What is CREATE?

CREATE (Conversation-Rich Education for Anti-Racist Teaching/Learning Environments) is a collaborative Diversity and Inclusion Grant awarded by the Associated Colleges of the South (ACS).

Catalyzed in part by our ongoing work to create equity and inclusion at our respective institutions, and further energized by recent racially-charged events nationwide, a group of five colleges in the ACS consortium (Birmingham Southern, Furman, Rhodes, Rollins, and Sewanee) have secured funding to create a series of cultural-competency infused learning opportunities for faculty and staff at our institutions. The goals of the CREATE (Conversation-Rich Education for Anti-Racist Teaching/Learning Environments) program are to:

  • Increase our awareness of key issues and theories related to equity and inclusion: institutional racism in higher education; cultivating the ability to recognize and respond to microaggressions and implicit bias; recognizing our position in antiracist work.
  • Expand our ability to identify inclusion gaps in our campus communities.

Over the next few months we will invite “train the trainer” experts to teach campus facilitator teams at each of our institutions using the following modules as a map:

Module 1: Grounding In:  Developing Anti-Racist Facilitation
Module 2: Structural Racism in the Higher Ed Context
Module 3: Implicit Bias and Its Department-Level Expression
Module 4: Microaggressions: Recognizing and Responding
Module 5: Creating Anti-Racist Environments

We anticipate campus facilitators will invest approximately 12-15 hours preparing for and participating in workshops to learn content (October-November).

Campus facilitators (3-4 per campus) would be eligible for a stipend or professional development funds for each module they facilitate in Spring 2021. All workshops will be facilitated via Zoom.

Grant Abstract

As small liberal arts institutions in the southeastern United States, we face particular challenges during this moment of civil unrest and sustained focus on racial inequity across the country. Racial inequity manifests on several different levels: the macro level (institutional racism perpetuated by state-sanctioned violence and higher education’s complicity in it); the meso level (in implicitly biased media representations that perpetuate stereotypes as well as statues or campus buildings named to honor Confederate heroes); and the individual level (via microaggressions and bias). CREATE proposes a train-the trainer set of workshops for campus facilitation teams. The outcome of the train-the-trainer workshops is for campus facilitation teams to develop a campus-specific curriculum to address racial inequity with specific, actionable steps to recognize structural racism and implicit bias and to disrupt the cycle of exclusion entrenched on our campuses. These will comprise a series of interventions including but not limited to: dialogues, workshops, departmental meeting modules, and other formats specified according to campus and audience need.

Furman Board Of Trustees Approves Recommendations To Rename Hall, Honor First African-American Student | Greenville Business Magazine

Photo: Joseph Vaughn was the first African-American to enroll at Furman.