What is TAG?

The General Education Program makes up 41 credits of all JMU students' curricular requirements. It is a foundational part of a JMU education and familiarizes students with critical thinking skills and prepares them to engage with essential concepts in their major courses. An intervention in the General Education Program would, therefore, go a long way towards creating awareness of justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion issues. Engaging these concepts requires an examination of systemic racism and the intersections of power and privilege. Doing so should naturally lead to an analysis of various means for addressing racism and oppression. Our hope is that the Teaching Antidiscrimination in GenEd (TAG) initiative expands the university standards of critical thinking to include the experiences and perspectives of minorities and the challenges of confronting systemic racism.

The TAG initiative is the first step towards creating a permanent requirement. The TAG should begin by identifying faculty with prior experience teaching justice, equity, diversity, inclusion, intersectionality, anti-oppression, antidiscrimination, antiracism texts, and concepts and identify classes and courses that embed these critical lenses in their curriculum. These experienced faculty and any other faculty who are interested in exploring these issues and adopting the TAG requirements should be recruited to tag their classes.

A tagged course addresses one of the identified core areas above. To provide peer support and disseminate best practices, we foresee interested faculty working together to form a learning community. We recommend that the Gen-Ed program encourage TAG faculty to create a training module by working with a coalition of faculty, students, and experts to ensure a common language and a discussion of shared conceptual frameworks. The training should ideally provide information and resources regarding current and relevant language related to the concepts and how to integrate them into courses across disciplines.

We also advocate for creating a Student Advisory Board (SAB) that would be responsible for consulting with and supporting tagged faculty members in various ways. Such an advisory board will allow continued exchange between interested and affected students and the TAG initiative.

How can we create TAG Criteria?

For the TAG initiative to succeed and achieve its objectives, it needs to establish criteria for selecting classes to receive the TAG. We have a few suggestions. The goal here is not to be selective or exclusive but rather to ensure that any tagged class maintains a pedagogical standard. Also, that faculty interested in this initiative can be clear about the requirements for participation. Our suggestions here should be considered a baseline roadmap for the TAG faculty to reference when designing and building course content could serve as a point of departure for discussions of the TAG learning community. These ideas could also serve as an initial framework for any review committee designated by the Gen Ed council, Cluster Heads, and DEI subcommittees to determine the TAG criteria.

We believe that obtaining a TAG designation for a course should require more than the inclusion of one Black author on a syllabus. The TAG should be a symbol of the real and substantive integration and a marker of faculty commitment to engaging with ongoing academic discourse on Antiracism, Antidiscrimination, and Antioppression. It is beyond the scope of this white paper to define these concepts or layout the breadth of scholarship and activism around these ideas. We have attached a copy of our syllabus, and the readings included in there are a great place to start an active engagement with these ideas. The criteria should not act as a roadblock to interested faculty who have not developed expertise in these areas but should instead function as an invitation to engage and participate in a lively intellectual community of other engaged faculty and committed students.

Here are a few ideas that might be useful in shaping the development of the TAG initiative criteria. They are framed as questions rather than prescriptions.

1. Course Content - Does the syllabus intentionally include a representation of diverse authors and class assignments that address justice, equity, diversity, inclusion and antidiscrimination? Do these inclusions allow for a space to critique systems of powers in the appropriate discipline? Do in-class activities include diverse perspectives and lenses with which to analyze potential and actual problems in the field of study?

2. Pedagogy – Is the class's foundation built on inclusive pedagogy and an environment of accessibility, where students from all identity groups are actively invited to participate? What steps have the faculty taken to make their class accessible?

3. Class Engagement - Does the class actively and intentionally addresses antidiscrimination and anti-oppressive action in the field of study?

4. Learning Community Participation – Have the faculty of TAGged classes committed participate in an active and practicing (experiential?) learning community.^[1]

Our class has also explored some possible Student Learning Outcomes that we offer as suggestions that might be adopted to clarify the criteria for receiving the TAG. Again, these could also be used by faculty to consider how their syllabi address these outcomes, even if they are not explicitly listed in the syllabus.

• • In this class, students will be able to critically engage with ideas of privilege and systems of oppression in the area taught and be provided an opportunity to reflect on these implications for individuals and collectives (through planned discussions and assignments).

  • Students will leave this class with a general understanding of real-world cause and effect within the practices of justice, equity, diversity, inclusion, antiracism, anti-discrimination, anti-oppression through documented examples in the field.

  • Students will learn how power and privilege develop and are sustained.

  • Students will be given the opportunity to understand and explain the intersectionality of their own identities and the identities of others.

^[1] We acknowledge the insightful suggestions and feedback from Claire Lyons to create this set of criteria.

What are some other universities doing?

We reviewed a few other universities with flagging systems in place to develop this white paper's ideas. For example, Xavier University in Cincinnati, Ohio, has provided student learning outcomes to keep students accountable for what they learn in class.

Learning objectives include:

● "Students describe and analyze how the complex multifaceted character of society can influence one's position in society, life chances and worldview in relation to one another."

● "Students demonstrate an understanding of and provide examples of how complex social locations shape the life chances of diverse groups of people across the globe."

These objectives help create a framework for the outcomes students should gain from the class.

The University of San Diego discussed how two flags are required for all students. This might be worth future consideration, as we believe it's necessary and valuable for all students to graduate with an understanding of JDEI, antiracism, anti-discrimination and anti-oppression.

When considering how students would find their way to such classes during registration, the University of Texas at Austin provides some ideas, they have a yellow box next to flagged classes during registration.

What might a process for TAGging look?

1. First, we need to identify classes that meet the newly created TAG criteria through a combination of nomination and application. As a start, we should identify classes across all five clusters that already meet the proposed criteria above.

2. Second, the class syllabus from the initial identification should be reviewed to identify best practices in crafting TAG syllabi and the sub-committee should use these already existing syllabi to further refine the criteria. The Student Advisory Board and other interested diversity-aligned groups (such as AAAD and LAXC) from across campus would be invaluable in providing their expert opinion to the TAG committee.

3. Third, the new criteria should be used to evaluate the syllabi of any prospective classes, and if one does not meet these criteria, the interested faculty member should be assisted by the TAG committee and any selected partners in refining their syllabi to meet the requirements.

4. Fourth, we recommend a possible mechanism for peer learning and ensuring accountability. Each semester, faculty and members of the Student Advisory Board could be invited to visit TAG classes and offer their observations and evaluations to the teaching faculty and the sub-committee.

5. Finally, the faculty peer-learning community ( in collaboration with the Student Advisory Board) should develop a process for ensuring that the TAG classes are evaluated periodcally to ensure that they continue to meet the criteria and accomplish the goals of the initiative.

Developing Shared Language

We acknowledge the difficulty teaching in the TAG initiative issues of justice, equity, diversity, inclusion, antiracism, antidiscrimination, and anti-oppression across various disciplines. In order to enable robust discussions in the TAG community, it is vital to develop a shared language with a shared understanding of these concepts and ideas. One way to accomplish this would be to have the faculty learning community develop an introductory module that could serve to introduce DEI to a broader audience. Creating such a resource would start valuable conversations and help coalesce a community dedicated to this work.