Getting Started with Equity: A Guide for Academic Department Leaders

Getting Started With Equity: A Guide for Academic Department Leaders

Getting Started With Equity is a guide designed specifically for academic department leaders in higher education. The guide can help department chairs, course directors, and lead instructors develop and curate an educational environment that is simultaneously justice-centered and equity-advancing.

While the guide offers specific strategies faculty can adopt in the classroom and in curricular development, a systems approach to centering justice — in the interest of equity-advancing work — is the responsibility of the entire campus community, not just individual instructors making choices around their own teaching. Equity-advancing work demands a change in systems and culture, which is a collaborative effort, not an individual one. It calls for the demystification and deconstruction of systemic inequities. This work shapes policies, course offerings, assessments of learning, and curricular content. And finally, it supersedes checklists full of superficial changes.

Getting Started With Equity: A Guide for Academic Department Leaders is not a comprehensive handbook for educators committed to equity-advancing work; there are many worthwhile resources and tools that illuminate and recommend best practices for equity in higher education. Rather, Getting Started With Equity is a resource to start having conversations in academic departments around how we can work toward equity and justice in our curricula and teaching.

Companion resources