CIDR puts beliefs into practice in year-long effort

By Nancy Wick
University Week

Asking average members of the University community if they believe in diversity is like asking average Americans if they believe in freedom. The answer will be "Of course." But believing in diversity as a principle is different from putting that principle into action in one’s work. No matter how earnest and well-meaning the person, it isn’t always obvious what to do.

That’s where the staff members at the Center for Instructional Development and Research (CIDR) found themselves a year and a half ago. CIDR staff has a long history of working with diversity issues on campus, but when graduate students who worked at the center asked, "What exactly do we mean when we talk about diversity at CIDR?" the whole staff agreed that it was time to express CIDR’s commitments to diversity in explicit, practical terms.

It’s been an interesting time since then, as CIDR has worked to define how it can bring its concerns about diversity into its day-to-day work, said Wayne Jacobson, who helped coordinate the effort.

The challenge for CIDR, according to Jacobson, was twofold. First, CIDR’s role on campus is to consult with faculty and teaching assistants about teaching, so the relationship to student diversity is indirect, at best. And second, the concept of diversity is a big and inclusive one. "We kept trying to say everything we knew about diversity when we talked about it and we kept spinning our wheels," he said.

It was then that CIDR asked Geneva Gay, assistant director of the Center for Multicultural Education, to speak to the staff and help them focus their thinking. "She challenged us to define who we are and what role we have on campus with respect to diversity," Jacobson said. "She emphasized that it’s not our role to do everything that needs to be done ourselves."

After Gay's visit, CIDR staff began reading relevant articles and having discussions about their work and its relationship to diversity. Their first goal was to create a mission statement, but not the kind that gets put on the shelf and forgotten. "We wanted it to be relevant and meaningful for our work," Jacobson said.

At that point they began to write, passing around the evolving document and engaging in a dialogue that lasted for several months. But by then their statement had grown to at least six pages. "It got so long and complex that we had to stop," said Katherine Frank, a CIDR staffer who also was a coordinator of the project.

Frank formed a subcommittee with two other staff members, and the three set about whittling down the verbiage to a statement that would fit on two sides of a single page. That took another month.

"When we took our shorter statement back to the staff, one of them pointed out that what we had written was all problem-oriented," Frank said. "It sounded as if diversity was posing problems that needed to be solved. However, we know student diversity enriches the classroom, and our colleague urged us to make that emphasis clearer in our statement."

When they had a statement that everyone approved, CIDR’s next step was to ask, if this is what we believe, what actions does it entail? They then turned the actions into a self-assessment survey, asking their staff whether they thought they should be doing the actions and whether they actually were doing them.

"From those surveys we were able to identify what things we’re doing best and where we need to grow," Jacobson said.

CIDR learned that it was strong with regard to helping instructors find many different ways to teach, thus accommodating a diversity of individuals and learning styles. And they also excelled at probing the context teachers find themselves in.

They found need for improvement in two other areas. One was in keeping informed about other units’ work related to diversity, in order to look for ways to collaborate with them. The other area for improvement was in directly raising questions about diversity in meetings with instructors; for example, asking about the contributions students make to how the course is taught based on their different backgrounds, identities and perspectives. CIDR staff were also not consistently asking about the ways clients are accounting for diversity in their planning.

After identifying these areas, CIDR began experimenting with ways to improve. They’ve asked their staff to try one of a list of ideas in their work to see if it affects their practice.

"Basically, we’re trying to 'open up' our practice," Jacobson said. "Typically we each work alone and don’t know what the consultant in the next office is doing. So we’re suggesting that people consider working together on a case, or keep a reflective journal on what they do, or write up case studies or role plays, maybe even use audio or videotape of a client session."

Frank said she had tried working collaboratively with another consultant and had found it to be an eye-opening experience. "When you’re working with someone else," she said, "you’re bringing your personal styles together but also playing off one another. It makes you so much more aware of what you’re doing and what you’re not doing and what you could be doing."

Staffers will be reporting on what they did when the whole staff meets at the beginning of winter quarter. The process, Jacobson said, will be ongoing, in keeping with the group’s determination to put their beliefs into action. He said CIDR would be happy to consult with others on campus who are interested in articulating their beliefs about diversity, teaching and learning, and examining how they put their beliefs into practice. However, he advised, no two groups would ever do exactly the same thing because the outcome must be tied to each group’s work in order to be useful. He also warns that it isn’t easy.

"We have a relatively small staff - about 20 - and all of us were committed to doing this," Jacobson said. "Even so, it’s been a long process. This isn’t something you can do in a weekend retreat."

The full text of CIDR’s diversity statement and self-assessment survey are available on line at http://depts.washington.edu/cidrweb/DiversityStatement.html.

Center offers resources

CIDR offers many resources to the campus community, including resources related to diversity. One issue of its quarterly bulletin, for example, is entitled "Transforming a Course." This issue was written by Betty Schmitz, director of UW’s Curriculum Transformation Project, and deals with diversity issues in course design.

The center also produces a one-page "Guide to Instructional Resources" that outlines where to find help on campus for various teaching and learning problems.

Both the bulletin and the guide are available, along with many other resources, on the newly revamped CIDR Web site at http://depts.washington.edu/cidrweb/. Go to http://depts.washington.edu/cidrweb/DiversityTools.htm to get a listing of informative, downloadable articles on diversity, from both on and off campus.

"Our old Web site did a good job of explaining what CIDR is," Jacobson said. "Our revised site does that and also provides information you can download and use."