Diversity Intensives

Overview: What Diversity Intensive courses teach

Diversity intensive courses are essential in liberal arts education for highlighting the centrality of diversity and complexity of difference in contemporary life. At UNC Asheville, required diversity intensive courses help to fulfill our mission in facilitating a truly liberating education while offering opportunities for students and faculty to examine their own experiences and values alongside those of others. Such self-examinations could lead to transformative experiences for participants.

Diversity Intensive course are offered everywhere in the curriculum. The list of courses currently listed as DI is available from the Intensives link.

Integrative Liberal Studies Diversity courses are diversity-intensive or centered, rather than diversity-inclusive or enhanced. Diversity intensive courses focus on the meaning and experience of diversity and difference and the implications of living in a diverse society whether one is advantaged or oppressed. Diversity intensive courses emphasize the complex and problematic processes of identity formation. These courses encourage awareness of the relationships between self and social institutions, both of which rest upon as well as reify difference and hierarchy.

Successful engagement with others in a multicultural and pluralistic society requires an understanding of how social forces shape our sense of identity as individuals and as part of a culture. In order to acquire this understanding, students must go beyond exposure to the perspectives of others to a consideration of the ways in which social institutions impact identity formation.

Diversity intensive courses offer and encourage opportunities for transformative experiences for all participants. They do this by engaging the heart and the mind, demanding serious consideration of pedagogy, and requiring participants to reflect upon and critically engage in analysis of power, privilege, and hegemonic ideology. Such goals require faculty to be aware of their own position relative to power and privilege, be sensitive to the potential range of student reactions, and be prepared to constructively confront difficult issues in the classroom. Students’ experiences in a D-I classroom can range from: a routine learning experience; to an intellectual breakthrough as they begin to put ideas and actions together; to, in some cases, a cathartic, emotional experience for which students may need support outside of the classroom. While transformative experiences may be liberating, they can also be challenging.

The application for Diversity Intensive designation should include: the completed application form; a syllabus; descriptions of class projects and assignments; and a vision statement.  See below for links to these documents.

To qualify for Diversity Intensive designation, the course should meet the following criteria:

1. Examines as one of its primary themes, within the context of the course materials, the cultural processes and ideologies of constructing human identities, such as class, sex, gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, disability, or religion, as well as the implications of those identities on lived experience.
2. Examines as its primary subjects individuals’ relationship to power, how privileged and oppressed identities are constructed among and across categories of difference, and how societies use institutions and imbalances of power to create and perpetuate or challenge inequalities.
3. Examines as a primary consideration of diversity the intersectionality of identities. (multiple layers of identities and the interrelationship between or among these identities, ie., black women’s experiences as blacks, as women, and as black women.)
4. Course materials relate directly to the issues addressed in the course. Whenever appropriate, course material produced by underrepresented or oppressed group(s) should be included.
5. Course structure allows participants to examine their experiences and values with course materials, discussion, and projects/assignments that move students beyond their comfort zones, providing opportunities for transformative experiences.

Documents:

Faculty interested in having a course considered as a Diversity Intensive should complete the Diversity Intensive Application form. To renew a currently DI designated course, use the Diversity Intensive Course Renewal form.

• Here is a sample proposal for the Diversity Intensive Course: American Women in Black and White
• Here are the guidelines for a Diversity Intensive Course Vision Statement
• Here is a sample assignment from a Diversity Intensive course.

Student Learning Outcomes

1. Students understand the socially constructed nature of identities.
2. Students understand the significance of individuals’ differing relationships to power.
3. Students understand how individuals, organizations, and institutions create, perpetuate, or challenge inequality.
4. Students understand how multiple identities intersect.
5. Students are better equipped to reevaluate their ideas about diversity and difference.