Creating Climate Change: Busting Bias and Creating Welcoming Environments

Cohort: 2017
Fellow: Alison Norman

My belief is that many faculty want to create a welcoming environment for all students, but they just don’t know how, don’t realize that they are not already, or don’t understand the student interactions in their classes that are problematic. I believe the first step to remedying the problem is education, so that the faculty may first correct any of their own behaviors and then provide leadership to the students and help guide them away from inappropriate behavior. My project is designed to educate faculty members on changes they can make to their classroom environments and their interaction to students to create a welcoming environment for all students, including underrepresented minorities. It is focused on actions in the control of each individual faculty member. In this project, we are focusing on the experience of women in the STEM fields. There are two key pieces to this project: 1) the general education of the faculty of the target department as a whole and 2) the specific education of two faculty members in a class-focused study. For the first piece, I will create a series of 5-7 micro-presentations (no more than fifteen minutes) to introduce faculty to the challenges faced by underrepresented minorities and easy changes they can make to reduce those same challenges. For the second piece, I will work with two faculty members to identify places within their specific classes that they might make changes to create a more welcoming environment.