Diversity. What does this word mean to you? For faculty who participate in Pitt’s Diversity Seminar, diversity often comes to mean reflection, change, active learning, discovery, collaboration, richness, and community ... along with inclusion and difference.
Jean Carr Ferguson, Associate Professor of English and Women’s Studies (FAS), describes the Diversity Seminar as an intensive process in which each of ten faculty participants revises a syllabus for a course they’ve previously taught and develops new materials and strategies for the transformed course. Dr. Ogle Duff, Associate Professor of Education, and Carr Ferguson are faculty co-coordinators for the 4th Annual Diversity Seminar to be held May 11-22, 1998.
According to Carr Ferguson, during the first week of the two-week Seminar, time is built into each 9-4 day for faculty to "do a lot of reading and talking about diversity" using case studies and reflective essays about curricular change, a mix of films, consultation with outside experts, and other activities. Early on, faculty participants informally present their own syllabi to the group. The fellows learn from librarians and AV specialists how to use a wide range of materials for course design. They find discipline- and course-specific answers to the question "Here’s what I want to do, now what technologies should I use?"
In the second week, she notes, "there is less class and more individual work time," with consultation available as needed. The fellows are working on revising their syllabi, which they then present in the last sessions of the Seminar. The Seminar closes with a fellows’ lunch -- an occasion for celebration of accomplishment and community among the fellows.
The thirty faculty who completed the Diversity Seminar from 1995-7 represent departments across FAS, UP-Johnstown and UP-Greensburg as well as the Graduate School of Public Health, Katz Graduate School of Business, and the Schools of Education, Nursing, and Social Work. Carr Ferguson suggests that although there haven’t been many applicants from FAS natural sciences departments, "We’d love to have a scientist." Diversity has no disciplinary boundaries.
Lester Olson, Associate Professor of Communication (FAS), and winner of the 1995 Chancellor’s Distinguished Teaching Award, was a participant in last year’s Diversity Seminar. Olson used the Seminar as an opportunity to revise his Rhetoric and Human Rights course, first taught in 1993, in order to emphasize sexualized aggression as a human rights concern. He found"... it was invaluable to have two weeks to think about gender and race issues with colleagues. The conversation early on -- brain-storming -- pulled in unanticipated ways and led me to examine the parameters I had put around the course."
Some of the concrete changes Olson brought to his course include new kinds of active learning exercises for students (one result last term was several student projects on the use of language in popular songs), and in-depth discussions -- of ways that institutions inadvertently respond to instances of sexualized aggression -- with local community members both on and off campus, including Marty Friday from the Women’s Center & Shelter of Pittsburgh and John Craig of the Post-Gazette. The future: Olson says, "I find myself wishing to build from here. The Seminar needs to include class and sexuality in its consideration of diversity. We need to be inclusive across the curriculum."
Another 1997 Diversity Seminar graduate is Lisa Parker, whose course focus was Medical Ethics, a masters level course through the Center for Medical Ethics and the Department of History & Philosophy of Science (FAS). She chose this course "because the Diversity Seminar’s emphasis upon race and gender issues coincided with an evolving agenda in medical ethics to represent viewpoints other than the ‘white physician medical establishment’." For Parker, one way that the Diversity Seminar most affected her teaching was to give her "an opportunity to reflect upon interactions in my classroom . . . especially students with me as a young female faculty member. I find that as a woman there are definite differences in what’s challenged, what’s taken for granted. Things are more contingent, more open to negotiation and challenge because I’m a woman. The Seminar was very helpful for giving me a forum and a language with which to analyze this with my students. . . to gain a different kind of authority."
One thing that may surprise future Diversity Seminar participants, according to these faculty, is that they will learn to use many different kinds of evaluation tools in teaching, from the "periodic, mid-course, ‘blow-off-steam’ kind of evaluation to formulating improved questions for formal student evaluations." This is important to give the teacher information about what students are learning and how they are responding emotionally to the course.
The Diversity Seminar, says Parker, "reflects upper-level institutional support and respect for teaching," a sentiment echoed by Carr Ferguson, who explains that the Chancellor’s Diversity Working Group supports the Seminar as part of a longer-term strategy to develop healthy diversity among the University community.
For more information about the Diversity Seminar, contact Jean Carr Ferguson at 624-6537 or e-mail her at jcarr+@pitt.edu.