Practical Toolkit for Supporting Belonging

• Consult with the Graduate School Assistant Dean for Access and Recruitment in the development of your strategic diversity outreach and recruitment plans, and engage in Consider Cornell: Explore & Experience programming.
• Engage in intentional recruitment activities with programs focused on facilitating access to graduate education.
• When faculty and graduate students are invited to speak at other schools, ask if they may also have the opportunity to meet with undergraduate and/or graduate students who engaged in graduate school prep and/or future faculty programs. Focus on making this not just a recruitment activity, but a “Power Mentoring” opportunity where students have the opportunity to engage in candid discussions with faculty on professional and personal development topics of interest. Contact the Graduate School Assistant Dean for Access and Recruitment for training and recruitment materials for such sessions.
• Regularly evaluate your admission practices to ensure you are applying mission-driven, holistic review strategies that remain in compliance within the context of current legal guidance. See the Mission-Driven Holistic Review Workshops & Resources for Graduate Admissions section of our Faculty Resources page. See also the AAAS & EducationCounsel Diversity and the Law Resources.
• Develop and utilize well-defined and mission-driven rubrics to evaluate applications. 
• Regularly examine your application and interview requirements – ensure you are clearly asking for what is most important to informing your selection process; and eliminate requirements for information not critical to informing selection.
• See also the Equity in Graduate Education Resources developed and provided by researchers with the Equity in Graduate Education Resource Center.

• Use written and spoken language to communicate communicate and expectation of belonging and support and zero tolerance for harassment, and discrimination within all learning, research, and community environments. For example, see sample statements provided by the Center for Teaching Innovation. 
• Provide access to resources providing strategies addressing needs and concerns that might be more specific to more at-risk members of your community. For example, Safe Fieldwork Strategies for At-Risk Individuals, a fieldwork guide developed by Cornell graduate scholars, Amelia-Juliette Demery and Monique Pipkin. See also the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences’ Fieldwork page for additional information on the issues that can arise in the field, such as harassment, bullying, and discrimination, and strategies to adopt to ensure safe, accessible, and inclusive fieldwork experiences for all students.
• Use written and spoken language to signal the intentional inclusion of students from across identity groups and lived experiences. For example, explicating stating and striving to adhere to your field or department’s community values. See the Community Values Statement for Cornell’s Department of Astronomy as one example.
• Make an effort to establish connections with students who identify with backgrounds historically underrepresented in academia such as first-generation college students (defined as neither parent having completed a bachelor’s degree). You can begin to do this by being welcoming, expressing interest in them as whole individuals, and recognizing their professional contributions to the field.
• Meaningful representation, not tokenism, matters. Consider how you are signaling aspects excellence and inclusion (or exclusion) by who you invite as speakers, whose work is included in your syllabi, whose voices are missing and why, and whose work or accomplishments are recognized by awards or publications, etc.

• Utilize the FAIM (Faculty Advancing Inclusive Mentoring) framework to inform your mentoring practices. 
• Identify and recognize your own culturally shaped beliefs, perceptions, and judgments.
• Develop both intrapersonal and interpersonal cultural awareness, and skills to recognize and respond to cultural diversity-related issues that may arise in your advising and mentoring relationships.
• Become aware of your own implicit biases and how to mitigate them.
• Regardless of a student’s background, do not make assumptions or generalizations about students based on any aspect of their personal identities or lived experiences.
• Avoid making assumptions about the lived experiences and personal identities of students by listening and learning from students about what they choose to share with you about their individual lived experiences and needs.
• Express interest in students as whole individuals, listening to what they choose to share about their experiences and asking about their specific interests, concerns, and goals. Use these insights to make informed suggestions on which opportunities and resources might best meet their academic and professional development interests and needs.
• Learn how to have meaningful conversations about identity and difference with graduate student advisees and mentees. For example, use the LARA method (Listen, Affirm, Respond, Add Information). LARA guides are available from the Cornell Center for Dialogue and Pluralism and Stanford SPARQtools.
• Become more familiar with the potential impact of social identity in challenging conversations, and learn how to engage productively across difference and conflicting perspectives.
• Help advisees and mentees identify resources within and beyond their graduate programs to support their development of a sense of belonging and community at Cornell within and beyond their graduate field. This is especially critical for students with identities that have historically been excluded from and underrepresented within the academy.
• Demystify the unwritten rules, language, expectations, and sociocultural norms of graduate education (especially within the context of your specific graduate field and discipline) through your field handbook, website, lab manuals, professional development seminars, and other means.
  • Example lab manuals:
    • Civic Laboratory for Environmental Action Research 
    • Paula Hammond Lab at MIT
    • Mike Boots at UC Berkeley
    • Lesley Chow Lab at Lehigh
  • Example faculty/student mutual expectations/mentoring agreements documents:
    • Faculty Advancing Inclusive Mentoring (FAIM) Mentoring Expectations Agreement Plan
    • University of Wisconsin Institute for Clinical and Translational Research – Mentoring Compact Examples
    • University of Michigan Rackham Graduate School – Sample Mentoring Agreement
• Make formal and informal professionalization and socialization activities more accessible to all advisees and mentees.
• For more resources and information, see the FAIM Practical Toolkit for Mentoring and FAIM Learning Opportunities. 

