The Office of Institutional Equity and Diversity (OIED) is committed to enhancing knowledge and skills to enable Brown community members to center equity in their academic settings and workspaces.
Working with departments, individuals and partners across campus, OIED offers consultations and facilitates a range of professional development opportunities for staff, faculty, and students to advance diversity and inclusion, and to address bias. Trainings include:
A facilitated and interactive space that provides participants opportunities to reflect on their values and reaffirm their commitment to co-creating and building an inclusive community within their organization, program, department, and/or unit. In this foundational module, participants explore definitions of key DEI concepts such as privilege, microaggressions, and intersectionality to enable deeper discussions of these concepts in future modules. Attention is given to skill-building and action steps that individuals can take to support a sense of belonging and inclusion for everyone with a particular focus on supporting marginalized identities.
A facilitated and dialogue-based space that provides individuals with an examination of personal social identities and their relationship to power and privilege, perceptions of self, and beliefs about others. This module focuses on the complexity of personal identity development and its influence on lived experience.
Harro's model of socialization describes how people come to accept, both consciously and unconsciously, both inequality and unfairness on the basis of their socialization with families, friends and neighbors, and with reinforcements in later life in various social institutions. The Cycle of Socialization is used as a conceptual framework to explore a) issues of social identity (e.g., identity formation, privileged and targeted social identities, pride, internalized dominance, internalized oppression, individual resistance to socialized roles in systems of oppression) and b) issues related to power relations at the system level (e.g., group privilege, social power, access to resources). This framework is helpful to both support and challenge us to gain a deeper understanding of how we all learn to “fit” in our social world through a systematic process of socialization in “how to be” each of our social group identities.
A facilitated and dialogue-based space that provides participants with an examination of issues of power, privilege, and difference through exploring the vast inequities of status levels, identifying how our society is built upon these inequities, and examining how those with power, privilege and high status perpetuate this structure. This module introduces theories that explain the (un)conscious ways in which individuals, institutions, and policies privilege some groups while disempowering others along gender, racial, linguistic, ability, and socioeconomic domains (among others). Here we explore the possibility that, through socialization and acculturation, we all have participated in and/or been impacted by this power/privilege imbalance in multiple ways. Attention will be given to how positionality may affect one’s experience in the world, unpacking experiences of marginalization and privilege, and establishing action steps for leveraging our experiences to establish more inclusive environments.
A facilitated and dialogue-based space that guides participants through an exploration of frameworks for organizing the ways individuals can engage in critical conversations on issues related to diversity, equity, and inclusion. The purpose of providing these frameworks is to begin the process of cultivating spaces for critical conversations about issues of diversity. The theoretical and experiential frameworks discussed will serve as the departure point whereby specific explorations of the lived experiences of historically marginalized groups (e.g., issues relating to race, culture, gender, ability, sexual identity, and class) can be discussed.
A facilitated and dialogue-based space that provides participants with an opportunity to assess the impact of biases on policies and practices. This module aims to enhance participant knowledge and skills for leading change in challenging contexts to help participants grow a more collaborative and supportive workplace environment as they move equity to the center of planning and practice in their respective spaces.
Exploring theoretical considerations and practical applications for the work of building a culturally inclusive environment.
An awareness-raising discussion that explicitly defines microaggressions and provides productive approaches to responding to them.
An exploration of the hidden biases we all carry from a lifetime of exposure to cultural attitudes about social identities.
To advance OIED’s mission of providing learning opportunities for faculty, staff and student leaders, we utilize a learner-engagement curricular model that scaffolds knowledge and introduces macro- and micro-level concepts related to diversity, equity and inclusion. We begin with a focus on facilitating community member development of vocabulary and conceptual frameworks and we create opportunities for staff, faculty and students to explore their own identities, assumptions about others, and the implications in their professional interactions. Recognizing the relationship of self and context, our multi-dimensional conceptual framework acknowledges the connectedness of the work situated in the personal and institutional domains.