Discussions of disability on college campuses often focus on how we can support and accommodate individual needs and meet compliance requirements under the Americans with Disabilities Act. With this panel of and dialogue sessions, we hope to expand that important conversation. On November 18, 2019, Berkeley faculty, graduate student instructors, staff, and students were invited to think in creative and visionary ways about culture, structure, teaching and learning, and broader institutional transformation. Some key discussion questions included:
Commitments to the work that connects diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging/justice, anti-racism, anti-Blackness, anti-white supremacy, and abolition work, are deep and rich. Each of these terms also has motivations and genealogies. During this event, there was a discussion focused on unpacking the relationships between these frameworks and how they help us better understand and situate the work and the questions that they generate. When we think about the relationships that we hope to foster with and between students, how do we use these frameworks to inform our practice...
This has been a difficult year for many Berkeley students and faculty. At the national level, we have seen an increase in hateful rhetoric and exclusionary policies directed at many identities and communities. And, here on campus, we have been deeply challenged by tensions around recent speaker events, as well as by increased policing, painful intergroup dynamics, and repeated instances of bias and harassment. All of this has led to an increase in individual and collective stress, trauma, and anxiety, which research shows can negatively impact learning, memory...
According to a July 2017 nation-wide report, 60 percent or more of the total cost of attending a college or university comes from expenses other than tuition, and the cost of living for college students has increased by more than 80 percent over the past 40 years. In a high-cost area such as Berkeley, affordability is especially acute and impacts many aspects of students' lives beyond the financial: housing and food insecurity, commute time, mental and emotional health, the ability to pay for course materials, working for money vs. doing research or taking...
In higher education, we want learning to be relevant to students’ lives, but how often do we explicitly incorporate students’ lives--who they are, what they know, where they come from--into our teaching and research? How do we take an asset-based approach, drawing upon the diversity of Berkeley's student population as well as our own subject matter expertise, to create a richer learning experience for everyone? What does this look like across different disciplines and what's at stake?
A discussion is a powerful tool, but facilitating challenging discussions often leaves many of us feeling ill-equipped to address the very complex emotional and intellectual topics that enter our classrooms.
In this pre-semester conversation, we considered a variety of perspectives, methods, and frameworks for these discussions and considerations that we might take back to our classrooms. Questions we have considered include:
What is the history of the use of terms such as trigger warnings and safe spaces that populate our concerns for the...
Tuesday, September 25th, 2018 marked the largest National Voter Registration Day on record. Over 800,000 people updated their registration or registered to vote for the first time. At the same time that so many Americans are involved in ballot box politics, the country is polarized, partisan and politicized. With sharp political differences seemingly not going away any time soon, how do we support robust discussions in our classrooms? How do we support our students to consider issues from immigration to gun control through deliberation and not shouting...
