Most successful change teams consist of a representation of relevant constituents, including leadership, senior faculty, junior faculty, graduate students, and potentially staff. The success of a team can depend on how it is viewed by influential faculty across the department. We strongly encourage you to consider including graduate students in the departmental team. 

We want to note that the burden of DEI work often falls disproportionately on junior faculty, women faculty, and Faculty of Color. With this in mind, we encourage you to be intentional and reflective as you form your teams. So, we encourage you to consider forming an independent or overlapping but differentiated team, rather than relying exclusively on an existing DEI/climate committee. 

Your team will likely evolve and grow over time. The initial team is just a starting point. The initial team’s role now, fall 2023, is to assist in planning the visit.

No, we will pay for our own travel.

Success depends on your department’s goals and actions and their outcomes. Your department can only change from within and our goal is to support that in multiple ways. 

The goals you set for yourself are also our goals — our success is the extent to which we can support your goals and actions.

IGPP can offer: 

• Direct funding through the subsequent AGEP Institutional Transformation Alliance. 
• Support for your team — organizational change frameworks, team structure and processes, and stakeholder and participant interaction recommendations
• Meeting with team members to help think through issues or questions they have, source needs and resources.
• Information such as articles, suggestions about how to approach a problem, and one-pagers that connect graduate education equity and inclusion conversations to the literature and frame discussion prompts
• Information on best practices in equity and inclusion in graduate physics education 
• Workshops and seminars on relevant equity and inclusion topics in graduate education, and connections to those offering workshops 
• Connections to other departments and what they are doing 
• Data collection tools, e.g. self-assessment tools, climate surveys for graduate students and faculty/staff, assessment of inclusive teaching tool, institutional assessment tools
• Suggestions for a departmental faculty or grad student / postdoc reading / DEI in STEM literature review group
• Travel support for Convening in June 2024

Yes, though we have not yet worked through the details, and the IRB, etc. Let us know who or if people are interested and stay tuned for more information.

The visit should be constructed to achieve several goals:

1. Build department buy-in through small and large group conversations with students and faculty; 
2. Build institutional buy-in through meetings with deans and other leaders; 
3. Collect data on the local landscape of equity and inclusion activities, policies, actions, and climate; 
4. Prepare your team (evolve team membership) to help achieve your goals; 
5. Potentially deliver workshops, seminars or lead discussion on equity and inclusion topics in graduate physic education. 

We want as many people as possible to be able to attend; so, please, advertise broadly. We are happy to meet with small groups for conversation of both students and faculty. Please ask faculty to allow students to have the time away from experiments or group meetings, etc. to attend

Next Step 1: Build team to help plan the visit if you haven’t already 

Next Step 2: Collaborate with us on planning a visit

We are first and foremost a research project; we also know that local data and inter-institution comparative data are effective at driving change. So we are very supportive of and interested in data collection and use. 

Types of data include: Data on graduate student admissions and retention; demographic data; climate data; data on policies and procedures; data on prior change efforts in equity and inclusion. 

You may have already collected other relevant data. This is something we hope to discuss with you during the IGP visit. 

You have quite a bit of flexibility. You will need a team we can liaise with and who can lead change; but how that happens and what you choose to focus on; and even the time scale over which you choose to do it are up to you and your colleagues. 

We also acknowledge that some departments may be in transition, be overwhelmed with other needs, and may not want to participate. This is totally fine. We will miss you.

Participating departments will benefit in several ways, such as:

• Opportunity to share with other departments what you have done
• Opportunity to learn about effective approaches to institutional/departmental change. 
• Strategies for navigating barriers to the DEIJ work that you are doing in your department. 
• Understanding how to maintain a high quality graduate program that is also inclusive. 

Participation in this project will potentially lead to a stronger department that contributes to the preparation of more inclusive and culturally competent STEM graduates and STEM workforce.

The Backbone is a hub or group which helps to support our collaborators in coordinating and advancing the work of the project.

We have created a Gmail account as a general contact (inclusivegraduateprograms@gmail.com), but soon you will largely connect through your IGP project liaisons as the relationship develops.