Skidmore program cited by regional council on inclusion

Kristie Ford

Kristie A. Ford, assistant professor of sociology, and Sarah Goodwin, professor of English, received an award Oct. 16 from the regional Leadership Council on Inclusion recognizing their work in launching a pilot Intergroup Relations (IGR) program at Skidmore.

The Leadership Council on Inclusion, formerly known as the Committee on Pluralism, began in 1990 under the auspices of the Hudson Mohawk Association of Colleges and Universities. Membership included key administrators at member institutions who were responsible for diversity and multicultural affairs at their colleges and universities.  Programs focused on promoting the growth, development, and retention of multicultural professionals in the region's higher education community.

	Sarah Goodwin

In 2007, Excelsior College assumed responsibility for leading and supporting the committee, whose goals remained the same, but whose name was changed.  In addition to continuing to offer conferences, the Council has embraced new technology to provide information via webinars.

The Council also launched an award program to recognize contributions toward multiculturalism on member campuses and in their home communities by faculty and staff at those institutions.  Skidmore is the first college to receive the award, specifically for clear hands-on participation in social justice education and efforts toward influencing and sustaining change at the college or in the community.

Skidmore's award-winning IGR program has been a collaborative initiative involving a number of faculty, staff, administrators, and students, according to Ford and Goodwin.  Together with an instructor team that includes Lei Bryant, Susan Layden, and Peter McCarthy, they developed a multi-component program in which team members participate in teaching, coaching student facilitators, and organizing curricular and co-curricular events on and off campus

The program's elements include the following: a "feeder" course in sociology, titled "Race and Power," taught by Ford; a training course, "Racial Identities: Theory and Praxis," co-taught last year by Ford and Goodwin, and this year by Goodwin and Bryant; and intergroup/intragroup dialogues on race, facilitated by pairs of students who have gone through the training course. These are one-credit dialogues in the curriculum; faculty coaches work closely with the student facilitators and are responsible for grading all student work. Last spring, Ford, Bryant, Layden, and Goodwin coached.

Concurrent with the race dialogues, student facilitators must also enroll in "Practicum in Facilitating Dialogues," a course that furthers their theoretical knowledge and practical skills related to race and inter/intragroup dialogue. Last spring Ford taught the course and this spring McCarthy will teach it. Other elements of the pilot program include co-curricular dialogues and outreach to the Saratoga community; the program also offers annual training workshops in IGR techniques for faculty and staff, in part to enlarge the group of faculty and staff who can teach or coach in the sequence, or contribute to the other IGR initiatives on campus.

In addition to the curricular experiences for the students there have been summer collaborative research and work projects overseen by Goodwin, Ford, Layden, and Bryant.

Tags: kristie ford, sarah goodwin, leadership council on inclusion