The Provost’s Award for Diversity in the Curriculum were given out Jan. 21 at the annual diversity awards ceremony to nine Pitt faculty members for work on six courses.
The award recognizes faculty who have taught a modified course or revised curricula to strengthen diversity and inclusion, resulting in changes of impact. These modifications may include such approaches as employing more inclusive and interactive teaching methods, instituting classroom changes to expand students’ cultural awareness and cross-cultural development, communicating equity-minded practices throughout a discipline, or creating more welcoming and inclusive learning environments.
Each recipient receives a $2,500 cash award and a recognition plaque. This year’s winners include:
Yodit Betru, Jaime Booth and Toya Jones, School of Social Work: Transforming the School of Social Work Curriculum to be Anti-Racist and Anti-Oppressive.
Students from all program levels urged the school to reinforce its commitment to anti-racist social work and to incorporate these principles throughout the curriculum. This is a response to strengthen their dedication to these values across teaching, practice, research, and activism, launching a transformative ADEI (Anti-Racism, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) framework. This initiative includes two key phases: assessing the current curriculum and implementing intentional changes.
Thomas Dyne, Dietrich School of Arts & Sciences, Slavic Languages and Literature: Behind Bars: Cross-Cultural Representations of Prison in the 20th Century
Behind Bars is a modified course that invites students to consider the experience of 5.5 million incarcerated people of color, arrested, or jailed Americans, factoring in socioeconomic, personal and historical impact. The change has impacted 102 students across all three spring terms (2022, 2023, 2024).
Jialei Jiang, Dietrich School of Arts & Sciences, English: Innovative Approaches to Design Justice
This course fosters students’ abilities to produce digital media compositions while exploring the rhetorical, poetic, and political implications of various writing platforms. The modification aims to strengthen diversity and inclusion by engaging students in creating inclusive digital media projects to enhance the representation of diverse racial, gender and cultural groups.
Max Hurwitz, School of Medicine, Physical Medicine & Rehabilitation: Justice, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (JEDI)-Minded for Disability
The JEDI-Minded for Disability course was developed to help close the gap between inadequate health care for people with disabilities and students’ cultural competency and understanding of their lived experiences.
Sam Pittman, Dietrich School of Arts & Sciences, English: The Disability Studies Certificate and Introduction to Disability Studies
The Disability Studies Certificate and Introduction to Disability Studies program was launched in October 2022 to address the lack of representation of disabled experiences in its curriculum. Developed collaboratively, it centers on a social and cultural model of disability, valuing it as an essential aspect of identity and aiming to foster greater understanding and inclusion. Five students graduated with the certificate in 2023, 33 are currently enrolled, and 132 have completed the program since spring 2022.
Ashley Yarabinec and Mario Browne, Pharmacy, Pharmacy & Therapeutics: Enhancing Cultural Humility through a Longitudinal Experiential Learning Exchange
Enhancing Cultural Humility is the only cross-institutional project, a collaboration between Pitt and the Howard University, College of Pharmacy. The Cooper-Stewart Longitudinal Exchange Program is a collaborative initiative between the Pitt Pharmacy School and Howard University College of Pharmacy. It is designed to cultivate cultural humility, social justice, health equity, and career readiness among pharmacy students. The program builds upon required PharmD experiential rotations to address health disparities by immersing students in diverse clinical environments and engaging them in reflective learning.