Equity Institute: Workshops for DEIJ

In partnership with Equity Labs, the Equity Institute is a series of 6 diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice (DEIJ) upskilling workshops that are applicable across industry and experience. Course content will fall into four thematic categories: intrapersonal, interpersonal, epistemic, and institutional. These themes are informed by research-backed sociocultural change theory. Asynchronous course materials and synchronous workshops will incorporate theories and strategies on how to identify, evaluate, and create equitable and inclusive workplaces. Each workshop covers a different topic and will include a variety of discussions and activities.

This course will require both cognitive and emotional commitment from participants. The time needed will vary for each person as reading, reflective writing, and processing time is highly personal.

Course Information

This course meets for six (6) weeks: Live online via Zoom (2 hours per week) + 2 additional hours per week of asynchronous pre/post assignments. 
Total Hours: 24

Summer 2025 cohort schedule: Thursdays: July 10, 17, 24, 31, August 7, 14 from 3:00 PM – 5:00 PM MT

Workshop topics provided below. See our course content summary here.
 

• Critical Reflexivity

  The Critical Reflexivity workshops begin with an examination of the identities that influence your relationship to the people and world around you. In these workshops participants inventory the various social and personal identities they hold and critically examine the affordance of power, positionality, privilege, and access associated with these identities. Building on these processes, participants will then develop strategies to remain open to voices and perspectives of those who hold different social and personal identities.

• DEIJ Literacy

  The DEIJ Literacy workshop focuses on how we make meaning of the world through the information we consume. We consume information through our people networks, our virtual networks, sources of news, sources of specialized and non-specialized knowledge, and entertainment. The identities of the people who influence our information intake is critical.  By consuming information from people whose identities are different from our own, and especially from those who hold non-dominant identities, we open ourselves to different ideas, perspectives, and lived experiences.

• Empathetic Learning

  In its simplest form, empathy is the ability to perceive the world in a way that someone else might. When we add the complexities of people with differing social identities, power, and positionality, empathy becomes a more difficult practice and one that has to be practiced with care and responsibility. In this workshop, we apply a critical lens to the practice of empathy by considering how and when empathy becomes a tool for just and equitable transformation and when empathy simply becomes a practice in self-gratification without meaningful systemic or interpersonal change.

• Centering and Decentering

  We are often the heroes in our own stories - and with us, our worldviews, values, and norms take center stage in our interactions. The workshops on centering and de-centering critically examine how taken-for-granted ways of viewing the world influence the way we make sense of other people’s experiences.  We then practice interpersonal and intrapersonal strategies that allow us to strategically create space for values, and worldviews that might exist in the margins that we might not subscribe to.

• Generative Conflict

  The generative conflict workshop rethinks traditional win-loss conflict dynamics by proposing an alternate pathway through conflict borrowing from non-western frameworks of conflict. The workshop begins by assessing existing conflict patterns within the organization or with key stakeholders through a series of mapping exercises. Based on these observations participants will reimagine ways of engaging in conflict that integrate possible effects of identities and social power. Participants will then generate methods and practices to transform relationships and meaning-making processes.

• Anti-Oppressionist Ethos

  The Anti-oppressive Ethos workshops begin with bringing to life some important concepts: anti-oppression, anti-racism, justice, and equity. Participants will survey parts of their own organization to assess their products, programs, processes and practices in advancing justice and equity in relation to design justice principles. Based on the observations of the participants the cohort will devise sustainable goals and methods that will allow the organization to generate more just and equitable outputs.  

Completion information: Participants will earn a non-credit certificate at the completion of the program from Equity Labs and the Center for Professional Development. In order to receive a certificate, participants must attend 4 out of 6 classes and complete the final project.

The final project will ask each participant to create an ethos statement. Each week of class will focus on a different section of the ethos statement that will result in a final completed project.