Empowering Change Through Inclusive Education

Maggie Grady: 0:03

Welcome to the CATT Teaching Table podcast, where we dive into the art and science of teaching, learning and technology. Hosted by the University of Buffalo's Office of Curriculum Assessment and Teaching Transformation, otherwise known as CATT, and supported by the Genteel's Excellence in Teaching Fund, this podcast is dedicated to highlighting the journeys toward educational excellence. Is dedicated to highlighting the journeys toward educational excellence. I'm Maggie Grady, a learning designer in CATT, and today we will be tackling a topic of equity, diversity, justice and inclusion, or EDJI. Joining us today is Dr. Seval Yildirim, newly appointed as UB's Vice Provost for Inclusive Excellence. Thank you, Dr. Yildirim, for joining us today and sharing your journey, your insights, your strategies to achieving social justice among the university. So welcome to UB and welcome to Buffalo. We had a little chance to speak before ] podcast and you've been here for a year. Can you describe to our listeners how you manage change and forward progress in the areas of equity, diversity, justice and inclusion?

Dr. Seval Yildirim: 1:10

Sure, I think you know, for any kind of change even change that is not sort of politically charged or misunderstood I think you have to first learn your environment, and every campus is a community on its own. So it's really important, when you come as an outsider, to take your time to learn the culture of the campus, of the university, understand who the people are, what's been done, what has been successful and what has not been so successful, where there are pockets of opposition and resistance because they do exist and then you know listen. So I'm still listening almost a year in and in my experience you know you just have to keep doing that. Then you know you start responding to the best of your ability and form collaborative communities, identify allies who can actually be your voice and your support system. I think that's how we go about change, not in a top-down manner, but really by building consensus bottom-up.

Maggie Grady: 2:24

So in doing a little bit of research, just so I could see who you are as a person, but I came across a question that you posed recently, so I'm going to ask it back how do you create an inclusive environment that people feel excited to be a part of, and then to follow up with that, what steps can we take on campus to support that vision?

Dr. Seval Yildirim: 2:43

First, it's important for us to understand what we mean by DEI and inclusion. These are very politicized terms, especially today. I think diversity we have to appreciate is just a fact, right, we're either a diverse community or we're not. These are just numbers, and so it's just a fact. Inclusion is an act, it's the cumulative set of acts that we undertake to make sure that we create a community in recognition of the diverse identities that we have. So it's understanding who is in our community first, what their needs are.

Dr. Seval Yildirim: 3:25

So listening to learn again becomes very important, without sort of also creating sort of stereotypes or presuming that everyone in a group has the same needs or perspectives, etc. Because I think that's a trap sometimes we fall into, and so that takes a lot of effort and it takes a lot of communal effort, right? So the question about what can we do? I think it's about accepting responsibility at the unit level, starting from our classrooms and hallways and office spaces and in terms of, you know, work that's directly relevant to teaching and learning, starting with creating inclusive classrooms and providing our faculty with the tools they need to appreciate and understand what that is. Because you know we ourselves can come from diverse backgrounds, doesn't mean we understand how the other diverse group you know feels about the environment we create. I'm a Middle Eastern Muslim woman. Doesn't mean I understand and appreciate what my black students might need, unless I make an effort to actually understand and appreciate what they need and listen to them and respond.

Dr. Seval Yildirim: 4:49

And equity going back to the definition for DEI, equity is about outcomes. So asking again do our students have equitable outcomes? Are they graduating at similar rates? Are they succeeding at similar rates? Are they finding jobs at similar rates and things like that? And so inclusion really is what makes all of this other stuff possible. So it's at the heart of DEI, it's not just the numbers we bring in.

Maggie Grady: 5:21

Do you have any resources for instructors and instructional support staff, like here at CATT, where we have four learning designers and we're always eager to help our faculty, who reach out to us with different resources and strategies to help teach their classes into best practices, current trends, things like that, information on laws, legal issues related to EDJI and I refer to it as EDJI.

Dr. Seval Yildirim: 5:50

So I mean I'm happy to do that.

I do sort of facilitate conversations around teaching and learning from an inclusion angle, right, how do we create inclusive classrooms, type of thing.

But we also have an institutional membership to NCFDD, which is basically National Center for Faculty Development and Diversity, and so every member of our community has access to their resources and they have many sort of.

They have podcasts like this one, they have workshops and certificate programs and they're all free for our faculty and staff and where they may not be again, this is part of the sponsorship that we provide and we encourage, of course, always our deans and department chairs to support the faculty in those efforts. We recently also became an institutional member to the Hispanic Association of Colleges and Universities and they also have many different professional development resources for faculty and staff geared towards creating inclusive spaces for Hispanic students, which is one of the largest minority groups that we have on campus and I foresee that group sort of growing, and every other institution I served at before was a Hispanic serving institution. So I was very happy to come here and one of the first things I did was make sure that we are institutional members to the Hispanic Association of Colleges and Universities, so they offer many, many different opportunities as well.

Maggie Grady: 7:31

One of your focuses is to recruit and retain faculty and students from underrepresented groups, promoting inclusive pedagogy in classrooms and building high school to university pipelines. Can you explain to our listeners the efforts that you are making towards that, to ensure success?

