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Text of our NASP 2023 poster is included below the image. Links to resources and references are in bold, purple, underlined text.
Purpose
Purpose
In recent years, our field has increasingly recognized the ethical and professional responsibility that school psychologists have to promote equity in schools (National Association of School Psychologists, 2021). To ensure that school psychologists enter the field with the knowledge and confidence needed to implement equitable practices, it’s imperative that they have the opportunity to engage in these topics in their graduate training (Perez et al., 2020).
University of Washington (UW) School Psychology graduate students established a student-led Equity Caucus to connect these future practitioners with a range of resources that address equity, identity, inclusion, and diversity, as well as to facilitate open and safe group discussions on these topics.
The purpose of this poster is to provide basic resources and insights into the logistics needed to establish an equity caucus and ensure that it is student centered, community oriented, and sustainable.
Leadership Team
Leadership Team
To begin the development of an equity caucus, programs must start by establishing a leadership team. One way to start is by identifying a faculty member who can reach out to new and current graduate students, especially those who have expressed interest in equity work.
Once established, leadership teams are sustained by recruiting first year students during mid-year caucuses. Interested first year students then meet with the current team to discuss responsibilities and goodness of fit. Upon joining the team, they shadow and support the second year students for the remainder of the school year and take on key roles in summer.
The leadership team generally consists of a faculty sponsor and three to four student facilitators with various roles. These roles and responsibilities are divided up before each school year based on team member interest.
Faculty Sponsor: Supports the caucus by mentoring the leadership team, representing the caucus in faculty-only spaces, and securing resources such as meeting spaces, snacks, and funds for materials.
Caucus Facilitators: Guides the caucus during whole group and small group activities, and follows the Facilitator Guide for leading discussions and addressing participant questions.
Resources Planners: Researches content in line with the caucus's theoretical foundations, finds discussion material, and creates caucus presentations and discussion questions.
Logistical Support: Supports the continuation of the caucus by managing communications, creating exit tickets for meetings, writing grants, and providing follow up reporting for awarded grants.
Theoretical Foundation
Theoretical Foundation
The leadership team must establish a theoretical foundation to inform the content of caucus meetings, with feedback from students interested in participating in the caucus. UW Equity Caucus's theoretical foundation includes:
Divorcing White Supremacy Culture: We credit Tema Okun (2022) and Kenneth Jones and their work on identifying and addressing how characteristics of white supremacy manifest in the field of education.
Critical Race Theory (CRT): We credit the work of Kimberlé Crenshaw (2011), Richard Delgado & Jean Stefancic (2017), as well as numerous others that established the framework of CRT and expanded it to include the field of education and its intertwining systems.
The National SEED Project: We credit the National SEED (Seeking Educational Equity and Diversity) Project and Dr. Jondou Chen's curriculum and activities that investigate the way that educators and students bring identity into spaces of learning.
Communications & Input
Communications & Input
The Equity Caucus model is focused on being a student led entity that evolves based on student interest, needs, and feedback. This means that having a robust communication system with multiple methods of disseminating information and gathering input is important.
Communications: Establish a schedule for communicating with students about meetings. Dates, times, and locations of upcoming meetings are shared at each caucus meeting, at orientation, and via posters in student spaces.
Student Input: Group expectations that foster a safe space for sharing ideas and feedback should be collectively determined in the first meeting of each year and reviewed in each meeting. Dedicated time for sharing at the end of each meeting is also encouraged.
Exit Tickets: Provide exit tickets at the end of each meeting to collect qualitative and quantitative data in the form of anonymous feedback from participants.
Grant Funding
Grant Funding
The UW Equity Caucus has been awarded grant funding from the Association of Psychology Postdoctoral and Internship Centers (APPIC) for the creation of the UW Equity Caucus Playbook. This year, the UW Equity Caucus team was awarded a UW Diversity & Inclusion Seed Grant to develop new Caucus content, share the caucus model, and host a speaker panel.
Many universities offer similar funding sources dedicated towards DEI work within universities. We've compiled a (non-exhaustive) list of potential funding sources at universities with NASP accredited programs. While requirements for grant reporting differ across funding sources, data collected in exit tickets can be used to serve this purpose.
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