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April is Celebrate Diversity Month, an opportunity to explore and honor the heritage and cultural traditions of those in our community. The aim is to create a sense of belonging among students, staff, and faculty and to foster a sense of cultural awareness and fluency.
Amanda L. Bonilla, executive director for Student Diversity, Equity, and Belonging at Ivy Tech Community College, emphasizes the importance of awareness programming: “students who are not familiar with these cultural heritage celebrations or religious observances are learning that they exist, and so it’s helping them build their tool kit of understanding. . . having that knowledge and language of what’s happening within different diverse communities essentially makes them that much more culturally competent when those individuals become their coworkers.”
Authenticity grows from the clarity that experience yields. Refining this awareness is a vital part of the higher education experience. Internalizing it doesn’t come from taking a single course, reading a particular book, or having one friend or colleague who exposes us to a culture that is new to us. It comes from a wealth of sources. Part of the experience of higher education is providing those sources and creating a community of belonging for all. Awareness programming achieves both aims.
Life Skills for Gen Z
Those born after 1996 are part of Generation Z — many of our undergraduate and graduate students are members of this cohort. Promoting diversity, inclusion, and belonging is deeply engrained in this generation’s value system.
Diversity isn’t an abstract concept to Gen Zs. Kim Parker and Ruth Igielnik, writing for the Pew Research Center, explain: “Members of Gen Z are more racially and ethnically diverse than any previous generation, and they are on track to be the most well-educated generation yet.” When we celebrate diversity, we celebrate Generation Z.
Rutgers Professor Mark Beal and his co-author Michael Pankowski write in their book “Engaging Gen Z“: “If you currently lead a company or lead the human resources function at a company, big or small, you must place greater focus on diversity and inclusion, or future Gen Z employees will leave your organization as quickly as they arrive.”
Furthering their fluency when it comes to the depth of thought and the sensitivity of language that diversity, inclusion, and belonging work requires are vital lessons for all students. These are professional skills students need for the modern workplace and life skills that diverse student populations and their counterparts seek and value.
Instilling a Sense of Belonging
An important goal of awareness programming is to foster belonging. Bonilla explains: “It’s really empowering and salient to know that the institution you’re attending recognizes your existence and if it’s a religious holiday acknowledges your religious practices so that it’s not as daunting to bring them up. So, if the campus is having a Ramadan program, that means that the folks that don’t participate in that can understand that Ramadan has fasting pieces to it. So as a student you’re not constantly having to explain why you’re not eating . . . for members of those identities and those communities, it allows them to kind of breath a little bit and not always have to explain themselves because the campus is acknowledging it. The campus is talking about it, which is extremely helpful.”
It bolsters a sense of belonging for students to feel like their campus recognizes their practices and is educating their campus community about those practices, while also honoring their traditions. “Providing access to folks through heritage month or diversity programs — I call them awareness programs because they’re really just scratching the surface of having folks understand the nuances of culture and religion — it’s really powerful,” Bonilla shares.
Cueing Key Conversations
Bonilla describes a program that has worked well at Ivy Tech: “I started a Heritage Month Speaker’s Program. It’s geared towards students, but more staff are coming than students. It’s free and it’s on Zoom . . . For Women’s History Month, we had a black female from Northwest Indiana really talk about the stereotypes of black women and how that shows up in today’s pop culture . . . I got so many emails from staff who said either (a.) I feel so seen thank you for doing this or (b.) I had no idea and now I feel like I understand my students a little bit better.”
Invite conversations from various perspectives. Keep hosting them. The conversation about diversity in culture is constantly evolving and changing. We have to be cutting edge in our commitment to diversity. We need to be refining our fluency continuously to serve our students and to help them understand the reality that they are experiencing now and that they will graduate into when they enter the workplace.
“Food, Fun, and Festivities Is Not Equity Work”
Celebrating diversity through awareness programing is important. It builds understanding, and it stands to create a sense of belonging. Bonilla points out, though, that “it’s not equity work.”
“Sometimes when institutions think about heritage month or diversity programming, they think it’s just food, fun, and festivities. Sometimes that’s the first budget to go, but I think it undermines the sense of belonging it creates for the students and the members of those communities,” Bonilla shares. “To be acknowledged and to be celebrated creates a sense of belonging that we’re trying get at, but for some folks, they don’t understand the depths of that. They see it as food, fun, and festivities, and I want to put a little asterisk and say food, fun, and festivities is not equity work. It’s awareness work, and it’s needed. It leads to belonging. It doesn’t lead to equity.”
Celebrate diversity, through awareness programming, but recognize this work as part of the greater project. Bonilla advises: “I don’t want folks to be like: ‘oh we’ll just bring in some keynote speakers and we’re good.’ No, you’ve got to deal with your other systemic issues at the university. Both are needed.”
