Participants have the opportunity to choose from amongst nine interactive online dialogues with panelists from academia and beyond to address student, faculty, and staff access and success; inclusive teaching, learning and curricula; inclusive decision-making structures; responsibilities and obligations of non-black peers; mentorship and more. The concurrent dialogues will explore the relevant issues considering the diverse and intersecting identities within the Black community.
This dialogue identifies and addresses institutional barriers to access for Black students, their sense of belonging, their representation in institutional practices and structures, their academic success, and their overall wellbeing in the classroom and beyond from recruitment through to graduation. It also challenges the deficit narrative of Black excellence and explores how to ensure that student accomplishments, potential and connections to community before and after university are valued, recognized and rewarded within and beyond the academy.
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Dialogue 2: Faculty Access and Success
This dialogue examines structural barriers and cultural practices that constrain equitable representation of Black academics within institutions – from professional preparation, through recruitment, to recognition, to career progress and success, to leadership development and attainment. It explores effective ways to address these constraints in order to correct inequities, to attract and support Black academics, to value and meaningfully recognize their contributions; and to facilitate their career success and inclusion within relevant decision-making structures.
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Dialogue 3: Staff Access and Success
This dialogue examines structural barriers and cultural practices that constrain equitable representation of Black staff within institutions – from professional preparation, through recruitment, to recognition, to career progress and success, and to roles in leadership positions. It explores effective ways to address these constraints, in order to correct inequities; to attract, support and retain Black staff; to value and meaningfully recognize their contributions; and to facilitate their career success and inclusion within relevant decision-making structures.
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Dialogue 4: Inclusive Decision-Making Structures
This dialogue will address deficits in Black representation in leadership, the benefits of addressing them, and how to effectively include the voices of Black students, staff, faculty, alumni, and community members in governance and other decision-making structures to advance institutional commitments to inclusion and to contribute to a supportive and healthy environment to work, study, and create.
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Dialogue 5: Inclusive Teaching, Learning and Curricula
This dialogue will address gaps in the inclusion and validation of Black perspectives, experiences, ways of knowing and learning, and contributions within existing curricula; approaches to teaching, learning, curriculum design, pedagogical approaches; and classroom cultures. This will include ways in which current structures do not support and sustain teaching and learning practices that are explicitly inclusive of the needs and perspectives of Black faculty and students, and the absence of curricula that incorporate decolonizing and intercultural perspectives and knowledge systems.
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Dialogue 6: Responsibilities and Obligations of Non-Black Peers and Supervisors as Partners
This dialogue recognizes that efforts in support of meaningful change within institutions and the higher education sector should not be the sole responsibility of Black colleagues. Discussion will focus on the responsibilities and obligations of non-Black peers and leaders to facilitate supportive environments, promote equitable practices and actively, intentionally, and appropriately foster inclusion for Black students, staff and faculty. Participants will share experiences and best practices about how to move from ‘intention’ to ‘action’ and develop the competencies necessary to challenge anti-Black racism wherever it appears and to be an effective partner for Black inclusion. Focus will include the need to support and sustain “allyship”/partnership that is truly collaborative and ensures that authoritative voice appropriately resides with Black colleagues.
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Dialogue 7: Mentoring, Support Networks, and Wellbeing
This dialogue will examine gaps in support systems for Black students, faculty and staff, and deliberate on how institutions and the sector, in collaboration with community partners, can enhance enduring support systems and mentoring networks that ensure their overall wellbeing, sense of belonging, retention within the academy as individuals and as a community, while facilitating their academic/career success.
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Dialogue 8: Race-Based Data Collection and Use
This dialogue explores the current status of race-based data collection in post-secondary institutions, and identifies thoughtful approaches to data collection, analysis and interpretation. The session will address the effectiveness of race-based data collection in addressing and measurably reducing disparities for Black students, staff and faculty. This will include the appropriate use of data to address inequities across the key areas covered by the sessions in these dialogues.
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Dialogue 9: Engaging Alumni and External Partners/Communities
This dialogue will focus on exploring ways to strengthen lasting relationships with alumni and external Black community partners. It will examine how our institutions and sector can engage as accountable partners in promoting and sustaining relationships with Black communities and other organizations that work to support anti-Black racism and Black inclusion. These discussions will highlight recommended practices to ensure engagement, with Black communities, are not based on a deficit model but recognize and value community assets and operate on the basis of fairness, reciprocity, and mutually supportive community development.
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