Participants ‘SEED’ diversity on campus

Meetings convened in rooms overlooking spectacular views of Lake Mendota should surely be outlawed. How could any business at hand possibly compete with the scene on display out the window?

Ah, but participants in the UW–Madison SEED (Seeking Educational Equity and Diversity) seminar will need to let their minds wander into private reverie during the next year. And no doubt they probably will require every inducement they can muster to help coax their focus inward, since formal study usually does not encourage deep self-knowledge, according SEED co-founder Peggy McIntosh, associate director of the Center for Research on Women at Wellesley College.

McIntosh and colleague Emily Style developed SEED more than 15 years ago as a national model for developing more inclusive curricula, teaching methods and school climate.

Participants in the seminars, now offered around the world, face a daunting task, McIntosh says. “A learning environment balanced in terms of race, ethnicity, gender and religion doesn’t exist anywhere on earth that I know of,” she says.

However, that situation isn’t preventing about 31 UW–Madison SEED participants, drawn from across campus and the Madison community, from electing to take steps toward change. SEED arrived at UW–Madison through the initiative of vice chancellor Paul Barrows and faculty member Richard Davis. The first trained facilitators are Seema Kapani in the Equity and Diversity Resource Center, Hazel Symonette in Student Affairs and Academic Services and faculty member Lydia Zepeda.

Kapani describes what happens in the seminars as a yearlong “learning journey,” she says. The enrolled academic and classified staff, faculty, administrators and teaching assistants will meet about once a month. Kapani says this seminar’s direction will be articulated and pursued entirely by the participants themselves.

The first step before SEED participants is scrutinizing closely how they learned — or didn’t learn — to deal with diversity and connection; only then can they begin to create an effective learning environment that includes and welcomes all, McIntosh says.

“Teachers and other school personnel are the authorities on their own experience,” she says. “Speaking about, and listening to others speak about, experience deepens our development. Participants will draw upon what Emily Style calls ‘the scholarship of them-selves’ to make textbooks of their lives, as well as scholarship on the shelves.”

Consequently, those attending the first Madison SEED meeting in October spent some time examining where they hope to be when the year ends, in keeping with the SEED principle of a journey directed by the travelers. Goals outlined in the first session range from “networking with allies for social change and justice” to “being able to transform rage into compassion” to “expand and stimulate thinking” to “understand my own role in diversity” to “creating an inclusive community on- and off-campus.”

SEED trainee Hazel Symonette stresses that “SEED is not a retreat from reality. It’s a fast-forward advance to doing our work differently.”

The message resonates well with Meera Rastogi, beginning her first year as an assistant professor of psychology at Edgewood College. Rastogi says she joined UW–Madison’s SEED seminar to find new ideas to bring back to her own classrooms, students and colleagues. This semester she is teaching an introductory psychology course, as well as classes in abnormal psychology and multicultural counseling. She says there about 30 students in each, and the vast majority are white.

“I especially would like to find effective ways to relay information to a predominantly white student body,” she says.

In turn, as a representative of a small liberal arts college, Rastogi will be able to provide the rest of her SEED cohort with another approach to higher education.

“Research isn’t as big a factor at Edgewood as it is at UW–Madison. We’re focused almost entirely on teaching and making connections with students,” she says.

While Rastogi is the only SEED participant from Edgewood, the UW–Madison Department of Human Development and Family Studies is fielding four participants this year. One of them is department chair William Aquilino. He says the department’s presence in SEED 2001-02 is part of a much broader overall agenda.

“We want to embark this year on an overall appraisal and rethinking of our curriculum and core courses with the goal of offering students a multicultural perspective,” Aquilino says. “We envision this as standard, not an afterthought or add-on. We are hoping to get insights from SEED on how we might do that. We would like to develop a knowledge base so that we can help faculty and instructional staff teach in an inclusive way.”

Aquilino will step down as chair next fall; during his four years in that role he has had some success in recruiting both faculty and graduate students of color, and no doubt will offer ideas about what recruitment strategies have worked — “but we would like to do better” in terms of adding people of color to the department’s faculty, staff and student body, he says.

“It’s an important goal for us. Some of the ways we thought we might accomplish it is by infusing a multicultural perspective throughout our curriculum, and by emphasizing service learning, practical application of knowledge in the tradition of the Wisconsin Idea, and outreach to the community. But first we will need to develop good, realistic answers to such questions as: What does an inclusive curriculum look like? What would make our department and programs attractive to faculty and students of color? How exactly can faculty and staff deepen their understanding of diversity and reflect that understanding in their scholarship and teaching? Programs like SEED are critical in moving from feelings of good will and support of a general idea to actually doing something to make it happen,” he says.

The “making it happen” part of improving the overall climate of campus life also might undergo dramatic revision, Kapani says.

“The current approach in higher education, as in just about all institutional cultures right now, is to ‘solve problems.’ I’m just back from a conference which introduced ‘appreciative inquiry,’ a different approach. Instead of focusing on what’s wrong with something and how to fix it, we were asked to envision what we wanted more of, say, more diverse faculty, staff and students. Then we brainstormed on ways to empower people to bring that vision about,” she says. Kapani and members of a university working group are searching actively for niches where that philosophy might be put into play.

“What we’re doing in all of our projects and programs, including SEED, is an investment, very connected to the performance excellence of education and work,” says Symonette. “What participants get from these opportunities will transform completely their day-to-day learning, work and living environments.”

For more information about SEED and other programs, contact Seema Kapani at (608) 262-6284, 263-2378, skapani@vc.wisc.edu.