General Education Forum on Diversity in the Curriculum: Questions for Consideration

This focus group, centered on Diversity in the Curriculum, will be this Thursday, 20 February, at 4:30 pm in the Laurel Forum.  The GERTF and Design Team would like to invite all interested faculty and staff members to attend this session (and the others), which will be facilitated by a GERTF member. 

At this forum, members of the design team will facilitate a conversation on some of the most common curricular models for diversity education, and on the issues faculty indicated were most important to them when asked about diversity during the Listening Project.  We anticipate using these discussions to assist us as we think about writing charges for the specific curricular requirements.  The Design Team has reached some preliminary conclusions about the structure and content of this requirement, but would like the benefit of your input on the following questions: 

1. What are your desired outcomes for students engaged in exploring diversity?

2. What knowledge, skills, and awareness do you want to give students the opportunity to develop in such a requirement?

3. In moving from the Listening Project to the Institutional Principles for the Design, there was divided opinion about how broadly or narrowly we should construe “diversity.”  The institutional principle on diversity presently focuses on “racism, sexism, and related forms of oppression/discrimination.”  It was thought by some that if we allow too many dimensions to satisfy a diversity requirement, we would dilute the students’ engagement with the issue; others thought that if we narrowed it too much, we would discourage faculty participation.  What dimensions of diversity do you think we ought to include in a UNCA diversity requirement?

4. In the Listening Project, faculty and students indicated that they favored a model infusing diversity across the curriculum, rather than in a specific course or list of courses.  Research shows that each of these methods raises problems.  The design team advocates diversity intensive experiences, in which students consider issues and problems of diversity in the context of course content.  Rather than limiting the number of diversity courses to a static list or single set of courses, faculty who could satisfy established criteria could have their courses designated as “diversity intensive.”  If we pursued this approach at UNCA, what specific curricular components would be necessary for a course to qualify as diversity intensive?

5. What issues or concerns do you have regarding the oversight of such a requirement?

 We are eager to have the benefit of your input, ideas, and expertise as we move toward a model for the revised general education curriculum.