Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Committee

The College of Liberal Arts and Sciences is pleased to solicit proposals for the LAS Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Initiative Award Program. The Awards provide resources for initiatives that promote and support meaningful diversity, equity, and inclusion in LAS.

Projects of any kind will be considered as long as they can project long-term sustainable impacts on the college’s diversity, equity, and inclusion mission and goals.

Proposal Deadline: March 31, 2025. Instructions forthcoming.

Project Title: First-at-LAS Parent Portal Website

Project description

First-at-LAS has a well-developed website with a target audience comprised of LAS first-gen students and LAS Faculty.  We would like to add a webpage for first-generation students’ parents with well-developed accessible resources, templates, and conversation prompts that address the abovementioned context. Given the potential for linguistic barriers, we would have the site appear in three languages: English, Spanish, and Polish.

Project goals

• To take a substantial step towards informative and collaborative communication with LAS first-gen parents.
• To offer informative, balanced resources and templates to help our first-generation students establish productive and healing conversations with their parents, families, and communities.
• To communicate the value of a liberal arts and sciences education and the future career pathways made possible by that education, regardless of major of choice.

CLJ Transforming Culture Through Curriculum Project

Participants: Jessica Bird, Alana Gunn, William McCarty, Danielle Akua Smith, Lisa Frohman, Rahim Kurwa

Project Summary: The CLJ Diversity Committee and Curriculum Committee are partnering on this project to bring together our work on DEI initiatives and curriculum reimagining.  The former consists of a series of information-gathering efforts to establish existing UIC data, followed by primary data collection to fill in gaps about the CLJ department, as well as literature reviews to identify best practices in the field. Analysis of this material will inform new practices and processes with the goal of strengthening our culture to meet the needs of our diverse community of students, staff, and faculty and to more fully embed our justice commitments. The latter curriculum work involves a reexamination of our curricula, pedagogies, and departmental identity in ways that dismantle the narrow ideologies and discourses that pervade the traditional criminological cannon. In practical terms, this includes but moves beyond simply an additive approach, where otherwise marginalized scholarship is incorporated into syllabi. Rather, we intend this project to also open-up space to engage as a group with fundamental questions of knowledge production and higher education’s institutional structures and practices, those which have relied traditionally on colonial and racialized hierarchies.  Our intention is to both generate relevant data that will support robust and long-lasting DEI initiatives, as well as to provide creative spaces to come together to think deeply about our departmental policies and practices, our course offerings, individual pedagogies, and our professional relationships as they relate to questions of decolonization, indigeneity, diversity, equity, and inclusion. The project as described in this proposal is not only a collaboration between our two faculty committees but also involves partnerships between a variety of stakeholders, including CLJ Department staff, faculty, and students. We view the benefits accrued from these efforts as providing long-term change to the CLJ Department’s curriculum and culture as we attempt to make our courses, spaces, and the overall environment of the Criminology, Law, and Justice more inclusive, more responsive to the changing climate beyond academia, and ultimately more just.

There are two pillars of the project. First, there is a research component that seeks to identify best practices, gather departmental data about student performance and experiences, and synthesize cutting-edge research we can use to transform our curricula. Second, there will be a program of events, including a curriculum workshop series designed to identify areas of need and begin to make key improvements, and an outside speaker event, inviting scholars who can help us expand our theoretical and pedagogical lenses. We believe these changes are vitally necessary to the future of our department as a vibrant and positive force at UIC and in Chicago. These changes will help us teach undergraduate students material relevant to their lived experiences and supportive of their desire to positively change society. And they will better prepare our graduate students for research and teaching that engages new sets of questions that will increasingly shape the fields of criminology,  law, and justice in the years to come.

1) Graduate/Undergraduate Research Mentorship (GRUM), Sociology.
This program will set up a Graduate to Undergraduate mentoring program that will provide graduate students with research support (in the form of project assistance from an undergraduate) and mentoring experience and undergraduates with a meaningful research opportunity. It also includes a spring semester faculty-supervised experience for the undergraduates to support them in writing a senior thesis, and funding and support for students to present their work at the UIC Innovation Day and at the Midwestern Sociological Society.

2) Arab American STEM Mentorship and Symposium Diversity Initiative, MSCS and Arab American Cultural Center.

This program will serve Arab American students from LAS interested in STEM. It involves (1) a symposium in which Arab American faculty and leaders share their experiences, (2) an Arab American STEM mentorship program modeled on the First-at-LAS program, and (3) a program connecting undergraduate Arab American STEM students at UIC with high school students of a similar demographic to serve as mentors and ambassadors.

