Despite the progress being made towards promoting racial diversity among faculty, staff and students, there is still a lot of ground to be covered. Defining diversity can be difficult, as it can include traditional notions like race and ethnicity, but also encompass physical disabilities, sexual orientation and age.
Dr. Karen Dace, deputy chancellor for diversity, access and equity at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, says that although affirmative action has created more diverse institutions, there first needs to be a receptivity and an appreciation for diversity.
So with a tenured or tenure-track faculty that is more than 80 percent White, UMKC implements diversity though a year-long curriculum infusion program. Faculty members receive a stipend to take the course, with the goal that they will incorporate what they’ve learned into their classrooms. Approximately 60 to 70 faculty, representing a variety of disciplines, meet in September, armed with spring course syllabi. Participants, who are given several days of instruction about curriculum theories related to the instruction of diverse learners, must give oral presentations of a proposed diversity-infused curricula.
Ultimately, program participants learn ways to incorporate multicultural content into their courses. At the end of the spring semester — after teaching their revised course — participants reconvene, presenting their results and discussing successes and areas needing improvement.
One of the program’s participants was Dr. Susan Adler, chair of curriculum and instructional leadership at UMKC’s School of Education.
“My goal is to see my students talk about meeting learners’ needs that take into account race, class, culture and not just a variety of learning styles,” she says.
Through the program, Adler and a colleague, multicultural and Latino issues professor Juan Carlos Gonzalez, decided to co-teach a cultural diversity course. “We bring diverse perspectives — I’m an older, White, Jewish woman from New York; Juan Carlos is a younger, Hispanic male from California,” she says.
