10 Transforming Student Services

Learning Objectives

1. Reflect on your professional approaches to equity and inclusion to identify strengths and areas to improve.
2. Build on your service delivery approaches by adding promising practices and strategies to your professional toolkit.
3. Internalize equity-centred guiding principles to provide opportunities for all students to meet high expectations for learning.

Introduction

“Believe it or not, when I walked into this appointment, I was defeated and didn’t believe in myself. With your help, I started believing that I could achieve the things I wanted to achieve.”

“I walked into the room and saw people who looked like me and felt like I belonged.”

“The different options for accessing services on campus is refreshing. I don’t have to ask for what I need all of the time.”

Have you ever heard comments like this from students? These comments are reminders that our work as educators creates belonging, inspiration, and equity.

Equity-centred education means embracing student diversity in all forms — race, ethnicity, gender, disability, socioeconomic background, ideology, even personality traits like introversion — as an asset. It means designing and delivering services in ways that foster talent in all students, but especially those who come from groups traditionally underrepresented in higher education.^[1] These strategies pay off across the range of student services.

In the foundational modules you learned that both universal design for learning (UDL) and culturally responsive/relevant pedagogy and practices (CRP) focus on:

• Identification and removal of barriers
• High expectations for all learners
• Building and maintaining relationships
• Fostering the learning process
• Connections to the neuroscience of learning
• Building on strengths
• Attitudinal investment and shifts from educators

CRP and UDL work together to create equitable learning for all students. Both approaches include the use of students’ backgrounds and high expectations for learning. Both CRP and UDL are grounded in neurological science and when implemented, have a positive impact on student learning and wellness.

In addition to CRP and UDL the foundational modules introduced other essential equity-centred approaches and frameworks. This module will use a set of equity-centred guiding principles intended to build on previous modules to offer guidance as you reflect on and implement these approaches in your professional practice. The aim is to break down equity-centred practices into manageable themes and levels of practice.

The goal? Creating inclusive, equity-centred learning environments and prioritizing student learning.

Equity-Centred Example

Let’s start with a few inspiring examples of equity-centred student services.

Sarah may need to register for classes and receive advisement over email after putting her kids to sleep, but these expanded service hours mean that George can also interface with his advisor while he’s studying abroad in Japan, and Aparna can go to her professor’s office hours instead of waiting in line at student accounts to pay her fee.

Service providers are employing technology to allow students to complete transactions online at any hour, using chat as an additional channel for getting help, and increasing visibility and face time with students by offering pop-up service stations at the place and time of need. With the help of new technologies and networks that expand the possibilities of what can be done (as well as when and how), many campuses are already making progress creating more opportunities that are critical for the needs of the few, but beneficial for the student population as a whole.

The Sankofa Scholarships at Dalhousie University were created as an act of reparative justice to help address systemic barriers faced by students from these backgrounds, and, in particular, those from Black communities in the Caribbean, Canada and Nova Scotia.^[2]

Nova Scotia Community College (NSCC) and Women Unlimited offer a free, 14-week program that allows women to explore their interests in the trades or technologies.

Many institutions across Nova Scotia offer flexible admissions processes for non-traditional applications.

Mount Saint Vincent University (MSVU) offers an Masters of Education in Lifelong Learning with a focus on Africentric Leadership.

NSCC offers an Early Childhood Education Program grounded in a Mi’kmaw worldview.

Reflect

Can you think of an example of an equity-centred initiative, program, or practice on your campus or from your own work?

In these examples:

• How did student services staff support the process?
• What was the impact on students?
• What is your biggest take-away?

What are student services?

Any non-classroom / course-specific student touch point. What these touch points are called and how they are organized will look and feel different at every institution.

All these roles intersect, they may overlap or be in different departments depending on the institution. In general, they include:

• Services for equity groups
• Information and academic supports
• Campus / residence life and off campus
• Administration
• Wellness services
• Grad services
• Continuing education
• Childcare

Student learning happens outside of the classroom in all these services interactions. Service providers are educators and have an essential role to play in advancing equity-centred practices.

