This year, the WRD Equity Committee is demonstrating more commitment to the students, staff, and faculty of the department. Through events, a public whiteboard, grant-funded research, and additional projects, the committee is facilitating conversations on equity and striving to make the department more inclusive and diverse. Read on to learn about these ongoing projects.
The mission of the Equity Committee is to create practices to embrace and sustain DEI initiatives in the department as a way to respond to the wider WRD community’s exigencies.
WRD Equity Committee member Dr. Maria Prikhodko
Community Whiteboard
During each week of the Winter Quarter, the Equity Committee asked community members to contribute their own definitions of diversity, equity, and inclusion on a public whiteboard that was hosted outside of WRD’s department offices.
On her inspiration for starting this project, WRD Equity Committee member Dr. Maria Prikhodko shared, “the idea behind creating white space is to allow rhetorical and more equitable space for ideas, quotes, and inquiries from students into the current WRD curriculum. Another rationale was to create a more metaphysical space for conversations around DEI, its shared definitions, and/or emerging discourse practices that remain unspoken otherwise.“
In addition, Dr. Prikhodko expanded on past and present directions for the project – “One of the first steps taken is that the Committee started generating a corpus of data for rhetorical and discourse analysis to find ways to implement them through the department ecologies. Next steps may involve expanding this white board into a more permanent rhetorical space within the department for more student-led initiatives. Of course, this list is being more revised with the data analysis.“
Stemming from the physical whiteboard in the Schmitt Academic Center, the committee has created a digital whiteboard where WRD community members can share their perspectives from anywhere. The digital whiteboard, with contributions and questions from current students, faculty, and staff, will go live at the beginning of Autumn Quarter.
Course Recommendations
In addition, the committee has begun to make lists of recommended electives outside of the WRD department for WRD majors and MAWRD students to enrich their learning. The list centers on classes that incorporate writing and rhetoric in various ways with topics of diversity, equity, and inclusion.
Starting in the Autumn Quarter, this list will be posted in advance on the WRD Blog’s “Courses” page, and students are encouraged to communicate with their advisors to see how such courses may fit into their own degree process and learning goals.
Departmental Initiative Grant
Finally, members of the equity committee worked together over the Winter and Spring Quarters to apply for a QIC Departmental Initiative Grant, through which they received funding for 18 months of research related expenses to, as the grant states, “improve the quality of teaching and learning across the degree-credit program.”
Equity Committee chair Dr. Monica Reyes shares, “This project is a collaborative effort between the WRD Department’s respective Equity and First-Year Writing (FYW) Committees and seeks to improve the quality of teaching and learning in WRD by learning more about the writing and language experiences students have in the department’s FYW Program. Specifically, this project has two purposes: (1) to elicit qualitative insights into student and faculty perceptions of findings from our most recent assessment project that reveal starkly different student learning outcomes based on racial demographic categories (First-Year Writing Committee [FYWC] 2022), and to better understand their teaching and learning experiences; and (2) to understand whether students experience FYW courses as inclusive of diverse literacy experiences and rhetorical traditions, and to determine the impact of these experiences on their perceptions of Writing and Rhetoric and Professional Writing as a diverse major and minor at DePaul.”
Want to learn more about what the WRD Equity Committee is working on? If you have additional questions, suggestions, or ideas, the committee would love to hear from you. Email Equity Committee Graduate Student Representative Grace Von Lehman at gvonlehm@depaul.edu to add your voice, and stay tuned for our digital community whiteboard!