What does inclusivity mean to you? How does that definition get translated into practice in your approach to teaching & learning? Come join us for an interactive series of workshops led by campus experts. Dialogue with instructors from all around campus while learning about key strategies, innovative approaches, and campus resources devoted to empowering you and your students. Breakfast & Lunch will be provided.
RSVP for the Symposium here.
SCHEDULE:
Light Breakfast & Registration - 7:30-8:00AM
Session 1 - 8:00-8:45AM
Bias Busting at UT Austin - The Cockrell School of Engineering and the College of Natural Sciences. The Bias Busters Workshop at UT Austin explores how we all experience unconscious biases and stereotypes and uses relevant and real life scenarios to foster discussions. Workshop participants gain a deeper understanding of their own biases and learn strategies for being a “Bias Buster” to intervene in bias situations. The workshop is modeled after the BiasBusters@CMU and Google’s Bias Busting@ Work programs and thus has some content that is focused on STEM scenarios.
Session 2 - 9:00-9:45AM
Did That Really Just Happen? A Discussion for Faculty on Recognizing and Responding to Harm in the Classroom and Beyond - Marian Trattner, MSW, BeVocal. Assist BeVocal in creating a new workshop for faculty members focused on building a culture of care in your department and beyond. After a quick introduction and overview to the BeVocal model and steps for intervention, the BeVocal team would like to hear your thoughts and gain insight for a new workshop they're creating for faculty. Our hope for this new workshops offering is that faculty will gain confidence in intervening in moments of harm to in order to create more caring and inclusive spaces within their departments and classrooms.
Texas Well-being: Promoting Well-being in Texas Learning Environments - Thea Woodruff, Ph.D., Counseling and Mental Health Center. We will provide an overview of the Well-being in Learning Environments project at UT's Counseling and Mental Health Center. Additionally, we will discuss and practice different conditions for well-being that faculty can embed in their classrooms and other learning environments.
Session 3 - 10:00-10:45AM
disAbility Advocacy in the Classroom: Creating Accessible and Inclusive Learning Environments - Emily Shryock, MSSW, Services for Students with Disabilities. This workshop will provide an overview of how to create an accommodating, accessible and inclusive learning environment for students with disabilities.
Creating Inclusive Spaces in Cultural Diversity and Global Cultures Flag Courses - Brooke Rich, Ph.D., Center for Skills & Experience Flags. Courses that carry the Cultural Diversity or Global Cultures Flags focus on the histories, traditions, and perspectives of cultural groups in the US and around the world. This workshop will focus on creating a learning environment that provides students with an in-depth examination of cultural perspectives and reflects a diversity of student experiences and identities. We will discuss strategies for incorporating these learning objectives in courses throughout the curriculum, including new or non-traditional areas of study.
Session 4 - 11:00-11:45AM
Race & Curriculum Revision Project - Keffrelyn Brown, Ph.D., College of Education. This workshop is designed for faculty to integrate the key cornerstones of teaching—theory, practice and critical reflection/praxis specifically around race and critical multicultural curriculum and pedagogy revision—as we collectively deepen our capacity and commitment to enact race-intentional teaching. Previous participants worked on revising their course content to include more robust presentations of race-based theory or race-based curriculum materials, deepening classroom discussion around race and gaining more experience teaching about race.
#MeToo: Responding to Sexual Misconduct on Campus - Brelynn Thomas, MSSW, & Krista Anderson, M. Ed., Title IX Office. This workshop will cover the basics of Title IX reporting responsibilities as well as cover adjacent topics on boundaries and cultivating shared values to prevent sex discrimination and keep our campus community safe.
Lunch - 12:00-12:45PM
Check out discussion rooms, mingle with fellow Symposium participants, and enjoy lunch in the Glickman Conference Center Rotunda.
