Designing Transformative Multicultural Initiatives: Theoretical Foundations, Practical Applications, and Facilitator Considerations

If we want to humanize our organizations and promote positive social change, much depends on our capacity to engage each other across lines of difference. In this important book, Dr. Sherry Watt offers a set of healing and life-giving strategies for embracing diversity and moving toward inclusion. The book is a clarion call for campus and community leaders to find the wisdom and courage to help us build a better world." --Parker J. Palmer (author of Healing the Heart of Democracy, The Courage to Teach and Let Your Life Speak ) "Dr. Watt and her talented cast of authors dissolve dualities between privilege and oppression, person and institution, and defensiveness and empathy to offer liberatory strategies in the spirit of Friere and hooks that offer real hope for realizing higher education s democratic mission. Rooted in the conceptual (like the AAFES Method and Privilege Identity Exploration Model), Designing Transformative Multicultural Initiatives provides an urgently needed pragmatic map for addressing the stubborn realities confronting college campuses around equity and justice. It is truly an outstanding contribution to the field." --Tracy L. Davis, Ph.D., Professor and College Student Personnel Program Coordinator, Director, Center for the Study of Masculinities & Men s Development, Educational and Interdisciplinary Studies, Western Illinois University Higher education is facing a perfect storm as it contends with changing demographics, shrinking budgets and concerns about access and cost, while underrepresented groups are voicing dissatisfaction with campus climate and demanding changes to structural inequities.This book argues that colleges and universities need both to centralize the value of diversity and inclusion and employ a set of strategies that are enacted at all levels of their institutions. It argues that individual and institutional change efforts can only be achieved by implementing diversity as a value that is embracing social change efforts as central and additive rather than episodic and required and provides the research and theoretical frameworks to support this approach, as well as tools and examples of practice that accomplish change. The contributors to this book identify the elements that drive successful multicultural initiatives and that strengthen the effectiveness of campus efforts to dismantle systemic oppression, as well as the individual and organization skills needed to manage "difference" effectively. Among these is developing the capacity of administrators, faculty and student affairs professionals as conscious scholar practitioners to sensitively manage conflicts on campus, deconstruct challenging structures and reconstruct the environment intentionally to include in respectful ways experiences of historically marginalized groups and non-dominant ways of being in the world. The books focus on developing capacities for multicultural competence aligns with higher education s increasing emphasis on civic engagement and institutional goals promote skills to interact in meaningful and responsible ways around "difference," whether of people, ideas or identities."Designing Transformative Multicultural Initiatives" provides guiding principles and practical strategies to successfully transform higher education to become fully inclusive and advance the success of all constituents and stakeholders.