User:Ksdunn0524/Inclusive Excellence

Inclusive Excellence

Inclusive Excellence is a term used to describe a variety of efforts by institutes of higher education to improve diversity, equity, and campus climate. Inclusive excellence is represented as a holistic effort to improve these factors across all core functions of the system focused on long-term improvement. According the Association of American Colleges and Universities, inclusive excellence is “is designed to help colleges and universities integrate diversity, equity, and educational quality efforts into their missions and institutional operations.”

Pillars of Inclusive Excellence
These efforts are not just focused on increasing diversity, but ensuring learning environments that maximize the learning potential of individuals from a variety of racial, ethnic, and socio-economic backgrounds.

According to the University of Wisconsin System’s definition of inclusive excellence, there are four main factors that need to be identified and developed in order for inclusive excellence to work. Within these “pillars”are :

Diversity
Key Terms: Diversity: identifying and utilizing unique perspectives to enhance learning, Compositional diversity: documenting the quantifiable racial and ethnic make-up of an  institution Critical mass: Achieving a representational student population maximizes student feelings of comfort and belonging

Equity
Key Terms: Equity mindedness: Awareness of potential areas of inequity and willingness to take responsibility at an individual or institutional level for alleviating areas of inequity. Examples include, but are not limited to areas of race, ethnicity, gender, and disability.

Deficit mindedness: Emphasis toward placing responsibility for poor outcomes on individuals, not institutional or environmental factors

Representational equity: proportional representation of historically underrepresented groups in all levels of an institution’s organizational system

Inclusion
As defined by the University of Wisconsin System: “The active, intentional, and ongoing engagement with diversity—in people, in the curriculum, in the co-curriculum and in communities (intellectual, social, cultural, geographical) with which individuals might connect”

Excellence
As defined by the University of Wisconsin System: “The quality of being excellent; state of possessing good qualities in an eminent degree; exalted merit; superiority in virtue.”

Universities that have developed inclusive excellence programs include the University of Wisconsin system, California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo , the University of Denver , the University of Akron , Hobart and William Smith Colleges , and Wheaton College and others. It has been embraced by the Association of American Colleges and Universities.