DAC Professional Development Subcommittee Student Panels and Book Reads
Background and Historical Overview:
North Seattle Community College is in a historically white middle class area of
Seattle, Washington. The student population is increasingly diverse and yet most
faculty and staff are white, middle class and late middle-aged. Members of our
Diversity Advisory Committee and others committed to cultural competency in our
work have been seeking strategies to educate and transform our employees to be
more effective with our diverse student body.
In 2005 the NSCC Diversity Advisory Committee (DAC) sponsored a full-day training
for the campus community entitled “Beyond Inclusion” with Leticia Nieto. She
introduced a frame of reference to understand oppression by outlining nine
categories of “Social Rank” with Agent and Target categories in these areas: Age,
Disability, Religion (relates to religious culture), Ethnicity, Social Class, Sexual
Orientation, Indigenous Background, National Origin, and Gender. Dr. Leticia Nieto
developed this frame of reference, with the ADRESSING acronym from Pamela A.
Hays. The material has subsequently been published in the book “Beyond Inclusion,
Beyond Empowerment: A Developmental Strategy to Liberate Everyone” by Leticia
Nieto with Margot F. Boyer. Nieto outlines a continuum of “Agent” awareness skills
from Indifference, Distancing, Inclusion, and Awareness to Allyship and a continuum
of “Target” awareness skills from Survival, Confusion, Empowerment, and Strategy
to Re-Centering.
After the “Beyond Inclusion” training, a number of faculty and administrators met to
see how we could continue the work started with this training. A committee was
formed to plan further professional development based on this analysis. The goal of
our committee was to move the people in our community towards cultural
competency and the higher end skill sets of Allyship and Re-Centering by providing
educational opportunities for people to engage at whatever stage they are on the
developmental ranges mentioned above. The committee's understanding of
"underrepresented, at-risk populations" recognizes biases based on historical,
institutionalized mechanisms that privilege people in some categories while
oppressing/disadvantaging people in other categories. The committee has
developed a working definition of diversity for this purpose using Leticia Nieto's
work on rank categories and rank roles. This committee became the DAC
Professional Development Subcommittee.
Student Panels:
The DAC Professional Development Subcommittee has planned training events for
faculty, staff and administrators focusing on these nine areas. The first event was at
the Faculty Retreat in 2006, with a training focusing on Age Rank Categories. The
subcommittee decided that Student Panel Presentations to the college would be an
excellent way to educate our community about the issues involved for people in the
Target areas on our campus. In Spring Quarter of 2007, the first Student Panel was
organized. Student Panels have been developed around the Rank areas annually
since this time. The subcommittee plans to cover all nine Rank areas and continue
indefinitely, as the process provides such a valuable opportunity to learn from our
students.
The first student panel the DAC Subcommittee set up in 2007 focused on the rank
area of National Origin, featuring students from a variety of countries outside of the
USA, including both international students and refugee/immigrant students. The
entire campus workforce, including faculty, classified staff, and administrators were
invited. The students presented their answers to questions provided to help them
tell their stories about their experiences relating to the Rank Category, both on our
campus and off, including both challenges and what has helped them be successful.
After the panel presentation, the NSCC employees participated in a reflective
workshop designed to identify what we learned from the students and develop
strategies to make improvements to our practices based on what we learned. The
information was consolidated and shared with the community.
Each year in Spring Quarter, we have continued to organize a Student Panel
Presentation in the same manner. Student Panels have included 4-6 students each
time, with audiences of typically 20-40 NSCC faculty, staff and administrators in
attendance. Rank areas covered include: Students of Color in 2008, Gender in 2009,
Students with Disabilities in 2010, LGBQ Students in 2011, and Students of Color
again in the fall Quarter of 2011. The Subcommittee is currently planning a student
panel focusing on Social Class Rank for Spring Quarter 2012.
The Student Panels have raised awareness on campus and have led to some changes
in college practices. The committee has followed up with the college community to
update the non-discrimination statement and address complaints of discriminatory
behavior.
Book Reads:
In Spring 2010, the professional development subcommittee recommended that
DAC sponsor Campus Book Reads. We hoped to reach more campus employees,
build community, and connect in a fun, engaging way by reading interesting books,
both fiction and nonfiction, which relate the stories of those affected by the Rank
Target Categories. During a Diversity Advisory retreat, the committee discussed
affecting change to the institution using the Multicultural Change Intervention
Matrix outlined in the book by Pope, Reynolds and Mueller, Multicultural
Competence in Student Affairs. In this model, change can be targeted at the
individual, group or institutional levels. At the individual level, the first order of
change comes from a change in awareness by individual faculty, staff and student
members that leads to a paradigm shift in their perspective. In order to enact group
change, groups investigate their membership, norms and goals using their new
perspective in order to incorporate new values. Finally at the institutional level,
groups and programs can evaluate whether there is a systematic value on diversity
through programming, initiatives and budget allocation. We discussed the particular
challenges faced at North Seattle Community College using the matrix as a guide for
understanding our particular problems. It was decided that all campus book
reads in fall 2010 would serve to engage faculty, administrators, staff and students
at the individual level around different themes in multicultural education through
fiction, and serve the mission of North Seattle Community College to "create a richer
environment by embracing diverse cultures, ideas, perspectives and people.”
Since the program’s inception, the subcommittee has selected one book per quarter
and hosted three to four 1 ½ hour discussion sessions per book. In Fall 2011, one of
the four discussion sessions was actually a screening and discussion of the movie
based on the quarter’s selected book. Each book was supplemented with an online
study guide providing related materials and suggestions for further reading. A
handout with guiding questions was also provided at every discussion session (See
Book Read Library Guides).
In year one of the program, we chose the book for each quarter based on Leticia
Nieto’s Social Rank Categories, intending to focus on one category per quarter and
to cover each in turn, as far as possible. Our other criteria were that the book must
be accessible to a wide audience, and hopefully fun to read. Year two loosely follows
these same criteria, with the added dimension of having the titles speak to the
concept of revolutions, broadly defined. This addition was part of the
subcommittee’s intent to bring the program into alignment with the campus wide
Year of Learning theme, Revolutions.
The titles we selected, together with the Rank Categories we had in mind are as
follows:
Year one:
Fall 2010 - The Other Wes Moore - Ethnicity and Social Class
Winter 2011 - The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears - National Origin and
Immigrant Experience
Spring 2011 - The Necessary Hunger - Sexual Orientation, Ethnicity and Age
Year two - Revolutions:
Fall 2011 - Persepolis - Religion (non-Christian religious milieu); and revolutions as
international history (Iranian revolution) and as a medium type (graphic novel)
Winter 2012 - Enrique's Journey - National Origin and Social Class; and reform in
immigration in the United States
Spring 2012 - The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven - Indigenous
Background (Native); and change in multidimensional social identities
A number of suggestions for improving college practices came out of each of the
book read discussions. The suggestions were very specific to the content in each
chosen title. There are now a number of initiatives that are currently in process that
address some of the issues that were raised during the discussion. For example,
peer mentoring and peer navigator programs have been implemented.