Services for Equity Groups

• Black Student Advising Centre
• Indigenous Advising Centre
• Elder-in-Residence
• Accessibility Services
• EAL Supports
• Cultural Centres / International Student Centres
• Transition Program
• Women’s Centres

Information & Academic Supports

• Library
• IT
• Tutoring
• Math help
• Writing Centre/ Note Taking
• Academic Advising

Campus Residence and Off Campus

• Residence Life
• Food Services
• Student Activities
• Athletics
• Religious Services
• Societies
• Student government / faculty advisors

Administration

• Registration
• Recruitment
• Financial Aid
• Admissions

Wellness Services

• Health Services
• Counselling Services
• Career Services

Transforming Student Services

Student Services Overview

The foundational modules introduced universal design for learning (UDL); culturally responsive pedagogy (CRP), and other essential equity-centred approaches and frameworks. This set of guiding principles is intended to build on previous modules to offer guidance as you reflect on and implement these approaches in your professional practice.

The goal? Creating inclusive, equity-centred learning environments and prioritizing student learning.  To begin, we invite you to first evaluate where you are, and make a plan for where you need to go. The aim is to break down equity-centred practices into manageable themes and levels of practice.

What are Equity-Centered Practices?

“Equity-minded teaching and learning practices, no matter the modality, call on us to look at systemic barriers to achieving educational equity in the learning environment…

Equity is about enacting intentional strategies to address disparities that affect students who are already disproportionately impacted.”

– Jill Provoe^[3]

Equity-centered practices in education consider, incorporate, and make the most of students’ cultures, learning strengths, and accessibility requirements. These strengths-focused approaches build a foundation for all students to achieve equality in educational and life outcomes. They also build our individual and community capacity to dismantle systemic oppression and create a future with equity for all.

Inclusive learning involves deliberately cultivating a learning environment where all students are treated equitably, have equal access to learning, and feel valued and supported in their learning. Such teaching attends to social identities and seeks to change the ways systemic inequities shape dynamics in teaching-learning spaces, affect individuals’ experiences of those spaces, and influence course and curriculum design.^[4]

Equity-Centred Guiding Principles

You are invited to use these interconnected equity-centred principles to guide your professional practice in student services. These inclusive educational principles are relevant to any learning setting, including one-on-one, group, remote, or hybrid settings.

The Equity-Centred Guiding Principles^[5][6][7][8] are not a prescription; they are an evolving set of ideas and practices, based on continuously emerging research and practice. The concepts and language in the principles will continue to evolve. You can mix and match practices to support specific learning goals, content areas, and contexts.

In the following sections of the module, we include examples of practices, aligned with the principles, relevant to inclusive learning in remote or hybrid settings.

Please Note:

When the term system racism is used in this module, it includes systemic, structural, institutional, environmental racism and oppression.

Equity-Centered Guiding Principles Checklist

These equity-centred practices are not intended as a checklist for ensuring your professional practice is equitable, accessible, and inclusive. Rather, they are designed to help faculty reflect on a range of inclusive teaching practices to reinforce practices already in use and identify new ones for exploration. Links to videos, podcasts, and articles are included under each principle to further your learning.

Here is a suggested way to engage with these lists:

Reflecting upon your teaching practice, do you or would you use any of the following strategies?

✓         I regularly use this or a similar strategy in my teaching

~       I sometimes use this in my teaching

X        I do not or would not use this in my teaching/this is not applicable in my setting

✩       I would like to try this, though I may need more information or resources

For ease of use beyond this module, all practices are compiled into a downloadable PDF in Learn More.  

We hope this reflection provides a useful basis for further exploration of equity-centred teaching practices, through conversation with colleagues, communities of practice or engaging in relevant scholarship.

