Overview:
What Diversity Intensive courses teach:
Diversity intensive courses are essential in liberal arts education for
highlighting the centrality of diversity and complexity of difference in
contemporary life. At UNCA, required diversity intensive courses help to
fulfill our mission in facilitating a truly liberating education while offering
opportunities for students and faculty to examine their own experiences
and values alongside those of others. Such self-examinations could lead
to transformative experiences for participants.
Diversity Intensive course are offered everywhere
in the curriculum
Integrative Liberal Studies Diversity courses are diversity-intensive or
centered, rather than diversity-inclusive or enhanced. Diversity intensive
courses focus on the meaning and experience of diversity and difference
and the implications of living in a diverse society whether one is advantaged
or oppressed. Diversity intensive courses emphasize the complex and problematic
processes of identity formation. These courses encourage awareness of the
relationships between self and social institutions, both of which rest upon
as well as reify difference and hierarchy.
Successful
engagement with others in a multicultural and pluralistic society requires
an understanding of how social forces shape our sense of identity as individuals
and as part of a culture. In order to acquire this understanding, students
must go beyond exposure to the perspectives of others to a consideration
of the ways in which social institutions impact identity formation.
Diversity
intensive courses offer and encourage opportunities for transformative experiences
for all participants. They do this by engaging the heart and the mind, demanding
serious consideration of pedagogy, and requiring participants to reflect
upon and critically engage in analysis of power, privilege, and hegemonic
ideology. Such goals require faculty to be aware of their own position relative
to power and privilege, be sensitive to the potential range of student reactions,
and be prepared to constructively confront difficult issues in the classroom.
Students’ experiences in a D-I classroom can range from: a routine
learning experience; to an intellectual breakthrough as they begin to put
ideas and actions together; to, in some cases, a cathartic, emotional experience
for which students may need support outside of the classroom. While transformative
experiences may be liberating, they can also be challenging.
The application for Diversity Intensive designation
should include: the completed application form; a syllabus (click here
for syllabus guidelines); descriptions of class projects and assignments
(click here for sample assignments); and a vision statement (click here
for vision statement guidelines and sample vision statement).
To
qualify for Diversity Intensive designation, the course should meet the
following criteria:
-
Examines as one of its primary
themes, within the context of the course materials, the cultural processes
and ideologies of constructing human identities, such as class, sex, gender,
race, ethnicity, sexuality, disability, or religion, as well as the implications
of those identities on lived experience.
-
Examines as its primary
subjects individuals’ relationship to power, how privileged and
oppressed identities are constructed among and across categories of difference,
and how societies use institutions and imbalances of power to create and
perpetuate or challenge inequalities.
-
Examines as a primary consideration
of diversity the intersectionality of identities. (multiple layers of
identities and the interrelationship between or among these identities,
ie., black women’s experiences as blacks, as women, and as black
women.)
-
Course materials relate
directly to the issues addressed in the course. Whenever appropriate,
course material produced by underrepresented or oppressed group(s) should
be included.
-
Course structure allows
participants to examine their experiences and values with course materials,
discussion, and projects/assignments that move students beyond their comfort
zones, providing opportunities for transformative experiences.