My commitment to diversity means first educating myself about the supremacism and colonialism at work in society and the ways I participate in and benefit from those power structures as a white, cis woman. To me, facilitating diversity and inclusion in an undergraduate biology program means, first, giving up my own power. In practice, this looks like sacrificing my own comfort and social standing for the promotion and support of people from oppressed groups. Second, vigilance about my own beliefs, tendencies, and biases is essential. As a teacher, I aim to do everything I can to create and preserve departmental channels that allow Black students, indigenous students, students of color, students with disabilities, students from religious or ethnic minorities, and students outside of the cis-, heterosexual norm to advocate for themselves and be heard. A teacher who promotes true diversity can guide a wide range of students to success, as defined by the students.  

At Emory University in Atlanta and UConn in Storrs, CT, I have mentored undergraduate and graduate students of color in many settings. Like all white people, I will never stop having to focus on, learn about, and continue to develop my sensitivities. By reminding myself of my multitude of intersecting privileges, I seek to make myself less threatening to my students and to be a source of support. To this end, one formative exposure was a book club I participated in as a graduate student. We read Claude Steele’s Whistling Vivaldi (2010). This text vividly describes stereotype threat, and I benefited from reflecting on the book’s implications and practical applications with Emory faculty. At UConn, I participated in a regional learning community that completed the 2022 Inclusive STEM teaching project MOOC. This extended the lessons from Steele’s book and elaborated on how aspects of instructor and student identity influence STEM education experiences.  

My approach to working with a diverse student population includes a focus on empowering students to self-define. Knowing what students want or need from me by explicitly asking has been effective, and we build functional communication systems together. I am grateful for and honored by their trust. Students email and meet with me to discuss academic and personal challenges. They share their struggles in my and other courses, and I respond with support and referrals to campus resources, like the academic achievement center, Dean of Students office, and UConn’s free mental health services.  

This trust between me and my students is important to me because I believe in my students’ capabilities and want them to feel a sense of belonging in my classroom and on campus. Their position as novices in my field makes them more divergent thinkers and exciting collaborators with one another and with me. In the classroom, to engage a wide range of students, I am patient with silence and give my students time to think. A simple but powerful tool I have frequently used is the think/pair/share technique where students are cued to independently think, sketch, or plan for a brief period, then partner with a fellow student to share their thoughts before being asked to speak with the entire class.  I have found this set up to scale well in settings from seminars to large lectures. When student engagement is high, I protect time at the end for summarizing main points and connecting to what will come next in the class. It is my passion to give space to open discourse that synthesizes the concepts at play, but the whole community must be taken into account during such exchanges. If conflict between students were to arise, my priority would be to ensure respectful discourse and to emphasize that, as much as possible, the ideas are to be debated, not the identities of members of the class. I practice acceptance of confusion by asking students who came to different conclusions to explain their varied reasoning. I want my students to see that voicing their confusion is valuable for the entire class.  

Another method I have applied to engage students is to assign projects where the final product can take a range of forms. In my writing-intensive upper-level electives, students create a short talk on the disease of their choosing, targeted to a lay audience they specify. Students have addressed legislators, writers for TV shows, fellow college students, children, parents, community centers, caregivers of patients, etc. Similarly, in a seminar I co-designed as a graduate student, we created a final project called “Imagine Otherwise” where students were asked to identify a problem at Emory and describe, using any format, how the situation could be made better through an inter- or multi-disciplinary problem-solving approach. Students presented class activities to represent the implementation of their solutions, wrote press releases for the unveiling of their plans, and created policy papers outlining their proposed approach to improving the issue. This assignment applied the semester’s work in a way that is relevant to the world beyond the university. My hope is that the flexibility of these assignments signals to my students that I value multiple ways of knowing and communicating. 

I believe commitment to diversity in higher education necessitates commitment to anti-racist work in the community. I have spoken several times at the town of Manchester’s Board of Directors meetings. I have provided public written testimony on state legislation and canvassed in support of the Cap the Rent campaign, a housing justice movement. Through my local mutual aid network, I organized a clothing “free store” that was open for two years. Even though these activities are off-campus and far outside my job responsibilities, I appreciate that, for my students to show up in my classroom, they must have access to safety, and their basic needs must be met. Thus, I connect with my neighbors to ensure we are caring for each other and meeting one another’s basic needs. I highlight my engagement with my community here to demonstrate that I believe diversity on campus is inextricably linked to the culture of the surrounding community, and I acknowledge my responsibility in improving that culture.