Critically Engage Across Difference

Review Current Practice

We bring our experience and our expertise into our professional practice. We also bring our social identities. Our social identities include our social relationships, both on a micro (personal) and macro (social) level. For example, our personal identities are based on our experiences, or what makes us unique, while our social identities are based on our group affinities, such as age, gender, race, religion, abilities, sexual orientation, or socio-economic status. Some identities are visible, such as race and assumed gender, while others are invisible, such as abilities, socioeconomic status, and education level.^[9]

All our social identities intersect, change, and evolve over time.^[10]

Reflect

1. Reflect on your social identities. How do your social identities impact your decisions and the way you interact with the world?  Which parts

• are apparent or even invisible in your day-to-day life?
• are most critical to your personal sense of yourself?
• most affect how others perceive you (positively or negatively)?
• have the most effect on how you perceive others?
• face the most marginalization — or give you the most advantage — in your community?

2. What do you think your students would want you to know about their social identities and worldviews?
3. Have you considered the intersectional identities of your students and how that impacts learning?

Practices to Critically Engage Across Difference

Identify and Name Your Social Identities and Locations

• Persistently reflect on your social identities and locations in relation to systemic racism and oppression inside and outside your institution
• Acknowledge systemic inequities
• Identify your strengths and weaknesses

Be Anti-Racist, Anti-Ableist and Anti-Oppressive

• Learn about the trauma of systemic racism and oppression
• Support and validate students’ intersectional identities
• Reduce students’ social-emotional stress

Adopt An Intersectional Lens

• Recognize students as the subject matter experts in their own lives
• See students as individuals and acknowledge their intersecting identities and communities
• Honour a range of expression and communication

Examples of practices that align with this principle include:

• Effectively integrate strategies for communication and relationship building skills with students from equity groups
• Consider opportunities for respectfully integrating Indigenous perspectives and worldviews within the work of Student Services
• Consider opportunities to integrate anti-racist, anti-ableist, and anti-oppressive perspectives within your courses
• Understand microaggressions and how they might occur in both in-person and online environments; be ready to address them
• Effectively facilitate dialogue about issues of social justice, inclusion, power, privilege, and oppression in one’s practice
• Actively increase your interpretation of culture beyond race, language, etc.
• Be vulnerable by acknowledging your desire to grow and learn and admitting you are still learning
• Examine systemic issues within your institution and develop programs and services that address them
• Diversify team members so that more perspectives are considered when making policies or providing supports
• Critically reflect on your roles and responsibilities in removing systemic barriers to student success; don’t attribute disparities in outcomes exclusively to perceived deficits in students’ identities, life circumstances, or capabilities
• Provide a cohesive list of services so students from diverse abilities or backgrounds can gain relevant, inclusive, and equitable access to all services they require
• Engage in continued personal research to better understand student service expectations for different cultures and identities
• Be mindful of other identities racialized students bring and be in service of those as well; don’t make assumptions based on race
• Be transparent with your students — admit when you don’t know something, and acknowledge you will make mistakes but you’re willing, and working, to actively learn
• Provide opportunities to engage with racial and equity issues; give students tools to engage safely and productively
• Stay present in the dialogue; monitor it regularly and intervene when necessary
• Encourage students to design the solutions
• Offer information in various languages, including American Sign Language (ASL)
• Ask complex questions about other cultures/social identities, seek out and articulate answers to these questions that reflect multiple cultural perspectives

Watch

Emily Duffett: An introduction

Emily Duffett: Personal experiences of barriers to accessibility on campus

Jean-Blaise Samou: Institutional strategies for change

Kimberlé Crenshaw: What is Intersectionality?

Mount 101 Your Guide to the Mount

Read

Diversity Toolkit: A Guide to Discussing Identity, Power and Privilege by Suzanne Dvorak-Peck posted on the University of Southern California, School of Social Work website.

University of Alberta Creates Hub for Intersectional Gender Research posted May 24, 2019 on Universities Canada.

Innovative Designs for Accessibility (IDeA) Student Competition posted on Universities Canada. Universities Canada administers the IDeA student competition, a national program on behalf of Employment and Social Development Canada.

University of Toronto A-Z List of Links for Students. An example of a checklist of services.