Dr. Seval Yildirim: 7:49

I think faculty diversity often is not discussed as in a highlighted manner as it should be, because as we bring in an increasingly more diverse student body, we have to have representation of that in our faculty, and that is not always easy to in R1's because our focus is not always there. I'm really happy to see both our provost and our president are absolutely committed to that, and I had the pleasure of talking to our incoming faculty this year at the faculty orientation, and there are about 140 some of them and 110 some of them are tenure track, faculty tenured or tenure track, and it was an incredibly diverse group. So that to me is very, very exciting. It's also an exciting time because on the faculty side we have two programs in my office that we have kind of revamped. One is just at UB it's called VITAL, where we bring doctoral students of color or from doctoral students from marginalized communities to our campus for four or five days where they get to meet the departments, present their scholarship, get to meet each other, we give them guidance on how to enter the job market etc.

That's not really pipeline in terms of we don't expect everyone will be hired here and we make that clear to them because not every department that brings them here can actually hire them.

But it is a service that we provide to the academic community at large, because they get to know each other and they get an appreciation for what the job market will be like, because that's not the easiest experience. We're also collaborating with SUNY, and they have a new program called PRODiG+, which is a postdoctoral program, and SUNY and UB were basically sharing the costs of the program and this year we have four postdoctoral candidates joining us as Prodigy scholars and we hope to bring more of them. Now, that is definitely a pipeline program because if everything goes well, we will have open tenure track lines available for these faculty of color, future faculty of color, on our campus. So those are very interesting things. And I'll say one thing about on the student side. You know we've been having a lot of conversations about outreach to indigenous communities, to black and Hispanic communities, to ensure that despite the recent well, not so recent anymore, but despite the Supreme Court decision that bans affirmative action on student admissions, we continue to increase diversity of our student body.

Maggie Grady: 10:50

Okay, so there has been a lot in the news recently about states that are eliminating diversity, equity, inclusion in their states, so are there any changes on the horizon that might impact our work here at UB?

Dr. Seval Yildirim: 11:10

So I think in New York State we're lucky to be in a I will call it a reasonable region where, you know, difference is not seen as a threat and it shouldn't be right. Diversity really makes us all stronger, the student experience better. There's a lot of research that shows that diversity of teams leads to better outcomes, more efficiency, more creativity, more innovation, which of course makes sense, right? If we're all saying the same thing, come with similar experiences, then we're just kind of running around in the same circle.

So it is very unfortunate that we're going through this backlash period and for those who are interested in this topic, I really highly recommend the Chronicle of Higher Education. It has a DEI legislation tracker so you can go on Chronicle of Higher Education and see where these things are. And it's really scary to see because some legislation has passed and DEI offices have been closed. But then there are other states where there's proposed legislation, where the institutions are shutting down their DEI programs in anticipation so that they're not kind of, you know, targeted, if you will. And so as to what's in the horizon, it's difficult to say. So I think there's a lot of unknown at this point in terms of the future of DEI. You know, I think it's a very tense moment in our country, so we'll see.

Maggie Grady: 12:56

So aligning and expanding the university's edgy related initiatives are so important to promote student, faculty and staff success, as we know. How can we, as a university, help with the initiatives and goals?

Dr. Seval Yildirim: 13:08

Every unit has to accept responsibility and commit to it.

A centralized office like mine can only make recommendations and facilitate success of the units by finding resources and pointing people in the right direction, but we're not on the ground doing the work every day.

So I think everyone needs to be committed to this and do the work in the units and ask for help where needed, and that's why offices like mine exist centrally in central administration. I always feel fortunate that my career ended up being in the university context, because it's a continuous learning experience for all of us and it's an opportunity to educate one another in this environment. So I feel very fortunate for that, and I think one thing we can do is continue to do that, right? Listen to one another again, to hear one another, not just to sort of fulfill what we already think as truth or our presumptions, but really try to learn from one another. I encourage everyone to engage in these opportunities and I think when professors and instructors engage in these opportunities, students see that and it creates an even more vibrant environment for students where they see their professors engage with one another, hopefully in civil discourse, and I think that's how we support one another keeping an open mind, exercising empathy and compassion for different viewpoints, trying to understand where we all come from.

Maggie Grady: 15:03

Each of us can make a difference, so I'm a firm believer in that one. So thank you, Dr. Yildirim, for sharing your journey and your insights. Your story is a powerful reminder that the right approach, proper education and a supportive environment will help to achieve diversity, equity, inclusion and that can be closer for us at UB. Do you have any final thoughts that you would like to share with our listeners?

Dr. Seval Yildirim: 15:29

And I'll just say I mean, at the end of the day, the purpose of DEI initiatives is so that one day we don't have to think and talk in these terms because it's just who we are and what we do, so it's not something we have to identify and have initiatives for. Classes are inclusive, so we don't have to provide tools to anybody and it's kind of second nature, right. So you know it's like you do research, if you are a tenure line faculty, you don't have to make a big deal about that, and so the hope is that someday DEI will be that, and I think you know there's certainly the commitment and a strong foundation at UB, regardless of what happens nationally and whatever we may be subjected to nationally, hopefully we'll be fine. So yeah, it's been really nice chatting with you.

Maggie Grady: 16:34

You just threw out a whole bunch of resources that I was unaware of, so thank you for sharing that with us and our listeners. So thank you to our listeners for tuning into this episode of the Teaching Table podcast. If you enjoyed today's discussion, be sure to subscribe and leave us a review. We'll be back soon with more conversation on teaching, learning and technology, and until then, keep exploring new ways to reach and inspire your students and your faculty. As always, be sure to connect with us online at buffalo.edu/catt that's C-A-T-T or email us at ubcatt@buffalo.edu.