Design AEAE Committee

Members include faculty and students.

The Department of Design actions:

• A scholarship fund to increase BIPOC enrollment
• Create a teaching mentorship for BIPOC undergrad students with the intent to increase diversity among faculty in higher education.
• Create a workshop focusing on graduate school opportunities, experiences, enrollment process.
• Create an AEAE-focused database and resource list for students.
• Create open workshops & gatherings (as cultural events) for all department of design faculty, alumni, and students to discuss solutions to improve AEAE in the department and the larger design discipline
• Expand curriculum in the History of Design and Illustration to include BIPOC creatives more fully
• Expand curriculum in History of Interior Design to include BIPOC creatives more fully

Fine Arts AEAE Committee

Members include faculty and students.

• Visiting Artist and Scholar Committee along with the Fine Arts faculty put their energy into existing partnerships and forming new ones to bring in artists and scholars from diverse communities, so as to better represent our student body.
• Town halls are held: focused on listening to students' concerns regarding diversity, equity, and inclusion so as to form the basis of the Fine Arts AEAE committee mission and to create action items for the department to fulfill our goal to create a culture of inclusion in our courses and department. 
• Action items include:
  1. Conduct workshops for faculty members to reflect on inclusive teaching practices and address microagressions that may occur inside and outside the classroom
  2. Facilitate workshop for faculty members to establish strategies and procedures to use in the classroom when getting to know our students' preferred pronouns and names.
  3. Department chair works with Admissions to ensure we are recruiting from schools with diverse communities.
  4. Department chair will work on designating some scholarship funds specifically for minority students.
  5. Faculty will continue to build partnerships to bring artists and scholars from diverse communities so as to better represent our student body.
  6. Department chair will follow up with the Student Affairs to voice concerns from our veteran students. The Fine Arts department will act as a liasion in future difficult situations for our veteran students.

Music AEAE Committee

Members include faculty and students.

• The committee discussed what could be done to make the music cirriculum more inclusive. Creating a stand-alone World Music course or a third music history class that would come from an ethnomusicology focus was mentioned. Within the confines of a very tight curriculum schedule as mandated by the National Association of Schools of Music (NASM) it was discussed embedding more world music course material into the current curriculum would be more feasible.
• In terms of repertory, the committee encourages instructors to compile lists of examples that are more inclusive into a shared list. 
• Instructors encourage students to seek out diverse works which represent a wide variety of races, cultures, and genders. 

Theatre and Dance AEAE Committee

All faculty members and students in the Department of Theatre and Dance will serve as a committee-of-the-whole focused on building, promoting, and continually re-evaluating Arts Engagement, Advocacy, and Empowerment in all our programs. We embrace the design and implementation of curriculum and the creation of production opportunities that celebrate diverse experiences across sex/gender, disability, race, sexuality, region, class/caste, religious belief/faith, generation, and ethnicity/nation. We work to develop and activate policies that remove barriers, promote fairness, and provide equitable access for all students, faculty, and staff. Finally, our department is committed to the recruitment, full inclusion, and retention of faculty, staff, students, and visiting artists from all socio-cultural backgrounds, without the expectation or assumption of representation.

Actions taken:

Gender/Sex:

• Removed gender specific language from dress policies for dance technique courses
• Opened up Rockettes to cis and trans-male students
• Revised casting requirement for productions with more inclusive language
• Produced the department’s first fully trans-gender show, Jon Jory’s Boy Meets Girl, directed by a student

Class/Caste & Ethnicity:

• Offering more upper-level courses in Jazz and Tap to balance traditional genres like Ballet and Modern
• Added financial need to considerations for the Producers Circle Scholarships
• Moved away from expensive, printed anthologies to digital editions through Dacus
• Produced Lydia Diamond’s Stick Fly about upper-class and working-class African Americans, with guest director Quentin Talley ‘03

Race & Ethnicity/Nation:

• Made THRT 442, African American Theatre, a writing-intensive course, so students can substitute this course for THRT 386, Theatre History and Literature II
• Produced Lynn Nottage’s By The Way Meet Vera Stark about race and Hollywood, with guest director Corlis Hayes

Religion/Faith:

• Produced Brandon Jacobs Jenkins’ Everybody, a modern adaptation of a medieval morality play, directed by a student