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Diversity & Inclusion
We all know that the students we serve at the two-year college are impossible to categorize. Whether we’re talking about educational background, racial identity, income level, gender identity, life experience, physical ability, ethnic identity, language, age, or any other grouping, our students are multi-faceted, intersectional human beings, and the more we can open ourselves, our courses, and our programs to this reality, the more deeply and justly we all will grow as artists and as human beings.
To this end, and in recognition of the multiple historic practices that have created imbalances of power and cultures of exclusion, here are some larger goals our Caucus has developed:
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First, we each can become more conscious of our own implicit biases, as much as possible, and encourage broader consciousness-raising in our individual places of work. This is a necessary step towards fostering justice and equity for ourselves, our colleagues, and our students.
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We also can choose the texts we teach in our classrooms more intentionally. As we know, artistic representation is one of the most powerful tools we have to cultivate empathy across traditional identity boundaries. If the majority of our texts represent only part of our population, we are missing an opportunity to understand ourselves and each other, and to help our students understand themselves and each other too. We need to break open our reading lists with new voices and multiple languages, and this needs to happen intentionally.
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Similarly, we all can consider ways to infuse our pedagogies, our program structures, our visiting writer series, and our hiring practices with more intentional diversity. This includes reaching out on our own campuses—to ESOL and Foreign Language Departments, and other departments or groups—to seek points of collaboration. Again, we will not become a more equitable society by accident. This will take a conscious space-making for voices and practices that have been historically marginalized.
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Finally, we all can consider ways to foster diversity within our Caucus. We each can cultivate interest in the Caucus at our institutions, join the Caucus’s Facebook page, and offer our individual insights at every turn. We can outreach to other groups within the larger AWP community and seek opportunities to cross-pollinate our audiences and memberships. We can outreach to the local community each year at the annual conference, and we can outreach to each other all year, in between conferences. And, we all absolutely can consider joining the Caucus’s leadership. We need multiple voices from multiple positions, and we especially need these voices in positions of power.
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Please submit any more specific “best practices” to Caucus President Stephanie Lindberg (cwtwoyearcollegecaucus@gmail.com) so we can begin building collaboratively a set of strategies for our respective colleges.