Morning Session: 10:15-11:30am

This practitioner presentation will discuss how the pedagogical practices of intimacy choreography and ungrading promote a student sense of ownership and belonging in the classroom and beyond.

Dr. K. Frances Lieder will discuss how they use the practices of intimacy choreography to encourage students to listen to their bodies and value embodied knowledge as part of their educational experience.

Dr. Leigha McReynolds will illustrate how ungrading defines the structure and supports the content of her class’s focus on disability and eugenics in science fiction. Ungrading creates a learning experience where students can succeed as they are, however their bodyminds function, without requiring adherence to rigid expectations about what a student should do.

This cultural immersion encourages self-reflection and empathy, allowing the students to not only provide services with cultural sensitivity and competence but also appreciate the importance of making individuals from all backgrounds feel welcome and valued on campus.

The service-learning experiences during our time abroad were developed in partnership with the local providers in Ghana that address communication challenges and promote inclusivity. These sessions enabled participants to develop skills that are essential for working with diverse populations.

Eliza Thompson, Ed.S CCC-SLP, Assistant Clinical Professor, Department of Hearing & Speech Science

This paper addresses institutional challenges to systemic racism and other forms of discrimination embedded in engineering education, examining how places mediate the transmission of engineering culture and how feelings of acceptance, inclusion, and belonging are experienced across key underrepresented groups. Across a variety of social identities, students' sense of belonging is in tension with ritualistic, symbolic, and physical manifestations of depoliticization of engineering, centrality of the military and corporate organizations in engineering (Leydens & Lucena, 2017; Riley, 2013), disengagement with societal issues (Cech, 2014) and a lack of diverse representation in labs, classrooms, hallways, statues, public gathering spaces, study lounges, etc. This suggests that place is an important factor to consider in the theorization of engineering identity formation and understanding institutional challenges to the creation of welcoming environments for diverse identities.

Timothy Reedy, Lecturer, Adjunct professor, A. James Clark School of Engineering

Shared Resources from Tim Reedy

We regret that David Patrick is unable to join us today. Please feel free to email him if you want to learn more about TechGirlz.

David Patrick will discuss his adventures in teaching young ladies a variety of computer-related technologies through a program called TechGirlz. David will show off how they were able to incorporate into the TechGirlz workshops the latest Microsoft technologies, so that the ladies would not only be learning technology, but gaining current, relevant, and valuable skills.

David Patrick, PTK Faculty, College of Information Studies

View the presentation.

The ADVANCE Program supports the recruitment, retention, advancement, and professional growth of a diverse faculty. Since the program began in 2010, we have organized a program called ADVANCE Professors, who are senior women faculty members assigned to a specific constituent group (e.g., by college or appointment type). ADVANCE Professors support their constituent base by sharing information, building community, and bringing recognition/visibility to faculty issues. In this practitioner presentation, a panel of current/former ADVANCE professors (2-3) will discuss strategies that they have used to foster a greater sense of belonging for faculty in their constituent based. Dawn Culpepper, ADVANCE Director, will facilitate the panel discussion.

Dawn Culpepper, Director of the ADVANCE Program, Office of Faculty Affairs
Wedad Elmraghraby, Professor and Senior Associate Dean for Faculty, Smith School of Business
Jean McGloin, Professor and Associate Dean of Research and Graduate Education, College of Behavioral and Social Sciences
Lisa Taneyhill, Professor, College of Agricultural and Natural Resources

Faculty Friday Sessions are a new initiative via the Graduate School’s Graduate Academic Counselor. One of the goals of the Faculty Friday sessions is to connect graduate faculty with each other in hopes they can network with each other, feel affirmed by their peers and improve their sense of belonging within the Graduate Faculty UMD community. Topics will include mentoring, statement of mutual expectations, acknowledging our biases, work-life balance, self-care, graduate school policies and careers beyond academia.

Simone Warrick-Bell, Graduate Academic Counselor, The Graduate School

In 2021 - 2022, I facilitated a virtual book club in the CHSE department. Participants included faculty and graduate students from the three programs within our department. We connected through reading and discourse related to the book Caste: The Origins of our Discontent by Isabel Wilkerson. This year I have expanded the concept to the College of Education teacher preparation programs, starting with the field-based faculty who work in teacher preparation across the three departments in the college. We will be reading The Teachers: A Year Inside America's Most Vulnerable, Important Profession by Alexandra Robbins. Our first meeting will be held via Zoom in Sept 2023.

Stacey Williams, Senior Lecturer & Internship Coordinator, Counseling, Higher Education & Special Education

We inquired about incoming UMD students’ perceptions of our University's campus climate June-August 2022 and December 2022-January 2023. The presenter will share the feedback from students who expressed concerns about DEIJB on campus.

Yu-Wei Wang, Associate Clinical Professor, Research Director & Assistant Director of the Counseling Center
Carl Wachowski, Undergraduate Research Assistant
(co-authors not presenting: Tiana Cruz & Israel Abebe)

Forced to speak “proper” English, many children – whether speakers of Indigenous languages, African America Language, Chicano English, or an immigrant language – feel like they don’t belong. Most of them adapt and learn the standard variety, while rejecting or hiding their heritage language ways as teens and later as adults.

Representation is key to belonging, whether in kindergarten or in college, and welcoming all language ways represents a commitment to true belonging for all. Anecdotes from students will illustrate the value of language in determining whether or not they feel a sense of belonging.

Kellie Rolstad, Associate Professor, Department of Teaching and Learning, Policy and Leadership (TLPL), College of Education