Faculty Retention & Success through Intergroup Dialogue and Inclusion Alliance

Inclusion is essential to furthering diversity at Purdue and providing all faculty with an environment in which they can succeed and enjoy fulfilling academic careers. Faculty Retention and Success through Intergroup Dialogue and Inclusion Alliance (FIDIA) began as a three-year Provost funded education, dialogue, and research initiative to engage faculty in promoting positive transformative change. The Alliance is composed of faculty members from across the Purdue campus.

Please contact Klod Kokini at kokini@purdue.edu with questions.

Introduction

In alignment with the Office of the Provost’s mission to develop creative approaches to foster a culture that supports and sustains innovation, a faculty-centered culture transformation initiative was started in July 2017: Faculty Retention and Success through Intergroup Dialogue and Inclusion Alliance. Our goal is to improve the climate for inclusion at Purdue, thus increasing the retention, success, and well-being of all faculty, especially faculty from underrepresented backgrounds (e.g. racial-ethnic minorities and women).

Objectives

With the vision of facilitating a transformative culture change across campus, the objectives of the Faculty Retention and Success through Intergroup Dialogue and Inclusion Alliance are:

promote awareness of inequity, biases, and social justice issues from a range of disciplinary backgrounds;
provide evidence-based strategies for promoting inclusion and belonging;
prepare faculty (at a predominately white institution and predominately male STEM discipline representation) to succeed in increasing diversity and inclusion on campus;
foster collegiality and interdisciplinary collaboration among faculty; and
conduct continued research on the experiences of underrepresented groups of faculty (including women in several disciplines and faculty of color) on campus, ways to improve campus culture, and rigorous evaluation of the proposed core activities

Core Activities

Core activities of our initiative are informed by social science theory, evidence-based approaches to transforming academic culture, and successful efforts at peer institutions. The philosophy of this alliance is to advance faculty members’ understanding of and respect for diversity and inclusion and to augment skills in the area of intergroup relationships, managing conflict, and promoting inclusion. We are engaging three core activities to transform our campus culture:

Educational Opportunities Targeted to Various Levels of Faculty
Intergroup Dialogue
Research

1. Educational Opportunities Targeted to Various Levels of Faculty

One of our core activities is to develop diversity, inclusion, and equity educational opportunities (e.g., workshops, seminars) for faculty based on their starting level of knowledge and designed to build from that level.

2. Intergroup Dialogue

Our second core activity involves in-person facilitated intergroup dialogue, where small group of faculty and/or department leaders will come together to explore social group identity, conflict, and social justice.

3. Research

All core activities of the Faculty Intergroup Dialogue and Inclusion Alliance will undergo rigorous evaluation research to assess outcomes and aims regarding faculty members’ gains from diversity and inclusion educational opportunities and intergroup dialogue.

References

Upcoming Events

The core activities of our project are to provide education, to create opportunities for dialogue and to perform research in order to understand how effective our interventions are. The following is a description of our ongoing and planned activities.

If you are interested in learning more about any of our activities, please contact Klod Kokini at kokini@purdue.edu.

1. Individual Diversity Plans: Faculty Promoting Positive Change Workshop Series

We offer a 3-part educational workshop for faculty designed to raise cultural awareness, foster community and increase a sense of agency to affect change. Each participant is asked to work on a simple project of interest to them and they are encouraged in their own personal project to positively impact inclusion and climate.

2. Be a Better Ally: What we say at Purdue and Why it Matters Workshop

This two-hour session, is designed to increase participants’ awareness of microaggressions, to understand the difference between diversity and inclusion, to provide opportunities to practice using inclusive language, and to participate in scenarios to practice being an intervening ally.

3. A Dialogue with Heads on Inclusion

We have designed a dialogue session which considers Purdue related information such as COACHE data, experiences of students and faculty at Purdue, and news items that reflect experiences of faculty and students.

4. How to Have Difficult Conversations

Existing evidence shows that communication among faculty is difficult when the topics are complex and uncomfortable. Such topics could include race, gender, privilege, LGBTQ status, etc. This dialogue event provides a combined training and practice session on how to have difficult conversations among faculty on issues such as racism, sexism, etc.