Bridging Marginality Through Inclusive Higher Education

This book examines the changing influences of diversity in American higher education. The volume offers evidence and recommendations to positively shape inclusive learning and engagement of students, faculty, staff and community across the complex terrains of urban, suburban, and rural organizations within higher education today. Chapters highlight critical collaborations across student affairs and academic affairs, and delve into milestones addressing access, retention, engagement, and thriving within distinctive institutional types (e.g., research, liberal arts, community colleges, Minority Serving Institutions). Authors also explore the nuanced changes occurring against the contemporary backdrop of COVID-19 experiences – including the rise of anti-Asian racism, the salience of implicit biases, and the disparate access to and impacts of health services. Essential chapters refocus our consideration about the trajectories of historically underrepresented groups and their peers (including, African Americans, Hispanic/Latino, Indigenous people, individuals with disabilities and those identifying as LGBTQ+, undocumented students, and women) in American higher education.

This book explores teaching, learning, and leadership in higher education following the Covid-19 pandemic. It examines opportunities that currently exist within higher education as they relate to innovative teaching and learning strategies, from instructional modalities to new models of transformative learning to meet students “where they are” in terms of career development and lifelong learning. Emphasis is placed on educational leadership and management skills, faculty and teaching acumen, and students and their quest for knowledge and understanding as we navigate past a global health crisis towards a future of hope and solutions to some of today’s most pressing issues using collaboration, community, and an inquiry-oriented approach. The current state of education is reimagined with emphasis on higher education as a learning organization. A sense of urgency in higher education is underscored to instill knowledge and competency, encourage innovation, and help the next generation of students flourish in an evolving and changing world with resilience, optimism, and creativity that will yield real solutions to some of the world’s most prevalent and challenging issues.

This book employs a fiction-based approach to address the revolving door of Black faculty and staff in American colleges and universities as a national crisis that needs to be resolved systematically. Alex-Assensoh coins the acronym SOULS to promote the importance of safety, organizational accountability, unvarnished truth telling, love, and spirituality as the foundational ingredients for reimagining and rebuilding an Academy that harnesses the talents of Black faculty and staff. Chapters feature storytelling to illustrate common cracks in academic structures while interweaving interdisciplinary research to contextualize themes that the fiction-based method reveals. To conclude, the author provides a research-informed call to action within the context of institutional transformation, as well as reflective questions and recommendations for further reading.

This book offers an intervention into the process of decolonization through the re-subjectification of the settler subject. The authors draw on what Deleuze and Guattari call minor threads of philosophy, pedagogy, spirituality, and healing practices rooted in neglected lineages of European thought and ceremony. The book proposes a methodology for unontologizing the settler subject, which they term "desettlering." Rather than fetishizing indigenous theory and practice as a mode for resubjectifying settlers to facilitate land-based decolonization, it offers a fresh approach by looking toward alternative sets of traditions and identities. These alternatives are used to interrogate minoritarian European philosophies, practices, and beliefs, which the authors propose could be deployed to unontologize the settler within current historical conditions. Asserting that such a process is not volitional but a historical necessity, the book offers a novel and timely investigation into who settlers become if they intend to engage seriously in decolonization. It will appeal to an interdisciplinary audience of scholars and researchers in psychological science, social psychology, counseling, philosophy, indigenous studies, and sociology.

In recent years, gaps in college opportunities have contributed to diminished social mobility and are influenced by disparities in collegiate experiences. An integral part of the mission of colleges and universities is to advance student achievement and prepare students for a global society by fostering educational excellence and ensuring equal access. In order to provide equal educational opportunities, further study on the best practices to create a diverse and welcoming campus community for all faculty and students is required. The Handbook of Research on Opening Pathways for Marginalized Individuals in Higher Education examines specific case studies and stories from the field, analyzes the research breadth for supporting the creation of policies to foster equitable educational access, and studies higher education inclusive policies that promote leadership, social justice, and the health and well-being of faculty and students. The book also helps to alleviate and remedy issues of “historical privilege” with a lens on diversity and support through the creation of inclusive communities of equitable educational access. Covering a range of topics such as social justice, accessibility, and healthy student interactions, this reference work is ideal for academicians, researchers, scholars, practitioners, instructors, and students.

The primary aim of this text is to provide educators with specific strategies for engaging in equity and inclusion work on college campuses. We include the perspectives of faculty and staff with a range of experiences and expertise to address current topics evolving at various levels and functional areas in the academy. Rather than replicate findings and recommendations established in extant literature, we provide faculty, staff, and graduate students with the insight and tools they will require to transform established recommendations into actionable solutions and promising practices. This book offers theoretical and practical approaches to evolving diversity, equity, and inclusion concerns in higher education. The core themes of this volume center on diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging in higher education. While some educators use these terms interchangeably, we define diversity as a concept that envelopes several modes of social identity, including race, ethnicity, gender, ability, sexual orientation, faith/non-faith affiliation, size, veteran’s status, etc. The practice of fortifying representation amongst minoritized populations without making considerations for structure and support has been the primary model for diversifying the academy for the past 40 years. Within the context of higher education and diversity, our conversation shifts beyond ensuring marginalized communities are represented. Within each chapter, the contributing authors address a wide range of diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging topics that are unique to their positionality as educators in the postsecondary sector. As editors, we intentionally identify authors with diverse professional backgrounds who offer a range in their approaches to addressing emergent trends in their respective areas in higher education. In addition to submitting manuscripts that engage critical examinations of diversity, equity, and inclusion in the postsecondary sector, authors were encouraged to design supplemental material for their chapters, such as training modules, study guides, case studies, guides for utilizing critical research approaches and design, and interactive activities that can be replicated in various settings on campus (e.g., the classroom, residence halls, student organization trainings, etc.).

A Just Future addresses the precarious future of American higher education and diversity and inclusion initiatives along with it. From a global pandemic to a national reckoning with anti-Blackness, the 2020 historical conjuncture brutally revealed the impact of structural inequalities on historically marginalized communities and galvanized college students, diversity officers, and educators on a scale not seen since the 1960s. In so doing, it exposed the unfinished business of the civil rights era and the limits of diversity and inclusion reforms. The time has come to create a more just future for the most marginalized community members at higher education institutions. To do so, we must share a common understanding of where we have been, what went wrong, and how to get back on track. Barton draws on abolitionist frameworks of social change to provide a bold, comprehensive guide to abolitionism in education, not only for diversity, equity, and inclusion practitioners but also higher education leaders and faculty. As a result, A Just Future provides new values, tools, and mindsets to address—and redress—ongoing forms of oppression that thrive on college campuses.

While the issue of advancing equity occupies the pages of many education journals across the world and pursuing it in schools and classrooms is a common instructional goal, there is an obvious absence of established school policies combined with pedagogies on how to achieve educational equity.