Creating a Culture of Inclusivity Across a College Campus

At Providence College, we have been working to create a culture of inclusiveness across campus. This work has been guided by five main pillars: Defining Inclusive Teaching, a Speaker Series, an Inclusive Pedagogy Badging program, Community Building, and Student Engagement. This strategy allows faculty to engage with inclusive teaching practices in multiple ways, meets faculty where they are by allowing for different levels of familiarity with inclusive practices, and provides opportunity for continuing development of their knowledge. New faculty are introduced to our efforts at their incoming orientation, where they receive books focused on inclusive teaching and our institution-specific definition of what inclusive teaching means is shared with them. This establishes a culture at our institution where inclusive teaching practices are valued. For both new and current faculty, we offer opportunities to discuss and learn more through inviting nationally recognized experts in pedagogy to campus and book groups to discuss the ideas of these experts. Additional incentives for faculty to introduce or increase their inclusive practices in the classroom are available through workshops, attendance at conferences, a digital badging system which allows faculty to gain certification of their inclusive teaching practices, and our summer faculty development program—LIT@PC. The latter is an effective way to allow faculty the time to focus on incorporating labor-intensive inclusive practices into their courses by facilitating a group of like-minded faculty to work with and a summer stipend to allow them to devote their time to these efforts instead of other work that they may need to do for a summer salary. Finally, because student voices are important, we composed a Student STEM Advisory group to both offer us feedback on the present climate in their classrooms and to engage their fellow students in activities to call attention to the efforts of their instructors.