Equity, Diversity, and Inclusivity (EDI)

Written by Dave Smulders, Program Manager, Faculty Development

Welcome to our Learning Hub issue on Equity, Diversity, and Inclusivity (EDI). The idea for this issue was hatched a few months ago. At the Centre for Teaching, Learning, and Innovation (CTLI), we decided this was a topic worth exploring. EDI has been getting much more attention these days in workplaces and post secondary institutions. We noticed that the conferences we keep our eye on began to include more directive guidelines on accessibility and more encouragement of inclusive practices. And very recently, while working on another initiative, we discovered the rich resources created by the Educational Developers’ Caucus on EDI to help inform those working in post secondary contexts. Even our own strategic plan of the Justice Institute of BC has included Indigenization and EDI as two of its primary commitments for the next five years. Clearly something is going on…

Our own journey with questions and issues around EDI began with the efforts of Caroline White, a CTLI friend and colleague formerly in the Centre for Counselling and Community Safety at JIBC. Anyone who knows Caroline is familiar with her passion and commitment to EDI and knows that she can be hard to resist when she is on a roll. Caroline contacted CTLI last spring to try to get a bigger conversation started about EDI at the JIBC. She enlisted a couple of us (Dave and Helen) to talk to JIBC staff and faculty through School Curriculum Committees to find out what we were doing across the institute and who was involved, interested, knowledgeable, curious. There was an urgency to her pitch. EDI was something that had been around in bits and pieces for many years, but something was coalescing. A new kind of immediacy and importance, and as educators, we needed to pay attention. 

EDI comes in many forms and diversity itself is represented by the perspectives on what EDI can mean to people. For some, EDI is about reducing barriers, making education accessible in multiple formats, affording anyone the opportunity to learn. For others, EDI is practised through anti-racism and culturally responsive teaching, celebrating our differences while acknowledging that we all carry with us our own biases and blindspots and even when we want to be part of the solution we sometimes apply our ingrained assumptions instead of working to find new ways of knowing and learning. Ultimately, we see EDI as helping to widen our perspectives on who we are as learners and educators, whether that is through the lens of gender, culture, ethnicity, accessibility, sexual orientation, or any other perspective that can contribute to more inclusive educational practices.