Anti-Racist and Inclusive Teaching Grant Projects

Faculty leaders and partners:

• LaNitra Berger, Director of African & African-American Studies
• Richard Craig, Associate Professor, Communication
• Kelly Knight, Associate Professor, Forensic Science
• Neesa Ndiaye, PhD student, Educational Psychology
• Idée Edalatishams, Writing Center ESL Specialist
• Susan Lawrence, Writing Center Director
• Courtney Massie, Writing Center Assistant Director

With input from our faculty partners, the Writing Center is completing a guide to writing respectfully about race and racism in the United States. The guide outlines a step-by-step process for engaging in the deep reflection and self-education necessary for writing about race and racism. Ultimately, the guide aims to cultivate writers’ ability to think structurally about systems of oppression in order to write about these and other aspects of identity in ways that affirm readers’ humanity. Writing Center leadership met with our partners in June and July to gather and implement feedback on multiple drafts of the guide. We are currently undertaking final revisions and preparing to distribute the guide, along with a companion guide to using it in courses, to a pilot group of faculty for the fall semester. We anticipate that faculty who assign and discuss the guide in their courses will be able to establish anti-racist consciousness-raising as an explicit learning goal, foster structural thinking and more intentional language choices among their students, and become better equipped to discuss issues of systemic racism both inside and outside the classroom. Faculty will also be able to consult the guide when designing assignments in order to prioritize inclusivity in their assessment criteria.

Faculty leaders and partners:

• Michelle Hand, Assistant Professor, Social Work
• Daniel Freedman, BSW Program Director and Associate Professor, Social Work
• Jeanne Booth, Community Program Manager and Assistant Professor, Social Work
• Rimsha Abassi, BSW Program Alumnus and Community Partner

The aims of the Revising a Mason Core Social Work Course to Reflect Antiracism, Equity and Justice project are to recruit a diverse group of students, staff, and faculty to collaboratively transform SOCW 200: Introduction to Social Work into a signature course that covers antiracism, diversity, equity, and inclusion (ADEI) in our undergraduate curriculum. This will prepare students to competently use ADEI practice approaches, while ensuring that SOCW 200will be known as a premiere course encompassing consequential ADEI content, by identifying and developing readings and content to substitute and supplement current content, to advance justice, human rights and training, research, practice and policy development. This work will reflect an antiracist, intersectional and decolonized approach to teaching and assessing progress toward ethical conduct, engaging with diversity and advancing human rights and social, economic, and environmental justice, to best meet the needs of our students and the communities they will serve.

SOCW 200: Introduction to Social Work is a 3-credit Mason Core social science course, a foundational social work course, and prerequisite for all required and elective social work courses. In total, 200-300 students to complete it each year, to learn about social work, as well as the values, ethics, and knowledge necessary for serving diverse populations. As a Mason Impact Course, SOCW 200 encourages engagement in research and civic engagement, and several students participate in required service-learning projects and internships in various local agencies. Thus, greater focus on multiculturalism, antiracism, intersectionality, and justice will benefit SOCW 200 students by helping them to better understand their own intersectional identities along with how they may impact direct practice with individual clients, small groups, agencies and organizations and at the societal level. Moreover, this project will prepare students to promote antiracist policies in their future work and advocacy as well as more antiracist, welcoming and inclusive cultures in their future organizations of practice, not only on a relational level and organizational, with future colleagues, but also with the surrounding community, while they collectively work to impact multi-level change.

To date, several readings, podcasts, videos and student resources have been collected on ADEI-related content, which also reflects racially, ethnically, and sexually diverse authors with a range of abilities and ages, to replace and supplement the current course content in SOCW 200, which may also be relevant to additional classes across the undergraduate and graduate curriculum. This work is being completed in partnership with the Diversity, Equity and Justice Committee in the Department of Social Work at George Mason University. Select topics for the ADEI-focused content include human rights and social justice; criminal justice and work with violence, victims and offenders; gerontology, particularly as part of social work practice; healthcare; and social work in schools. Further sub-topics related to social work will be covered. We welcome recommendations as well as expanded University partnerships in this endeavor.

Faculty leaders and partners:

• Aditya Johri, Professor, Information Sciences and Technology
• Nupoor Ranade, Assistant Professor, English

Dr. Aditya Johri and Dr. Nupoor Ranade will be redesigning several of the pedagogical modules in the IT 304, IT in the Global Economy course. IT 304 is the only course taken by all B.S. IT and BAS Cybersecurity majors to fulfill the Mason Core IT Ethics requirements and those set by the accreditation board, ABET. The core focus of the course is on socio-technical issues related to ethical implications of technology and it is a high impact course. Each year ~400-500 students take the course. Our students recognize that technology is not inherently neutral and through the course redesign students will engage directly with historical and contemporary concerns related to IT and racism, bias, justice, and equity.

The changes will increase the focus of this course on discussions surrounding algorithmic biases, inclusive design, and ethical data analytics. The course design will be enhanced to include additional role-plays to talk about inclusion, process outcomes, and societal impact. This project was kick-started in Summer 2022 when the researchers worked with an undergraduate student, Marly Saravia, to conduct a detailed literature study on the various opportunities to incorporate AI ethics in higher education. Through Fall 2022 the team will build course materials that can be used by the researchers. Additionally, the materials will be hosted for internal use by other instructors who teach courses that require analyzing technology through a critical lens. During Spring 2023, Dr. Johri will conduct a pilot study of the new materials, which will be further improved iteratively through the following semesters.

