Contributions to Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion

Access and Success

Undergraduate Students

The Commons integrates equity and asset-based frameworks into our educational programs that encourage educators to examine how their instructional practices contribute to (or not) equitable outcomes for our students. These instructional practices are incorporated into the Commons’ student-facing academic and co-curricular programs and services for undergraduate and graduate students. Examples include:

• Black Academic Excellence Initiative (BAEI) The Commons is a campus partner for this program.  Specifically, the Academic Achievement Hub contributes to student academic success through Supplemental Instruction (SI), learning strategies tutoring, and content tutoring to students in the program.
• Black Alumni Scholarship Council The Commons is a collaborative partner of the Black Alumni Scholarship Fund (BASF) program. It supports the Council by providing academic and experiential learning resources and peer mentors to BASF students and by hosting networking events for BASF students and faculty. 
  • The Academic Achievement Hub contributes to student academic success by inviting BASF incoming freshmen who qualify for Summer Bridge to participate in Supplemental Instruction (SI), learning strategies tutoring, and content tutoring.
  • The Experiential Learning Hub contributes to student success by providing guidance and support for co-curricular opportunities and competency-development on career-exploration and planning.
• Community Centers The Commons is a highly engaged partner of UC San Diego's Community Centers, providing learning strategies sessions at the LGBT Resource Center, the Veterans Resource Center, and the Women's Center.
• Summer Bridge The Commons is an instrumental partner in this UC San Diego summer success program for incoming freshmen from underserved California high schools. The Academic Achievement Hub contributes to student academic success through Supplemental Instruction (SI), learning strategies tutoring, and content tutoring for students, and the Experiential Learning Hub provides guidance and support for co-curricular opportunities and competency-development on career-exploration and planning.
• UCDC Internship Program Scholarships The scholarships for UCDC internship program improve equity through recruitment and retention of underrepresented, first-generation, and lower-income students.

Graduate Students

• Competitive Edge The Commons partners with the Graduate Division to offer writing workshops and support to incoming graduate students in the program. 
• Diversity Statement Writing Workshops The Commons helps prepare UC San Diego graduate students for careers in education by providing guidance on what to include in a teaching diversity statement. 
• Writing Discussion Groups for EAL (English as Additional Language) Students The Commons hosts weekly writing discussion groups to cultivate EAL graduate students' confidence and self-efficacy for producing and reviewing graduate-level academic writing.

Educators

• Anti-Racist Pedagogy Learning Community A quarter-long learning community for UCSD educators that meets every other week for two hours to discuss ways to unpack anti-blackness and dismantle systemic racism in educational practices.
• Changemaker Faculty Fellows Program The Commons partners with CSI and the campus Changemaker initiative to provide an opportunity for selected faculty to integrate community-engaged service-learning into their teaching, research, and public service, while being recognized campus leaders in CESL pedagogy. 
• Creating an Inclusive Classroom workshops The Commons partners with the Center for Advancing Multidisciplinary Scholarship for Excellence in Education (CAMSEE) to offer two half-day workshops to support faculty in learning about immediately implementable and sustainable strategies to cultivate inclusive classrooms, as well as guidance in creating learner-centered syllabi that address the diverse needs of our students. These workshops also aim to increase awareness of the challenges faced by students on our campus and the support resources that are available to address those challenges.
• Promising Practices in DEI Course Support The Teaching + Learning Commons is researching how learning outcomes are developed and deployed for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) courses at UC San Diego as well as identifying and designing promising practices to support DEI instructors in achieving their outcomes.

Hiring Practices

Since our founding in 2015 we have intentionally and purposely endeavored to attract and retain professional and student staff who are committed to our campus values of equity, diversity, and inclusion, and to increase representation within our unit for practitioners who are members of groups that have historically been excluded from or marginalized within higher education. From the onset,  we have been strategic and mindful about employing processes to sustain our efforts in this area:

• Crafting a statement on diversity to include in all job postings (in addition to standard EEO statement),
• Including vision and leadership around equity, diversity, and inclusion both as an area of responsibility in job cards and as a component of the annual review for all director-level positions, and
• Introducing screening questions for all applicants which ask about understanding of, and experience enacting, principles of equity, diversity, and inclusion.
• Hiring student staff reflective of our student body, in terms of ethnicity, gender, first-gen status, and academic major.

Organizational Culture

 Within our unit, we have taken a deliberative approach for our bi-weekly staff meetings, using this forum to introduce and reinforce our core values (being constructive, collaboration, inclusion, integrity and sustainability) and to foster professional development on topics including equity, diversity, and inclusion. We maintain a rotation (among all professional staff) for leading staff meetings and provide opportunities for members from various subunits to collaborate in structuring and running these meetings. Our goal in developing this structure has been to foster inclusion and to support agency for every member of our team. We also support an EDI workgroup, which serves to identify specific opportunities for goal-setting, training, and professional support.

We have gained valuable feedback during our annual retreat on our progress in supporting a welcoming and inclusive workplace for all employees. We are engaged in discussions to identify means of increasing our accountability in this area, including fostering an environment that supports constructive feedback. In particular, we look forward in the 2019-2020 academic year to undertaking a more systematic assessment of our employees’ experience, by obtaining disaggregated analysis of our staff@work survey data, with support from the EDI unit.