Session 5 - 1:00-1:45PM
Quantitative Skills for a Just Society - Lin Winton, Ph.D., Center for Skills and Experience Flags. The need to understand and use numbers, percentages, basic statistics, and other quantitative ideas arises constantly in our modern lives. Literacy of all kinds, including quantitative, equips us to engage with arguments and evidence critically and reduces our vulnerability to being manipulated – literacy is empowering. Our students arrive at UT with a wide range of abilities to reason quantitatively, with White and Asian students tending to have higher incoming estimates of quantitative skills than other races. This disparity between racial groups is likely widened as White and Asian students pursue more quantitatively focused degree plans than our Black, Hispanic, and indigenous students. A group of faculty and staff at UT has come together to explore these disparities, the mechanisms that perpetuate them at UT, and the trends and needs that are particular to certain disciplines. How can we make our STEM classrooms more diverse, inclusive, and conducive to the academic progress of our Black, Hispanic, and indigenous students? In the Humanities, where students are more likely to be preparing for careers that directly engage with issues of discrimination and oppression, what accessible, meaningful opportunities to develop the quantitative reasoning skills crucial to this work can we offer? Our concern is that if this disparity is not addressed, many of our students will graduate from UT without the empowering quantitative skills to fulfill their civic, personal, and professional potential; for others, the perception that these racial inequities are acceptable will become further entrenched.
Improving Classroom Climate - Betty Jean Taylor, Ph.D., DDCE. This session will present information about our University bias report mechanism, the Campus Climate Response Team, with an emphasis on how to improve classroom climate.
Session 6 - 2:00-2:45PM
Creating Culture Change: How We Got Started, and How You Can, Too - Alison Norman, Ph.D., Computer Science. Did you spend the morning wishing you could take each workshop back to your department? Did you think, "Wow. If there were some way for us *all* to learn about these topics, it would really make a difference for our students?" Come learn how my colleagues and I began the journey of culture change through (short) workshops that educated faculty about the student experience and discussed concrete, evidence-based steps for change, and learn how you can implement the same in your department.
Trauma-Informed Practices in the Higher-Education Classroom - Sharon Hoefer, MSSW, Voices Against Violence, and Sarah LePichon, Trauma-Informed Pedagogy. Trauma-Informed Pedagogy aims to create an inclusive environment for all students, paying special attention to those many students who have experienced interpersonal violence or other forms of trauma and might therefore be put at risk with certain texts. TI pedagogy, rather than encouraging the removal of these difficult texts, encourages an open dialogue and sets up specific practices for the success of all students in our classrooms. This workshop will explore trauma-informed teaching as a framework and present various practices for individuals to implement into their learning environments.
Session 7 - 3:00-3:45PM
Why Intersectionality and Allyship Can't Wait - Quỳnh-Hương Nguyễn, M.Ed., Gender & Sexuality Center. This workshop will focus on understanding and unpacking participant's identities. The goal of this workshop is to identify and practice strategies and tools to affirming for women and LGBTQA+ people and people with more than one of these identities.
Universal Design Learning for ALL Students: UDL 201 - Nick Winges-Yanez, Ph.D., LMSW, Texas Center for Disability Studies. This workshop provides an overview of Universal Design Learning with a more specific focus on students with labels of intellectual/developmental disabilities. Students with a variety of labels have historically been excluded from postsecondary opportunities due to lack of access. UDL provides pathways for all students to access college courses and provides instructors the opportunity to reach more students and increase all students’ learning. Specific examples will be provided for instructors to take back to their classes.
Special Session (Advanced Registration Only) - 3:00-4:00PM, Blanton Museum of Art
Practicing Inclusive Teaching and Learning in the Blanton Art Museum - Siobhan McCusker, Blanton Museum of Art. Join Blanton educators for a facilitated gallery workshop that uses selected artworks as entry points to think about inclusive teaching and learning. We will explore together how close-looking at art can foster active listening, perspective taking, develop a sense of belonging, cultivate empathy, and promote resilience.
Event co-sponsored by the Faculty Innovation Center & the College of Liberal Arts