Reflect

What other strategies do you use to acknowledge or affirm students’ different identities, strengths, or needs in your courses?  What else could you do?

Choose another question from this list that resonates for you:

• What is one tiny shift you can make today that would have the most significant impact on your students?
• Where do you feel this work is most urgently needed?
• What area or topic makes you feel the most uncomfortable and what will you do to tackle that?
• What has emerged for you that you can meaningfully act on today?
• Where do you feel most alive in this work?
• What’s your biggest take-away so far that affirms one of your own values?

Shift Attitudes and Mindsets

When staff members from every department are aware of the critical role they play in the educational experience of students and that with each interaction, offer of support, and demonstration, they are seen and heard and are integral to the way students see themselves.  In turn, when staff see the power in every position held, students can see the interconnectedness of the institution and that staff are all working toward one goal — student success.

Reflect

Review current practice

1. Do you recognize that changing attitudes are key to changing action?
2. Do you see students as co-learners?
3. Do you consider the life experiences of the students when offering services and consciously create a safer learning environment?
4. How do you offer multiple options for accessing services so that students may interact in a way that is compatible to their learning needs?

Practices to Shift Attitudes and Mindsets

Challenge Your Mindset

• Recognize that changing attitudes are key to changing actions
• Know equity-centred practices can help all students
• Integrate an inclusion mindset to foster innovation, performance, academic and personal success, opportunities, and well-being

Expand Your View of Students

• Reorient your view to students as co-learners
• Value students’ diversities as strengths and build on them
• Commit to identifying and removing barriers for — and challenging all — students

Embrace Intentionality

• Plan and design for predictable variability in students’ lived experiences, strengths, and needs
• Formulate proactive approaches, instead of reactive approaches
• Work to move responsibility for knowledge and healing from the individual to the community

Examples of practices that align with this principle include:

• Embrace learning and inclusive mindsets; accept vulnerability as without it, you miss key that service provision is a teaching and learning interaction: experience in both directions
• Hold high expectations for performance — for your students and for yourself
• Reject deficit perspectives about students’ intellectual capacities or fit for higher education; validation and positive messaging are critical
• Tell students, “you belong;” “you can do the work;” “you can succeed;” “you have the ability;” and “you are intelligent”
• Seek opportunities to expand your own knowledge and skills in helping students with specific concerns (e.g., bias, navigating systems of oppression) as well as interfacing with equity groups
• Be open to feedback on barriers
• Learn student’s names to create the feeling of more than a number
• Engage in continual relationship building
• Have an “open mic” session for students to ask general/informal questions
• Use external community supports (like the Youth Project) to do presentations /training for staff and students on gender identity
• Exhibit culturally inclusive active listening skills (e.g., appropriately establishing interpersonal contact, paraphrasing, perception checking, summarizing, questioning, encouraging, avoid interrupting, clarifying)
• Allow for creativity when assisting students who feel uncomfortable with current processes. When a student feels intimidated going to a formal meeting invite them to meet in the cafeteria over coffee and allow for pauses so students can formulate thoughts and have a chance to speak without feeling they are interrupting
• Establish rapport with students, groups, colleagues, and others that acknowledges differences in lived experiences
• Ensure all students feel welcome as an integral part of the institution
• Consistently update student information to ensure all populations are included in approaches
• Continue to learn about the roles of other departments to foster partnerships and create a holistic experience; visit other departments and meet the staff and find out who they are and what they do so you are able to refer students to a person that can help instead of a department name
• Demonstrate culturally inclusive advising, supporting, coaching, and counseling strategies
• Design or modify services and programs to support well-being and a positive organizational culture and ethic of care, considering students holistically

Learn more examples

Watch

Bradley Sheppard: Having an inclusive mindset

Danika Berghamer: Not knowing something is an opportunity to learn and grow

Emily Duffett: Be open to dialogue about barriers, and how to help

Bradley Sheppard: The power of learning students’ names

Read

CAST webinar slide deck on The Language of UDL: Shifting Mindsets presented by Melissa Sanjeh and Bill Wilmot. You can also listen to the audio recording of the presentation.

