Creating Common Language To Share Common Experiences

Staff at Texas A&M’s Memorial Student Center has created a team called DEIA (diversity, equity, inclusion and access) to promote an inclusive university culture through discussion and education.

“The team’s goal was to provide cultural competency training and a common language while building on the great resources already available to the campus community,” said Cory Arcak, MSC DEIA team co-chair. “We started with the glossary of terms provided by the Office of Diversity to tackle our current climate and prepare our staff and students to fully embrace and enhance our unique student-staff partnership.”

From the glossary, the MSC DEIA team chose to focus the training on 41 terms. These terms were divided into the categories of basic definitions, belief/belief systems, external power structures and identity.

“These categories were developed with input from Gabriella Webster, the former student executive vice president of diversity, and DEIA team member, Jaclyn Carpenter,” said Melany Pearl, MSC DEIA co-chair. “This was beneficial to not only produce a stellar product, but to also actualize our philosophy of our student-staff partnership.”

During the summer months, the MSC DEIA team facilitated a 10-week training by sending weekly emails, featuring one term from each section. Each term was defined, with each email containing links to additional resources such as journal articles, TED talks and other online resources. Then, during each weekly MSC staff meeting, a member of the MSC DEIA team would share experiences and discuss the four terms featured in the email. The team’s hope was to connect terms to current events and encourage and engage staff members to simply ask questions.

“The weekly common language training emails sent to all MSC staff were very educational in helping our staff be better prepared to have difficult, but necessary conversations,” said Luke Altendorf, director of the MSC. “The 10-week training period provided an opportunity for enriching and courageous dialogue where staff members were able to discuss personal impact or merely strive for better understanding of the 41 chosen terms. We look forward to the training module being developed as this initiative has provided a truly open and honest space to further implement this and other DEIA practices into our experiential learning opportunities.”

The common language training will culminate in a TrainTraq module available to all MSC staff. Members of the MSC DEIA team included Cory Arcak, Melany Pearl, Jaclyn Carpenter, Ben Griffith and Jamie Arrexi.