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Inclusion

Inclusion is a key piece of EDID, closely connected to the other dimensions.

How can we go further in creating an environment where all undergraduate students, graduate students, staff, and faculty members feel welcome, respected, and able to participate fully?

Read Western’s Inclusive Washroom Policy. The Social Science Centre has several gender-neutral single-user washrooms: SSC 3318, SSC 4318, SSC 5318, SSC 6318, SSC 7318, SSC 8351.  

Representation matters, in ways that connect to Inclusion, to Equity, and to Decolonization. As our community becomes increasingly diverse, how can we make sure that new barriers are not created and that everyone has an opportunity to succeed? How can spaces be created with sufficient critical mass of scholars and students to foster community, mentoring, and support? How does Diversity strengthen Inclusion, as more students see themselves and their experiences reflected in both the university community, and in their classes, readings and coursework?

There are many dimensions to inclusion. Below are some relatively easy steps to take as we continue to work collectively and at the institutional level on more challenging steps. Choose any place to start. Then add another.

In your teaching, consider whether any examples, case studies, or language you use would change if you imagined that in your classroom there are disabled students, Indigenous students, racialized students, LGBTQ+ students, students from a country or region you are discussing.

Consider how inclusive your language is.

• Moving to more gender-inclusive language is a start.
• Western's Office of Equity, Diversity and Inclusion has created an Inclusive Language Guide that covers many kinds of language and common expressions that may be experienced as exclusionary.
• You may also want to consider Words and phrases you might want to think twice about using. 
• Watch this classic BBC interview with Muhammed Ali about colour-coded/racially-coded language embedded in common language.
• And please, don’t forget Dr. Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor’s analysis in the Western anti-racism lecture Why It's Hard to Talk about the N-Word.

Accessibility in Teaching

Accessibility in teaching – alongside and beyond the Accessible Education office’s procedures – is another good place to start. Not all students with disabilities at Western are registered with Accessible Education, due to barriers in accessing diagnoses. And a large number of disabled students have non-apparent disabilities. Are there more ways you can build in accessibility and flexibility in learning environments?

• Consider the insights gathered from Western students with disabilities in the summer of 2022, who highlighted some simple steps that instructors could take to deepen access in teaching. Here is a two-page overview of the five easiest ways to increase access for disabled students and many others.
• An expanded version of that document includes eight ways to incorporate insights from disabled university students to enhance accessibility for all students. This version adds three additional teaching practices that may require more effort. It also includes quotes from students about why and how these eight practices are important to them, and some suggestions for how to incorporate them.
• For those interested in the research project that generated these insights, overviews of the project and some of its findings are presented in the short articles How accessibility for disabled university students can benefit all students (in The Conversation) and Engaging anthropology to understand the experiences of disabled university students (in the Canadian Anthropology Society’s newsletter).

 

Did you know that in the 2021 Graduating Student Survey from the Canadian University Survey Consortium about one quarter of graduating students across Canada reported having a disability?