Building a Unified and Inclusive Teaching and Learning Community at UPEI:
A Symposium Focused on Equity, Diversity Inclusion, Indigenization, and Decolonization
Preparations are well underway to gather colleagues together on April 30th for a day filled with learning from each other about the many ways we can incorporate EDIID into our teaching practices with our students. We are excited to welcome two dynamic keynote speakers that will be joining us to share their perspectives and experiences.
Many thanks to our colleagues from across the campus for their interest in sharing what they have learned and how they are putting these ideas into practice in their own courses. The circle of colleagues involved in planning the symposium is grateful for the enthusiastic response to the call for expressions of interest.
The program for the day is now available digitally and a print version will be available the day of the event.
Enacting our Shared Values
Building a Unified and Inclusive Teaching and Learning Community at UPEI:
A Symposium Focused on Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, Indigenization, and Decolonization
We are committed to providing a safe, productive, and welcoming environment for all symposium participants, organizers and support staff. We invite you to review this document which outlines values of honour, trust, honesty, and humility and invite you to commit to putting them into practice during the symposium.
Enacting Our Shared Values
We all play a role in fostering a positive environment of trust, respect, and ethical behaviours by recognizing:
that participants (no matter their role at this symposium) reflect a wide range of gendered, racialized, sexuality, disability, and national origins, and that this is, as much as possible, reflected in the symposium organization;
that the above point might mean some organizational details look different to some participants than usual, and welcome those changes as inclusive and welcoming;
that different groups of people bring different knowledges and experiences to this symposium, and ensure that everyone is not just heard but actively listened to;
that different groups of people may have different needs in the event space, and work to ensure that those are met by symposium organizers to the fullest extent possible, and are respected by all participants;
that not all teaching and research is “comfortable” and that it sometimes challenges status quo ways of knowing and being in the world, and considering comments and questions as productively intentioned;
as a follow-up to the above, that some teaching and research is more difficult for some groups of people than for others, and considering carefully how one goes about framing and presenting that material in a way that doesn’t further harm those people;
that social media formats are a part of our symposium and being mindful of how one is engaging with presentations and participants via these formats;
that we all share individual and collective responsibility to intervene—through both comments and actions—when we witness actions and behaviours that perpetuate discrimination of any kind;
Participants in the symposium agree not to engage in or condone others’ engagement in actions and behaviours that do not reflect the shared values of the organization. These include:
addressing participants, either by tone or content, in ways that perpetuate discriminatory, stereotypical, or harmful beliefs and statements;
engaging in—either through one’s own behaviours or by overlooking the behaviours of other participants—comments, actions, or practices that perpetuate racism, sexism, ableism, homophobia or transphobia, ethnocentrism, etc., and instead, intervening when such comments and actions are witnessed;
disagreeing with or disrupting other participants’ presentations, comments, and questions, either by tone or content, in ways that are disrespectful or demeaning, or that suggest stereotypes about particular groups of people’s knowledges or skills;
insisting—through verbal comment, gesture, or other body language communication—that people adhere to singular modes of thinking, acting, and presenting, recognizing instead that participants have multiple experiences and perspectives;
bullying and harassing (along any identity lines—sexual, gender-based, race-based microaggressions, etc.) behaviours, whether physical or verbal, and including persistent unwanted attention of any kind, in all contexts;
The above lists are not all inclusive or exhaustive, and we encourage participants to always be evaluating how EDIID perspectives can make them more aware of, and more attentive to, altering their own behaviours in support of the statement of core values. We invite all to enact our shared values by working together to create a more just and inclusive space, in all ways, for a greater number of people. If you have questions, please contact us at TLC@upei.ca.
Sections of the above are adapted with permission from the ENACTING OUR SHARED VALUES developed by The Society for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education (STLHE) available at https://www.stlhe.ca/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Enacting-our-Shared-Values-2.pdf