Strategic Priorities
Teaching & Learning:
The division advances a holistic approach to institutional learning and ensures critical connections to working with faculty to cultivate inclusive academic environments and pedagogy. Central to the college’s academic mission is to provide students with meaningful and transformative educational experience and to support the pursuit of knowledge amongst the Barnard community and beyond. The vice president works closely with the provost to advance these mutually constitutive aims by ensuring that the curriculum and learning environments are constructed for inclusive academic excellence.
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The BOLD Conference
Slated for the Spring ’23 term, the BOLD Conference is an all-day, student-led event, focused on facilitating conversations between faculty, staff, and students to continue strengthening teaching and learning at Barnard. Facilitated by the Center for Engaged Pedagogy and the Council on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, it offers the opportunity to discuss questions, share concerns, and brainstorm suggestions regarding the academic experience.
Campus Climate:
In order to maintain a campus climate of belonging, the DEI office assesses and monitors how constituents experience campus life through surveys, departmental visits, one-one consultations, and community conversations. The cabinet and councils also structure cross-collaborative efforts in creating an inclusive campus culture as well as the grant opportunities that support faculty, student and staff agency in leading DEI efforts on campus.
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Racial Justice and Equity
"Racial justice is the systematic fair treatment of people of all races, resulting in equitable opportunities and outcomes for all. Racial justice — or racial equity — goes beyond “anti-racism.” It is not just the absence of discrimination and inequities, but also the presence of deliberate systems and supports to achieve and sustain racial equity through proactive and preventative measures."
At Barnard the work of DEI centers racial justice and equity. Each semester we will commit to offering workshops and collaborations that give members of the Barnard community the tools they need to uphold racial equity in their departments and in their academic experience.
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Community Safety
Inclusion, the work of belonging and institutional engagement with identities historically underrepresented in their institutions, is interwoven with safety. How Barnard works to uphold an individual's sense of safety with attentiveness to how race, gender, religious identity, ability/disability is experienced is something that DEI@Barnard is actively working on with CARES (Community Accountability, Response, and Emergency Services).
The Barnard Community Safety Advisory Council is charged with discussing broad issues related to campus safety, including concerns about racial and other forms of bias and their consequences, accessibility, who feels welcome in different spaces, and advising on improved structures for relationship building, training, and community oversight.
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Trans@Barnard
Supporting transgender and nonbinary students
In order to assist transgender and nonbinary members of the campus community with navigating the policies and practices of Barnard, we've provided a guide to Barnard-specific resources and supports.
Multicultural Affairs in the Office of Undergraduate Student Life on Columbia's campus also has resources available to Barnard transgender and nonbinary students.
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The Barnard Inclusion Grant
financially supports our community members’ efforts to help foster inclusion and belonging on campus. In 2022 the grant funded seven projects that initiated programs and events across curricular and co-curricular life. Notably among them were:
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“Akaraka” is a student-led community programming project that aims to connect Africans on campus with African immigrants in the New York area, and in the diaspora.
- “Language and the Classroom: Reflecting on the Evaluation of Student Rhetorical Expression in Community” is a project co-sponsored by the Writing and Speaking Fellows Program and the Center for Engaged Pedagogy (CEP), that aims to engage the Barnard community in a conversation about language, and racially-biased, gendered, or otherwise structurally-informed perceptions of rhetorics in the classroom.
- “Barnard Signs the Way” is conceived and led by Columbia University’s Sign Language Club [CU Sign]–for a weekend of hybrid workshops, panels, and art excursions in Fall 2022, with and for Deaf advocates and artists.
Click here for the full list of Academic Year 2022 Grant Recipients.
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Fund for Innovation in Teaching Grants:
Diversity, Equity and Inclusion financially supports faculty’s efforts to redesign or adapt their courses to address antiracism and structures of power, with an expectation of interdisciplinarity. The 2021 grant funded 6 proposals in History, Education, Dance, Biology, Chemistry and First Year Writing. Grants were reviewed by the FDD Dean Miller and VP Rosales and approved by the Provost.
Click here for the full list of Academic Year 2022 Grant Recipients.
‘Studying the Now’ and co-curricular programming:
The "Studying the Now '' series includes interdisciplinary panel webinars from experts in our community that help our community unpack in current issues immediately. Additional co-curricular programming includes the Grace Lee Boggs lecture, Accessibility week, and Trans awareness week.
Community Engagement:
As highlighted in Barnard’s mission statement, the College’s location in New York City is central to the education it offers, and its identity as a vibrant part of the city and its Harlem neighborhoods. At the foundation of Community Engagement & Inclusion at Barnard is the belief that at the core of liberal education is a mission to learn across differences and engage locally with a sense of mutuality, public responsibility and cultural humility. Through collaborations with a range of departments at Barnard we are working to facilitate a culture of sustained community engagement.
Learning from Institutional History:
DEI works closely with the archives, faculty and students to excavate and center contemporary and historical stories for preservation and future learning.