develop different skills.
• Intentionally teach equitable group process and teamwork skills.
• Leverage team building activities, peer review, or other milestones to monitor group dynamics.^[1]