Language of Appeasement by Dafina-Lazarus Stewart posted March 30, 2017 on Inside Higher Ed.

Engineers Canada creates an inclusive environment for LGBTQ students posted October 15, 2018 on Universities Canada .

Universities across Canada make way for the “non-traditional” student posted October 15, 2018 on Universities Canada .

UDL and Growth Mindsets by Katie Novak, July 10, 2015 posted on Novak Education.

Reflect

What other strategies do you use to acknowledge or affirm students’ different identities, strengths, or needs in your courses?  What else could you do?

Choose another question from this list that resonates for you:

• What is one tiny shift you can make today that would have the most significant impact on your students?
• Where do you feel this work is most urgently needed?
• What area or topic makes you feel the most uncomfortable and what will you do to tackle that?
• What has emerged for you that you can meaningfully act on today?
• Where do you feel most alive in this work?
• What’s your biggest take-away so far that affirms one of your own values?

Design the Learning Environment

When students enter into spaces or relationships with support staff at the school, they should feel safe and empowered; it is critical that they can access the services they need through people who take the time to listen to their concerns, help them find answers, and do so with the least amount of stress possible.

Reflect

Review current practice

1. Is the learning environment welcoming and accessible to all individuals of differing skills and abilities?
2. Do you foster student voice and agency?
3. Are you open and engaging to all students and share a belief in their equitable treatment?
4. Do you welcome and inclusively navigate courageous conversations?
5. Do you connect content, assessment, and approaches/strategies to students’ lived experiences and cultures?

Practices to Design the Learning Environment

Be Culturally Relevant and Affirming

• Know your own cultural and social lens
• Learn about diverse cultures, lived experiences, and ways of knowing
• Connect content, assessment, and approaches/strategies to students’ lived experiences and cultures

Foster A Community of Learning

• Ground decisions in accessibility and equity
• Welcome courageous conversations
• Build a learning community that goes beyond the classroom and institution

Cultivate Safe(R)/Brave Learning Environments

• Create intellectually and socially safe(r) learning environments
• Foster student voice and agency
• Establish a culture of accountability with equal space for culturally relevant conversations

Examples of practices that align with this principle include:

• Recognize the importance of students’ physical, emotional, spiritual, and social well-being in learning, development, and success
• Demonstrate a willingness and capacity to generate, critically examine, and change policies and practices that privilege one group of students or educational stakeholders over another
• Communicate the learning orientation of student services/affairs to the campus community
• Understand that cultural contexts are intersectional; in addition to international students and BIPOC students, students with disabilities, Deaf, and 2SLGBTQI+ communities have their own rich, distinct, and beautiful cultures
• Acknowledge and leverage the cultural strengths and assets of your students
• Mirror diverse students in programming, physical spaces, course content, perspectives, and materials
• Honour the lives and backgrounds of the students you serve; this addresses students’ unique cultural experiences by enhancing their growth, learning, and success, and contributes to the learning of all students
• Select inclusive resources and texts that validate the experiences of all learners as much as possible
• Create a one-stop shop where students can access entrance points for all services
• Communicate clear up-to-date office hours and modes of contact available to all students
• Invite staff from other departments for regular brainstorming sessions to discuss services offered and ways of combining, supporting and streamlining delivery to utilize resources to their maximum
• Create bridging programs to post-secondary learning
• Collaborate across departments to ensure student success
• Ensure enrollment processes are clear with a step-by-step outline or checklist that gives potential students assurance in completing all necessary components
• Utilize Frequently Asked Question (FAQ) guides to answer commonly asked questions enabling students to easily access information
• Create and communicate protocols across all departments so students can easily and accurately find the services they require
• Create culturally appropriate and welcoming spaces, this includes spaces for students to congregate, Indigenous student centres that allow smudging, etc.
• Include student feedback to inform your practice
• Flexible services delivered in multiple formats to students (in person, online, hybrid)
• Perceive and analyze unspoken dynamics in a group setting

Learn more examples

Watch

Bradley Sheppard: Perspective taking – Asking yourself how you would feel in the same situation

Read

Lessons from a One-Stop Shop by Francisco Maldonado posted January 3, 2019 on Supporting Student Success.

