What We Offer
Workshops for higher education, businesses,
and non-profit settings
LinD Group Workshops
As our society has become increasingly diverse, so has the approach to and knowledge about diversity and inclusion. Thus, it is important to gain a deeper understanding of diversity if we are to create more inclusive climates, address the needs of diverse communities, and enhance work environments and outcomes for all. This workshop introduces participants to concepts and frameworks that highlight the complexity of diversity. It introduces and illustrates concepts such as worldview, social identities, individualism, collectivism, privilege, institutional “isms”, and salient/non-salient identities during the workshop. Sessions are interactive, engaging, and involve team interaction.
The demographics of colleges and universities and various work places and spaces have changed and reflect individuals and groups of diverse staff, student, and faculty. This is manifested in the modern classroom – students and faculty members from many different backgrounds interacting as part of the learning process. This rich blend of social and personal identities poses both challenges and opportunities. It also engenders a mixture of outcomes including learning, collaboration, friendship, and community, as well as cross-cultural conflict and tension. This workshop is designed to explore diversity in the classroom and the positive learning outcomes that can be achieved when faculty and instructors develop the skills to manage the dynamics of engaging diversity to enhance student learning outcomes.
Diversity and social justice are some of the most challenging concepts to explore with students, particularly those from dominant groups. Power, privilege, worldview, implicit bias, and systemic oppression are but a few diversity frameworks that can generate stress, misunderstanding, resistance, anger, and conflict, when presented to individuals. What are teaching techniques that minimize some of the negative effects of teaching about social justice concepts? What can instructors do to create deeper understandings about diversity issues while minimizing defensiveness, anger, and conflict? Story-telling, group dialogues, props, theater, simulations, and interactive and faculty-guided group work are a few of the techniques that can be utilized to maximize learning and engagement of students in diversity work. Interactive workshops will provide techniques for productively examining diversity concepts.