Rewriting the equity statement for the Learning Center was one of the biggest jobs I have ever done. It took two trimesters worth of work and research, plus brainstorming outside of class and many hours dedicated to writing the new statement. I started by gathering data from my fellow tutors and from tutees about definitions and what our commitments should be. I put all this data on posters in the Center for everyone to see while I worked on writing our statement. My goal was to create a statement that was one page long and had only three or four complete sentences.
I used several different existing statements to inspire my own, including guidance from the University of Notre Dame, a video of Zingerman’s DEI statement, and a blog post from Wiley Publishers. I used the notes that I had taken to write a rough draft, and then checked in with the leader of the Center to make sure everything was up to our standards and our values. I then presented the statement to the Center as a whole and let people find mistakes and critique the wording of the statement.
After revising the statement for clarity, I added links for feedback and a QR code so that the statement could be hung in the Learning Center. Finally, I took inspiration from the Zingerman’s video and created a video of some of the tutors and our leaders reading the statement. I wanted to make sure we could have both a physical and a digital copy of the statement, so I am super happy about the final result. You can view the final products here on the Learning Center website.
Skyline Learning Center 