Student-led McGill camp promotes diversity in health care professions posted on the McGill University Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences Outreach page.

Student Voice page on Inside Higher Ed. Student Voice is a news hub spotlighting the student perspective on higher education.

Reflect

What other strategies do you use to acknowledge or affirm students’ different identities, strengths, or needs in your courses?  What else could you do?

Choose another question from this list that resonates for you:

• What is one tiny shift you can make today that would have the most significant impact on your students?
• Where do you feel this work is most urgently needed?
• What area or topic makes you feel the most uncomfortable and what will you do to tackle that?
• What has emerged for you that you can meaningfully act on today?
• Where do you feel most alive in this work?
• What’s your biggest take-away so far that affirms one of your own values?

4.  Support the Learning Process

Developing a relationship with students requires an openly welcoming beginning with a continued acknowledgement of ongoing needs and a follow-through on promised actions. It is important that student services professionals take the opportunity to encourage trust and care for the entire student, not only the educational pursuit.  Offering services that provide an inviting and friendly atmosphere gives them courage and confidence to further seek services they need.

Reflect

Review current practice

• How do you centre equity, diversity, and inclusion in your practice?
• How do you ground relationships in humility, trust, respect, and care?
• What are your strategies for inclusive information processing, engagement, and assessment?
• How do you maximize choice in expression and assessment and encourage self-reflection?

Practices to Critically Engage Across Difference

Centre Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion

• Engage in personal and professional learning and development
• Apply a social justice/decolonizing/anti-racist/anti-ableist/anti-oppressive lens to programs and environments
• Commit to designing for diverse learners

Build Authentic Relationships and Rapport

• Ground relationships in humility, trust, respect, and care
• Support students’ ownership of their learning and have high expectations for all students
• Reach out to students often and engage positively

Strategize For Inclusive Information Processing, Engagement, and Assessment

• Maximize choice in expression and assessment and encourage self-reflection
• Connect your practice to the neuroscience of learning
• Advance digital equity, offer flexible delivery, and ensure access

Examples of practices that align with this principle include:

• Incorporate strategies for anti-racist, anti-ableist and decolonized education
• Facilitate student access to services by all departments being aware of what other departments do, reducing replication and allowing easier access; invite other departments to do a show and share of what their department does to ensure there is no overlap and combining best practices
• Create more student-centred services to streamline access. (e.g., MSVU students can book career counselling and accessibility appointments online)
• Facilitate educational interventions that are based upon research, trend data, and needs assessments of students
• Provide alternative models that explore student learning and development from an inclusive paradigm
• Humanize yourself by sharing your story
• Learn at least one thing about each student
• Share your pronouns with your students, if you’re comfortable, and invite your students to do the same. (Avoid the term preferred pronouns; pronouns are not a preference, but a statement of fact.)
• Online, invite students to create short videos about themselves as a way to start building meaningful relationships; in person, find safe ways for students to meet and get to know each other
• Convey unconditional positive regard; see your students as being fully capable of succeeding; approach them in non-judgmental ways
• Set up a peer mentoring process to guide new students
• Create a system of hand-off/follow-up that allows all students to be supported throughout the process of accessing services to address any potential misunderstandings of next steps; approach the hand-off as a learning event, teaching students about self-sufficiency
• Ensure students have a person to help them navigate systems (e.g., peer support programs, advising programs, lots of different models)
• Offer support in multiple ways that best meet the individual student’s need, including choice of phone calls, emails, one-on-on meetings, group meetings, text, social media, appointment, drop-ins, office, or coffee house meeting
• Ensure information is created in multiple formats
• Make your documents, presentations, and websites accessible (there are website accessibility guidelines)^[11]
• Make your online meetings more accessible (see the Nova Scotia Accessibility Directorate’s^[12] guide online for tips)
• Make videos accessible (e.g., use closed captions, have ASL interpreters, create transcriptions)

Learn more examples

Watch

Cynthia Bruce: Why it’s important to provide learning materials in multiple accessible formats

Read

Strategies for anti-racist and decolonized teaching by Anamika Twyman-Ghoshal and Danielle Carkin Lacorazza posted March 31, 2021 on Faculty Focus.
Why I Put Pronouns on my Email Signature (and LinkedIn profile) and You Should Too a blog post by Max Masure (they/them) posted August 10, 2018 on Medium.