3) Disability, Justice, and Disproportionate Representation: A Proposal to Increase Diversity in CLJ, CLJ.
This initiative seeks to expand the impressive diversity in the department of CLJ even further by creating a focus area on disability justice and developing specific recruitment initiatives for students with disabilities. It involves the creation of a disability justice working group, which will (1) design a disability justice curriculum and build a program of internships, (2) host a seminar series with 4 nationally recognized speakers who will give public lectures and meet with the working group, and (3) hire a research assistant to coordinate the seminar series and do a literature review and other necessary research to support the development of the new curriculum.

4) Undergraduate Research Opportunity, BIOS.
This initiative provides research experience to undergraduates who are from groups under-represented in STEM careers. It builds on work devised this past spring in response to the pivot to online, which offered an online, remote collaborative project to a team of undergraduates from UIC. The initiative expands this program to include 8 students who will work in a team doing research on the ACE2 protein, which serves as the SARS-CoV-2 receptor in humans. It is intended to serve as a pilot and proof of concept for a larger grant, which would expand the program to many more students.

5) Academic Advising Staff Mentorship Program, LAS Student Affairs.
This initiative offers mentoring and professional development opportunities for advisors from under-represented groups. It provides mentorship for incoming advisors from such groups by veteran advisors, and of the veteran advisors serving as mentors by LAS professionals in advanced administrative or leadership positions. The award also provides grant money that can be used for books, webinars, and conferences to provide networking opportunities and resources to advisors from under-represented groups, supporting their career development and allowing them to better serve our diverse undergraduate student body.

6) Antiracist Writing Pedagogy Working Group, First-Year Writing Program.
This initiative builds on the 2021 MLK Day keynote at UIC by Dr. Ibram Kendi, which described an antiracist university as focused on antiracist research and teaching. It will form a working group to examine the First-Year Writing Program curriculum and pedagogy through an antiracist lens and engage LAS students and faculty in ongoing discussions of racism. The group will research antiracist pedagogy and assessment and share strategies specific to writing faculty through the creation of a webinar and other methods.

Diversity Initiative for Graduate Instructors: Workshop Series
Awarded to the Philosophy Department Graduate Program Coordinator and a 4th-Year graduate student to launch and run the Diversity Initiative for Graduate Instructors workshop series, aimed at bringing together UIC graduate instructors across LAS to combine resources and insights, tackle common issues, and examine pedagogy practice to learn together to make classes more accessible and inclusive. The awardees will coordinate with the Center for Teaching Excellence to transition the workshop and any resulting data, case studies, and relevant other information into their future programming for graduate student instructors.

Increasing Gender Diversity among Economics Majors
Awarded to four faculty in Economics (including the Director of Undergraduate Studies) to develop four special events involving four carefully selected female guest speakers to present their research at a level that is accessible to students with little knowledge of economics. These speakers will also be part of a panel that will include one or two of the proposers and some other students to provide information about the economics major at UIC. They will also develop a mentoring program for students enrolled in ECON 120, matching advanced students with students in the introductory-level course. Both initiatives will help students in general, but both will be tailored with the special aim of increasing the percentage of women who choose to major in ECON, addressing widespread gender inequality in the field.

Academic Advising Staff Mentoring Program
Awarded to four members of the LAS Academic Advising staff to better support advisors of color through a mentorship program for new and veteran advisors of color, or from historically marginalized backgrounds. This will be a two-tier program that pairs incoming advisors in the relevant groups with veteran mentors and mentorship of the veteran advisors who are mentors to incoming advisors by LAS professionals in advanced administrative or leadership roles. There is also money for professional development in the form of conference attendance by one or two pairs of mentors and mentees.

Highlighting Diverse Identities to Empower the Next Generation of Mathematicians and Scientists
Awarded to faculty in Earth and Environmental Science and Chemistry, and staff at the Math and Science Learning Center to support positive science and math identity development in students by celebrating diversity and creating a sense of belonging through a photo backdrop installation at the Math and Science Learning Center that leverages the hashtags #ThisIsWhatAScientistLooksLike and #ThisIsWhatAMathematicianLooksLike that have been popular in social media campaigns to increase the visibility of women, minorities, first-generation experiences, individuals with disabilities, the LGBTQIA+ community and more. There are three main components to this initiative – a student designed photo backdrop competition, promotion of the hashtags on social media, and a showcasing of the photos and stories of our students on a display in the MSCL. There will also be a student design competition for two wall graphics.