• Regardless of your discipline, find ways to address issues of racism, inequities, and access within your local graduate field or department at Cornell as well as in your discipline as a whole. 
• Examine your curriculum to identify whose voices and which communities have historically been excluded and why.
• Utilize the Center for Teaching Innovation consultation support for Curriculum Mapping, which offers a means of charting what happens at any given point throughout an academic program to confirm priorities and identify points of redundancy (such as duplicated instructional efforts), as well as address any potential gaps. 
• Ask students for their input on whose voices are missing and whose work they would like to see included in your curriculum.
• Examine any problematic attitudes and behaviors of scholars and/or alumni who are upheld by your field or for whom awards, honors, etc. are named. For example, see Nature’s “How Nature contributed to science’s discriminatory legacy: We want to acknowledge — and learn from — our history”.
• Examine whether established practices for qualifying (Q) and candidacy (A) exams are in need of refinement and whether expectations are transparently documented and communicated. Examine whether aspects of established practices associated with these exams threaten mental health and/or fail to substantively contribute to students’ development. 

• Create space and opportunities for supportive dialogue.
• Practice phrases such as “I don’t know what you’re going through, but I’ll always be willing to listen and support you in any way I can.”
• Approach discussions with humility and humanity; actively listen and seek opportunities to demonstrate empathy and compassion.
• Schedule a My Voice, My Story: Understanding the Untold Lived Experiences of Graduate and Professional Students session for focused audiences of faculty and staff, or graduate students and postdocs. My Voice, My Story sessions pair video monologues – constructed from experiences of Cornell graduate students – with facilitated discussions. The primary objectives of My Voice, My Story are to utilize the power of narrative to achieve greater understanding of the lived experiences of graduate and professional students, share stories that frequently go untold, and develop strategies on how to create more inclusive and supportive research and learning environments.
• Example Resources:
  • Protecting Student Mental Health in the Face of Antisemitism and Islamophobia
  • Communicating with Students about Racial Violence
  • Race and Racism Across Borders
  • How to Help Students Cope With Safety Threats
  • Religious Bullying: How to Get Help and Cope
  • How to Cope With Safety Threats in Your Community or the World
  • How to Cope With Traumatic Events
  • Resources for Leading Through Trauma and Crisis

• Learn to recognize, acknowledge, and address when an act of aggression occurs. Though such actions are often termed micro-aggressions, recognize that they are experienced as acts of aggression by those to whom they are directed.)
  • A Guide for Responding to Microaggressions
  • How to Respond to Microaggressions
  • Phrases for Responding to Microaggressions and Bias
• Have a plan in place of how you will respond if faculty, staff, postdocs, students, or invited speakers use language or demonstrate behaviors that are racist, sexist, homophobic, antisemitic, ableist, or otherwise discriminatory. This goes beyond reporting and includes how you will address aggressors, support individuals, and respond to your community.
• Become comfortable with having discussions about intent versus impact – due to the influence of racism, sexism, and oppressive systems and structures, well-intended words or actions can result in negative impacts.
• Cornell community members can access a number of guides from the Center for Dialogue and Pluralism to help prepare them to engage in and/or facilitate challenging conversations. 
• Utilize the R.A.V.E.N. Method for Responding to Microaggressions 
  • Redirect: (intervene) (correct) (pull aside)
  • Ask probing questions for clarity
    • I think I heard you say… what did you mean by that?
    • I want to make sure I understand what you were saying, were you saying that…?
  • Values clarification
    • You know, in this department we work hard to create a space that is safe and welcoming for all students
    • What you just said is not in alignment or consistent with our institutional values that prioritize equity and inclusion
  • Emphasize your own thoughts and feelings
    • When I hear your comment, I think/feel…
    • Many people might take that to mean…
    • In my experience…
  • Next steps for addressing microaggressions
    • Reflect and decide the next time you encounter this situation, what you might consider doing

