It’s Monday at 4pm and your weekly Equity Council is meeting – but failing to come to consensus yet again. More time is spent on debate and the back-and-forth of common language and definitions and who should be at the meeting than planning, implementing, and assessing interventions. Sound familiar? WSCUC Fellows from the California Association for Institutional Research (CAIR) will guide you through a framework for how to use a justice, equity, diversity and inclusion (JEDI) lens in order to navigate complex institutional priorities of varying scale. Designed for any member of the higher education community, our facilitators will help participants articulate, advance, and/or reimagine an initiative and/or enduring challenge to be informed by evidence. We will engage and interact via multiple modalities and develop the information needed to devise a usable action plan.

A large and growing body of evidence suggests that active engagement helps learners retain and apply concepts both inside and outside the classroom – and the experiences of the past three years have foregrounded the importance of online and hybrid learning, often leaving instructors and institutions to grapple with developing and sustaining effective learning environments. However, engaging today’s diverse learners requires meaningful consideration of institutional culture, curriculum, and the classroom dynamic. This workshop explores each of these pillars—culture, curriculum, and classroom— toward the development of better teaching, learning, and approaches to assessment, self-reflective practices, and roadmaps for change. We will dive into the complexities of student engagement, including how and why, and what kinds of student behavior signals academic achievement in online and hybrid learning environments. All of this work will be considered in a context of practices that encourage student engagement and promote equity – especially those that improve educational effectiveness.