Reflect

What other strategies do you use to acknowledge or affirm students’ different identities, strengths, or needs in your courses?  What else could you do?

Choose another question from this list that resonates for you:

• What is one tiny shift you can make today that would have the most significant impact on your students?
• Where do you feel this work is most urgently needed?
• What area or topic makes you feel the most uncomfortable and what will you do to tackle that?
• What has emerged for you that you can meaningfully act on today?
• Where do you feel most alive in this work?
• What’s your biggest take-away so far that affirms one of your own values?

Conclusion

Summary

Remember that becoming an equity-centered student service provider is a process that will happen over time and with conscious effort. You do not need to know and understand everything to do better and do more for your students.

“[P]eople will falter throughout their EDI work, whether they’re an EDI novice or expert, faltering is okay as long as you remain accountable and take the time to learn from those missteps. The primary goal is to keep your students safe and, therefore, taking ownership of your mistakes and continuing to learn and grow your equity practice is critical and will allow you to come back stronger than ever.”

– Jill Provoe^[13]

We hope the guiding principles and sample promising practices we’ve outlined here provide a roadmap to make sure your service environments reach all students. When we as student services professionals include more students in the learning, we empower them to achieve and show that we care about them and their sense of belonging.

Learn More

Download:

Transforming Student Services Practices [Add branding, authorship, creation date and CC license to file download]

Read:

Review the CACUSS website. The Canadian Association of College & University Student Services (CACUS) is a comprehensive organization consisting of networks and Communities of Practice representing many topical and functional areas of Student Affairs and Services.

Review the NACADA website. NACADA promotes and supports quality academic advising in institutions of higher education to enhance the educational development of students.

Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion-Minded Practices in Virtual Learning Environments by Jill Provoe, Executive Director, Human Rights, Equity and Inclusion, Nova Scotia Community College.

Diversity Toolkit: A Guide to Discussing Identity, Power and Privilege by Suzanne Dvorak-Peck posted on the University of Southern California, School of Social Work website.

Pulling Together: A Guide for Teachers and Instructors. 1 of  12 books in the Pulling Together series — guides for Indigenization of post-secondary institutions. A professional learning series shared as free open textbook published by BCcampus.

Do:

Nova Scotia Human Rights Commission — Free online courses

Healthy Minds Nova Scotia — student support services available under the HealthyMindNS program.

Indigenous Canada. A Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) from the University of Alberta Faculty of Native Studies that explores Indigenous histories and contemporary issues in Canada.

Aboriginal Worldviews and Education. Offered on Coursera by the University of Toronto.

Attribution

Equity-Centred Guiding Principles Checklist paragraphs adapted from University of Michigan Center for Research on Learning and Teaching (CRLT). (2021). Reflecting on Your Practice: Applying Inclusive Teaching Principles.

Resources Consulted

Bracken, S. & Novak, K. (2019). Transforming higher education through universal design for learning: An international perspective. Routledge.

Hammond, Z. (2015). Ready for rigor framework. In Culturally responsive teaching and the brain: Promoting authentic engagement and rigor among culturally and linguistically diverse students. Corwin Publishing.

Harris, F. & Wood, J.L. (2020, March 27). Employing equity-minded and culturally-affirming teaching and learning practices in virtual learning communities [Video]. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMrf_MC5COk

Provoe, J. (2019) Equity, diversity and inclusion-minded practices in virtual learning communities. Nova Scotia Community College. https://www.nscc.ca/docs/about-nscc/applied-research/equity-report-english.pdf