Equity and inclusion on our campus
Equip is a scalable, effective, hybrid learning program
for education professionals and students
Equity, Identity, and Inclusive Pedagogy
EQUIP
Why Equip?
Much diversity training focuses solely on building awareness of difference. However, recognizing differences in identities is not enough to create inclusive environments that foster equity and belonging.
Equip offers a hybrid learning training utilizing frameworks, knowledge and practical application to help administrators, staff, faculty, and students expand, grow and excel their skills and competencies.
Equip has 3 customized versions available, with audience specific reflection and discussion questions, and communities of practice to apply the learning:
- Equip for Faculty
- Equip for Staff
- Equip for Students
Each version consists of 2 parts:
- Core models and frameworks around navigating diversity.
- Identities: historical context and knowledge that addresses some of the systemic challenges and its impact on diverse identities.
For faculty specifically, we have additional content: - Inclusive Pedagogy: focuses on the practical application, and addresses inclusive pedagogy.
Equip is built around competencies (such as attending to judgment, humility, curiosity, etc.) that are developmental and adaptive across a wide array of contexts, identities, and circumstances. See more on these competencies further down on this page.
Equip is not prescriptive (there are too many situations to account for) but rather focuses on needed core competencies and skills to be effective in situations where difference and power/privilege plays a role.
Equip moves individuals and institutions beyond compliance. Equip helps to promote organizational learning, while laying the foundation towards policy/systemic change.
How It works
Equip is designed to be customizable as well as flexible, and is competency based.
Customization:You select one, or two, (and for faculty up to three) of the parts described above to create a customized training for your students, staff and faculty, for a total of 3 hours, 6 hours or 9 hours of training. Depending on the need of your institution, you can make some of the training/modules mandatory and some optional. You can find the full curriculum here
Hybrid learning: Each part contains 1.5 hours of online content and 1.5 hours of in-person learning.
- Online content: The first 1.5 hours of each part provides engaging videos, questions and handouts which you go through at your own pace.
- Communities of practice: The online content is followed by a 1.5 hour structured discussion among peers. Equip provides the detailed guidelines and curriculum for the discussion and application of the materials to you and your institution.
Flipped Classroom: We frontload the online content to allow everyone to participate in the discussion in the community of practice with similar knowledge. As such, we can immediately go deeper into topics such such systemic bias, intersectionality and universal design.
Educational objectives and competencies: In collaboration with a number of institutions, Equip identified 9 learning objectives and 10 competencies (see below). Based on these, we built the curriculum and selected the content.
What’s Included
Online content:The Equip program encompasses up to 14 comprehensive modules, covering a range of topics that include, but are not limited to, models and frameworks, overviews of unconscious bias, microaggressions to racial inequity, religion and for faculty only ways inclusive pedagogy can create opportunities for student centered teaching in person and online.
The modules feature in-depth content, thought-provoking reflection questions, collaborative group discussions, and helpful resource materials. Each module includes focused content through engaging videos, thoughtful reflection questions, group discussions, and helpful handouts
Communities of practice: In addition to the online resources, you’ll receive comprehensive session outlines to facilitate self-led communities of practice with your peers within your institution. These communities of practice provide structured opportunity for sustained engagement of materials (frameworks etc.) to continue to explore and build skills and competencies to engage, work with and teach diverse audiences.These communities of practice will allow you to apply the program’s content.
Your unique url, with logo and opening message: We provide a private and customized learning environment, exclusive to your institution, with features such as your own logo, text and materials. You also have the option to add additional content throughout the course and have a dedicated space for discussions and reflection.
Educational Goals
Foundations
1. To understand the needed skills and competencies on how to deal with diverse learning audiences.
2. To critically examine the origin and impact of various implicit and explicit biases, especially reflecting on one’s own.
3. To suspend judgment and to manage prejudice.
4. To understand and analyze inequities related to one’s own and other’s identities.
5. To understand the importance of managing emotions (own and other’s) when interacting with diverse learning audiences.
6. To learn how to allow ambiguity, and foster curiosity and empathy, as key cornerstones for engaging with diverse learning audiences.
Putting it into practice
7. To learn best practices for creating, enhancing and delivering curriculum and course design for diverse learning audiences.
8. To improve pedagogy to be inclusive, such as methods of student-centered teaching, and mindful teaching practice.
9. To increase comfort and success when communicating and engaging with diverse learning audiences, especially when holding difficult dialogues.
Course Walkthrough
Platform
Equip is delivered through TalentLMS, a leading Learning Management System (LMS) with extensive data security features, meeting ADA compliance.
TalentLMS supports SSO (Single Sign On). To provide single sign-on services for your environment, TalentLMS acts as a service provider (SP) through the SAML (Secure Assertion Markup Language) standard. We can discuss more with the IT department during implementation.
