Inclusion and Equity

The History Department Commitment to Inclusive Teaching and Practice

As a faculty, we recognize our unique role as stewards of student learning, and we commit to ensuring our curriculum and classrooms contribute to an inclusive culture at Loyola. While we recognize that doing so will take time, we also understand that words mean little without concrete action. We acknowledge that students face injustices and challenges created by intersecting forms of oppression such as racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, ageism, ableism, antisemitism, and Islamophobia. We are therefore committed to practices of inclusion and equity that recognize the particularities of each of these forces and the ways they intersect. The history department has therefore collaborated on the following commitments to Loyola, to our department, and to our individual classrooms in the service of a more equitable and just community. 

As members of the Loyola University community, we have commitments to advancing the aims of equity and inclusion in keeping with our mission as a Jesuit institution: 

1. Advocate for curricular changes in programs that we participate in as faculty, such as Global Studies, Messina, Honors, and interdisciplinary programs in ways that reflect anti-racist learning. 
2. Encourage and support bias training for all students and faculty. 
3. Organize a series of talks on the histories of marginalized groups by Loyola faculty and guest speakers. These talks will take place at least once a year to coincide with other national and campus activities (i.e., Black History Month and SAGDAW). 
4. Encourage engagement between our faculty and students and the Baltimore community. 
5. Supporting a diverse representation within our department faculty. 
6. Sustain learning aims that address elements of identity, diversity, justice, and action. 
7. Encourage departmental faculty to include actions in support of greater equity and inclusion as part of their annual assessments and promotion by contextualizing these efforts in their narratives within their promotion dossiers, as well as by providing annotated syllabi as evidence of fulfilling this goal in annual evaluations.  

We recognize that while the classroom should be a space where oppressive social structures are challenged, they often become spaces where they are reinforced. We affirm our commitment to creating an equitable learning environment where students can discern the ways that white supremacy and other forms of oppression shape the modern world and, in doing so, to combat those structures. We acknowledge the ways that both students and faculty bring forms of implicit bias into the classroom, and we recognize the particular burdens that are often placed on students of color in a predominantly white institution. 

We therefore make the following commitments for our individual classrooms and in our capacity as advisors: 

1. Regularly offer courses at all levels that fulfill the university’s diversity requirement, while also offering a wide variety of other courses that also address race, class, gender, sexuality, and disability. 
2. Reject efforts to sanitize historical narratives and ensure that we teach the full truth of our topics by acknowledging the role of racism and white supremacy, as well as sexism, homophobia, transphobia, antisemitism, Islamophobia, and ableism, in shaping local, national, and global history. We will ensure students receive a full history that contextualizes and acknowledges the ways in which historical figures, processes, and events perpetuated – and resisted – these forms of oppression. We will integrate the history of people of color and other marginalized groups throughout our courses and not rely on diversity courses to do the work for us. 
3. To train ourselves in inclusive and anti-racist pedagogies and classroom practices in order to ensure that we create spaces that enable all our students to thrive. 
4. Include diverse voices in our syllabi by committing to assigning material by or about people of color, as well as women, LGBTQI+ individuals, religious minorities, immigrants, the disabled, and other marginalized groups. Assessment of this goal will be based on an annotated syllabus during annual assessment, which should document progress toward this goal. We acknowledge that transforming course content takes time and must consider the particularities of the field and topic of the course. 
5. Practice equitable advising by ensuring that students are supported in pursuing whatever field they choose. While we hope to increase the numbers of students from marginalized groups majoring in history, we also recognize the unique challenges that face marginalized groups in pursuing a degree in any field. 
6. We recognize that an anti-racist pedagogy is not just about enlightening white people, but also about providing opportunities for students of color to also engage with their own relationship to histories of race and racism. 
7. We will not tokenize our students by asking that a single student teach other students through their personal experience. Therefore, we will not require any student to speak in the name of entire communities, nor will we ignore the ways that we and our students participate in sexist, homophobic, ableist, ageist, antisemitic, and Islamophobic systems as well. 
8. Acknowledging that even the best-intentioned instructors can be affected by implicit bias, we strongly encourage the use of rubrics in grading. While rubrics may take a variety of forms, they have been shown to increase equity in the classroom. 
9. We will critically reflect on feedback from students and not take personal offense when a student points out that we made a mistake. We encourage students to speak to their professors about their classroom and to the degree they are fulfilling these commitments. 

These commitments will be monitored and evaluated by a departmental equity and inclusion committee. One member of this committee will also serve on our assessment committee to ensure that equity and inclusion goals are being followed in our classes. In addition, we encourage students to hold us accountable and to call us out when we fail to uphold the standards we have set forth as scholars and as teachers.