• Create avenues for ongoing formal and informal learning opportunities for graduate students, postdocs, faculty, and staff for creating inclusive learning and research environments.
• Consider what levers you can use to influence faculty to engage in such opportunities. For example, embed such learning opportunities in activities in which all or most faculty participate such as faculty meetings, faculty retreats, department seminars.
• Incentivize and encourage faculty to engage in learning opportunities supportive of their ongoing development as mentors.
• Embed learning opportunities for graduate students into field structures such as orientation, first-year seminars, TA training, mentor training, etc.
• Signal to graduate students that their engagement in outreach and service activities are important to the field. Appreciate that engagement in such activities are often vital to the well-being and sense of belonging for students. 
• Utilize the Any Person, Many Stories: Histories of Exclusion and Inclusion at Cornell project as a resource. This project features stories in sketch, biography, podcast, interview, and video formats that can be used as learning resources for courses, workshops, and other meaningful purposes. The stories featured delve into powerful, sometimes painful histories, many of which are not broadly known. These stories also help to bring recognition to many of those who fought for a more inclusive Cornell and how their efforts are ever more critical to informing our ongoing and future efforts.

• Develop a committee, council, or work-group focused on advancing access and inclusive learning, research, and mentoring environments in your department or graduate field. 
• Set up the group so they have actual power and influence on policies, structures, and other activities of value and importance to the field or department.
• Develop a clear structure and term of commitment for service.
• Seek to mitigate power differentials between group members (esp. between faculty and students) and help ensure there is equity in whose ideas are heard & acted upon.
• Develop a public website where you communicate the mission of your department and your community values.
• Use data from the Doctoral Experience Survey and other sources to inform the ongoing assessment of your department. 
• Document areas of progress as well as opportunities for improvement. (Transparency is an asset for many reasons, including in the recruitment of prospective students, postdocs, faculty, and staff.)
• Make sure that work is not just the responsibility of a single committee. Rather ensure aspects of this work are considered critical to other department committees (curriculum, academic policies, facilities/space, search committees, admissions committees, etc.).
• Consider creating opportunities for students to participate in faculty search committees.
• Recognize the additional emotional labor frequently associated with this work. 
• Examine the recommendations being shared by various community stakeholders via formal and informal means and consider how any could inform short and long-term strategic action plans. Consider also how recommendations might inform how current actions need to be communicated more broadly and clearly.

• Be Reflective
• Create a Safe & Inclusive Learning Community
• Critically Examine Course Content
• Utilize Various Teaching Methods
• Be Prepared to Deal with Moments of Conflict
• Assess Classroom Climate

For more detailed guidance on inclusive teaching practices, visit the Center for Teaching Innovation (CTI) Getting Started with Inclusive Teaching Strategies and Inclusive Teaching pages. Cornell community members can also register for the CTI Teaching & Learning in the Diverse Classroom Online Course and educators outside of Cornell can register for the CTI Teaching & Learning in the Diverse Classroom MOOC.

Additional Resources

• For tips on teaching international and multilingual scholars, visit Global Learning’s tips page and the English Language Support Office Support for Faculty page.
• For guidance on supporting and teaching students with disabilities, visit the Students with Disabilities Faculty and Staff Resources page.
   

• Cornell Faculty Advancing Inclusive Mentoring (FAIM) Resource Center
• Cornell Graduate School. Faculty Guide for Advising Research Degree Students
• Cornell Graduate School. Resources for Faculty Supporting Graduate Student Diversity, Inclusion, and Mental Health
• Cornell Office for Faculty Development and Diversity. Resources for Understanding and Engaging in Conversations about Racism, Antisemitism and Islamophobia
• Cornell Center for Teaching Innovation. Inclusive Teaching
• Cornell Global Learning. Teaching International Scholars. Tips for Online Instruction
• Equity in Graduate Education Resource Center
• National Academies – The Science of Effective Mentoring in STEMM
• NCFDD Core Curriculum
• AAAS & EducationCounsel Diversity and the Law Resources
• PEN America – Campus Free Speech Guide