The Diversity Associates Program is moving into its fifth year of bringing new perspectives and different teaching angles to Ball State's campus.
"We need to think about how the institution is structured and functions; how it makes its decisions and see how to change the institute itself rather than always expecting the outsiders to change to be part of the process," director of the Diversity Policy Institute Michael Stevenson said.
Stevenson, founder of the program, has served as the director for the past four years. He is also the chairman of the Department of Psychological Science.
The Diversity Associates Program is the faculty development component of the Diversity Policy Institute.
"It primarily helps faculty who have some impact on curricular issues to learn something new about diversity, to integrate diversity in the course they are teaching, to prepare materials for their department that would enhance the curriculum in some fashion," Stevenson said.
The program focuses more on faculty because there are already many diversity-related outlets for students.
"Until we established the institute, there really wasn't any entity that helped faculty curriculum or administrator's policy," Stevenson said. "We have a lot of people working for students but not really for the other pieces of the institution."
All staff and faculty are sent invitations to make proposals for their classes. A committee decides which ones will be chosen.
This year's participants include William Bock, Patricia Clark, Lori Demo, Ione DeOllos, Ron Dolon, Erin Kilbride, Michael Spillman, Bernard Whitley and Mei Zhong. Each represents a different place on campus.
Stevenson's idea for the program came from serving as the director of the Women's Studies Program.
"That experience (as director of the Women's Studies Program) really helped me to understand how difficult it is for faculty on their own do a lot of this innovative work," Stevenson said.
The money to fund the programs comes from internal grants.
Programs have varied from the development of curricular materials in nursing classes about African Americans with cancer to placing a strong Vietnamese viewpoint in history classes.
"The most exciting part was meeting a lot of fascinating people," history professor Anthony Edmonds said. Edmonds said he plans to include his research on the Vietnamese perspective in his Vietnam course. Edmonds said he went through many written and visual sources to obtain the information.
Resident hall director Erin Kilbride proposed bridging Freshmen Connections and Freshmen Connections Assistant Program with the Multicultural Advisor program through the Housing and Resident Life. Kilbride's program will focus on the Freshman Connections book, "Nickled and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America," by Barbara Ehrenreich.
The best-selling book is about a woman's journey through a series of occupations, such as a waitress and housekeeper, and how she was treated under these identities.
"It's important for our students to realize that multiculturalism and diversity are a part of their educational experience," Kilbride said.
Kilbride said the program will work with the content of this book and bring about discussions inside and outside the classroom.
"Unless you happen to have a great amount of diversity among the students," Stevenson said, "which we are growing in that regard, but it's not as great as we'd like it to be, we have to work much harder to encourage us to take on a different perspective."
In addition to monthly meetings to discuss each other's progress, the group will attend the Diversity Roundtable of Central Indiana conference for the third time. Other universities that attend are Indiana University, Purdue and Indiana State.
"It's important for the faculty to step outside that exclusively academic environment even if it's just for the day to see how these diversity issues are playing out in the rest of the world," Stevenson said.
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