Faculty leaders and partners

• Mihai Boicu, Associate Professor, Information Systems and Technology
• Eugene Kim, Term Assistant Professor, Bioengineering
• Katherine “Raven” Russell, Instructor, Computer Science

The Inclusive Curriculum Building Initiative (ICBI), a two-hour short course and a five-module long course workshop, was launched in spring and summer respectively by the Office of Diversity, Outreach and Inclusive Learning (DOIL) within the College of Engineering and Computing (CEC). We set out to create inclusive curriculum development courses that asked Engineering professors to engage in activities, reflections, and discussions around topics of equity and inclusion in learning environments across a variety of institutional contexts. The goal of both the short and the long course is to improve STEM faculty participants cultural awareness, self-efficacy when teaching to multiple identities, and abilities to create more inclusive Computing and Engineering learning environments for their students. Short course topics covered introduction to tools/techniques to foster inclusion and introduction to inclusive assessment tools and course resources. Long course workshop modules included topics surrounding the current state of inclusive pedagogy in Engineering Education; student centered course design; and course activities and spatial awareness to foster more inclusive classrooms. Follow-up features of ICBI include a peer learning community for short and long course participants once a semester where faculty ask questions, seek feedback, and share progress related to their inclusive curricular practices.

This FCB grant supports our pilot group of long-course faculty, selected from diverse ranks and departments. Long-course participants will partake in the train-the-trainer model and will engage dissemination activities (two per semester) within CEC, receive individual and group coaching from their inclusive curriculum course instructors, and then facilitate the next cohort.

Faculty leaders and partners:

• James Brian Colchao, Computational and Data Sciences
• Kimberlie Fair, School of Business
• Hyunjin Deborah Kwak, Sociology
• Eunhee Seo, English for Academic Purposes
• Kent Zimmerman, School of Business

 Mason Korea is a unique interdisciplinary teaching and learning environment. Faculty have the opportunity to engage regularly with other faculty outside of their field of training on issues of student engagement and student success. This capacity building grant supports Mason Korea faculty, all of whom are term faculty, in their ability to support one another as a learning community in this international, multicultural, and interdisciplinary teaching and learning environment. The main goal of this FLC is to empower and provide support to Mason Korea faculty in order to practice inclusive teaching and incorporate diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) into their curriculum. The sharing of experiences and best practices among faculty will provide capacity building for faculty peer conversations as well as strengthening the ability of faculty to deploy DEI pedagogical approaches in the Mason Korea classroom.

As a team, we have held multiple meetings during Summer 2022 to craft exploratory questions and develop goals for Fall 2022. In Fall 2022, our goal is to focus on assessing faculty needs and challenges related to DEI. We plan to facilitate these conversations so that Mason Korea faculty can articulate their definitions of DEI in the Mason Korea context, understand the DEI efforts and expectations of their home department in Fairfax, and identify their specific needs and goals in the classroom. In Spring 2023, we plan to focus on addressing faculty needs.

Faculty leaders and partners

• Bethany Cieslowski, DNP, CHSE, Associate Professor, School of Nursing
• Catherine J. Tompkins, PhD, MSW, Professor, Social Work
• Kim Holmes, PhD, Associate Dean for Student Affairs, CPH
  Jhumka Gupta, ScD, MPH, Associate Professor, Global and Community Health
• Jeanne Booth, MSW, Assistant Professor, Social Work
• Terri Ann Guingab, Med, Instructional Designer, CPH

The key goal for this project is to develop, implement and evaluate immersive VR simulation for faculty to examine the impact of microaggressions, racism and discrimination, and provide opportunities to debrief perspectives and solutions.  Project objectives include the following:

• Create a safe learning environment for discussing racism, discrimination, and microaggressions
• Assess the cultural humility of faculty
• Identify frameworks and models for implicit bias and microaggression training
• Develop training to recognize and react to microaggressions
• Create custom immersive VR scenarios to practice response

The initial phase of the project will create resources to train CPH faculty to recognize and react to implicit bias and microaggressions, encompassing didactic content, experiential learning and debrief practices. After the implementation and evaluation of Phase 1, the training will be offered to CPH staff and students with plans to partner with others across the University to open up the training to the campus community

In Summer 2022 we are in the process of working through a contract with SIMX who will develop the VR simulation.  We have done a literature review and working to refine our case study that will be used during the VR.  We also have received the results of the climate survey that was done with faculty in our College, so will use those results as a part of the VR simulation as well.

Faculty leaders and partners

• Hyunyoung Cho, Term Associate Professor, English, Mason Korea
• Anna Habib, Term Assistant Professor, English
• Lisa Lister, Term Full Professor, English
• Elizabeth Paul, Term Assistant Professor, English
• James Savage, Term Assistant Professor, English
• Courtney Adams Wooten, Assistant Professor, English

The English Composition Program Linguistic Justice Leadership Team is extending work around language and linguistic justice already begun by faculty in the Composition Program, including drafting a Language Philosophy and Aims Statement and gathering feedback from faculty about this statement. The leadership team will facilitate work with faculty from across the program to understand sociocultural constructions of “standardized English” and how writing studies scholars have interrogated this concept; synthesize anti-racist and language scholarship in writing studies to identify ways other scholar-teachers have integrated inclusive language pedagogies into their writing classes; and apply their understanding of these pedagogical approaches to develop resources and/or revise existing resources for their own and other faculty’s composition classes, such as course readings, activities, assignments, and assessment.

In Summer 2022 we have completed initial meetings about how to move this work forward with the larger faculty group and to plan a workshop for all faculty in the Composition Program in August to prepare them for this work. Out of this workshop, we will recruit faculty from across the program to join curricular groups led by the leadership team to build knowledge together and create resources for faculty that will be integrated into our program’s curriculum and that we hope other faculty around Mason’s campus may find useful in implementing anti-racist approaches to students’ language practices.