On Monday Feb. 12, nine days after the end of UW’s weeklong event, Martin Luther King Jr. Days of Dialogue, the first sessions of a diversity workshop for faculty and students will be held in the Wyoming Union Building, in the Wyoming Union Ballroom.
The faculty workshop will be from 1 p.m. to 4 p.m., while the student workshop will be held at a later time, 7:30 p.m. to 9:30 p.m. The last workshop will be for faculty and staff from 8:30 a.m. to 10:30 a.m., on Tuesday February 13. The second portion of the workshop, from 10:30 a.m. to 4:00 p.m., which is not required, but is available for the faculty members that have the time to stay the full day.
Chief Diversity Officer, Dr. Emily Monago, from the Office of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion headed the workshop series by communicating with different parts of the University, including the Division of Student Affairs, the Office of Academic Affairs and Student Athletics.
“The workshops are encouraging collaboration across campus, building bridges, partnerships, to work together on issues of diversity, equity and inclusion,” Monago said. “Ultimately, any changes that we see at the University is going to involve working across different areas of campus.”
The focus on the faculty workshops will concentrate on how to create and maintain an inclusive environment in the classroom, to not only help the staff members, but also the students as diversity takes a more apparent role.
“As we look at the United States becoming more diverse, the University of Wyoming is becoming more diverse as well,” Monago said. “We can’t increase our student enrollment without looking at diverse populations. We can’t fill some of the positions that we have without looking at women, people with disabilities, or diverse people with race and ethnicity.”
Anthropologist and professor at UW, Dr. Steven Bialostok, works with culture and diversity in many of his classes, both in subject material and in his classroom environments. Bialostok teaches classes such as Introduction to Cultural Anthropology, a race and racism course, among a variety of others.
“Sometimes, when we talk about diversity, we kind of get into this game,” Bialostok said. “Anthropology has dealt with this, certainly, about looking at people culturally, but not in a good way. It’s like, ‘here’s this group of people, here’s what you might expect from them and how to interact with them,’ as if there’s a laundry list of behaviors and culture doesn’t work that way. Culture isn’t the essence of a being. So, when we think about diversity in teaching, what’s important is to get to know them [the student] as a person.”
The Office of Academic Affairs has played an integral role in developing the strategic plan for the University of Wyoming from 2017-2022. Diversity and the embracing of diversity is an integral portion of the strategic plan.
“We have benchmarks around increasing the number of students who graduate, increasing the number of students at the University, increasing the rate at which they graduate, increasing the diversity at the University, these are all things we’ve outlined as goals and metrics in our strategic plan,” Provost Kate Miller of the Office of Academic Affairs said.
The 2017-2022 strategic plan, titled “Breaking Through,” has four goals in mind: driving excellence, inspiring students, impacting communities and transforming into a high-performing university.
In Driving Excellence, the strategic plan states, “Expand recruitment of international students and broaden the exposure of faculty and students to international events and cultures.”
To inspire students, the University wants to provide more programming on diversity. To impact communities, the University plans to further develop partnerships with the tribes of the Eastern Shoshone and the Northern Arapahoe peoples.
