Hello!
I’m Dr. Jennifer Teramoto Pedrotti, Associate
Dean for Diversity and Curriculum in the College
of Liberal Arts and I am very excited today
to share with you our inaugural CLA Diversity
Action Plan.
In this video, I’ll walk you through some of the main points in the plan and
tell you a few things to look for in the document as you
go through the plan yourself. In addition,
the plan is also broken down below on this website,
and the entire document is available for downloading
below as well.
As you likely already know, the College of
Liberal Arts sees diversity as central to
its mission and is committed to fostering
an equitable and inclusive environment within
the college and university.
We house the foundational scholarly disciplines
that study cultural awareness, knowledge,
and skills, and our students are asked to
consider multiple perspectives daily in their
classes and in their studies in general.
We have long been a leader on campus in the
area of diversity, equity, and inclusion (or DEI),
but started to formalize our more recent
efforts in this area in 2016 with the development
of our Faculty and Student Diversity Committees
and the creation of my position.
In the last few years, we’ve utilized university
data and collected some of our own to help
to formulate our goals in this area.
I’ll take you through each of the main goals
now.
Goal 1: Recruit a diverse group of faculty,
students, and staff who value and are invested
in cultural competence.
Our main efforts in this area surround prioritizing
DEI knowledge and specialized skills in working
with a variety of different types of students,
when hiring our faculty and staff, and when training
our search committees to conduct hiring processes
in ways that avoid bias, and encourage broad
representation.
We know that diversity in our faculty and
staff is important for our students so that
they see teachers and mentors who are like
themselves in their classrooms and in their departments.
Goal 2 is related to Goal 1 in that it covers
our desire to not only recruit the types of
individuals we talked about in the first goal,
but to retain them as well and to mentor them
successfully through their studies or career
trajectory.
We plan to achieve this retention by offering
mentoring opportunities, making sure that
the types of services we have in the college
like advising, counseling, and child care
are culturally responsive and expanding our
growing relationships to the San Luis Obispo
communities who are also underrepresented.
Goal 3 involves providing explicit college
support and value for training and education
related to DEI issues.
Some programs already exist on our campus,
but this goal for us includes broadening the
types of opportunities to which our students,
staff, and faculty have access, and increasing
college support for engagement in off-campus
professional development in DEI areas as well.
We have recently developed new programs that
help to make international experiences more
accessible to all of our students, and are
continually working to make sure our curriculum
reflects broad offerings in DEI areas
of study.
Goal 4 is foundational to many of our plans,
in that it is to develop institutionalized
practices and policies that increase equity
across the college and university.
This includes building DEI into our current
policies, and shaking the pillars of our long
held practices to make sure they are taking
differences and equity into account.
Finally, goal 5 is to eliminate the graduation
rate gaps between underrepresented students
and non-underrepresented students.
Though we know these gaps are found across
the country, we are committed to reducing
our gap to zero by providing first generation
college students and transfer students with
explicit support, and by making sure that all of
our students have access to the high impact
experiences that research tells us lead to
success in college, and beyond.
When you look through the rest of the document,
you’ll find that below each broad goal,
there are several subgoals and these are aligned
with specific metrics that will help us to
measure our progress during the next five
years.
In addition, department chairs and leads in
all of our units will be asked to report achievements
under the five goals on an annual basis to
assist them in creating goals for themselves
that move us toward a diverse, equitable,
and inclusive college as a whole.
Finally, you’ll notice that we’ve taken
the time to show how our plan aligns with
the University Strategic Plan as a whole.
I hope you’ll scroll down to the bottom
of the screen to download the entire report – please
also look for the credits page for a list of
all of the people who assisted the college during
this process.
The College of Liberal Arts is firmly committed
to providing a diverse, equitable, and inclusive
education for all of our students, and workplace
for our faculty and staff.
I thank you for your time today and look forward
to continuing this important work together.
