Fall 2007 - course #3
Instructor: Randy McCrillis
CLOSED

Course Overview:
Despite the widespread recognition of the value of diversity in higher education, a need still exists for staff to advance their Multicultural Competence (e.g., awareness, knowledge, and skills) as a way to develop meaningful relationships with individuals from diverse backgrounds. Offering a variety of workshops and training sessions is a common approach to teaching multicultural competence, yet this approach does not infuse the practice of multicultural competence into one's daily work. Once a division makes a commitment to value diversity, it is often difficult to create a coherent framework from which to develop, implement and assess diversity initiatives.

This six session course should particularly benefit those who are responsible for diversity training, strategic implementation of diversity goals, and those who are looking for ways to further the Multicultural Competence of staff members using a comprehensive framework.

In this course students will:

• Be introduced to new diversity tools.
• Learn about the Multicultural Competency framework for understanding difference,
• Understand new way to systematically develop, implement and assess diversity initiatives from a comprehensive framework of Multicultural Competency.
• Learn to use the new diversity tools.
• Create individualized diversity strategies.
• Tailor the tool and strategies to reflect the uniqueness of their respective institutions.

Course Outline:

• Week 1: Introductions and Building Coalitions Designing a diversity commitment statement
  
  
• Week 2: Understand the multicultural competence matrix
  Working with the diversity tools
  
• Week 3: Implementation Strategies
  Course Summary and Evaluation

Learning Outcomes:
Upon completion of this course, active participants will gain:

• How to identify key members for an empowered diversity committee.
• To develop and market a diversity commitment statement.
• Ways to actualize multicultural competence into everyday practice.
• How to use a multicultural competence model to create diversity training and education.
• Specific tools used for implementing individual and divisional diversity strategies.
• How to develop strategies for assessing a multicultural competence model.

Participant Expectations:
Participants should plan to spend approximately 1 1/2 to 2 hours per week in this course. This will include time to read materials, complete on-line exercises and surveys and participate in asynchronous on-line discussions. Participants will need to log on for course content that will be posted on the site. In addition participants will need to answer questions posted on the discussion board each week. As the discussion board is asynchronous, students may check in and post at their convenience. This learning tool will be an important part of participants learning experience.

Instructor Bio:
Randy McCrillis serves as the Assistant Director for the Office of Student Diversity Programs and Services at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. At UNLV he is currently the co-chair of the Diversity Training Facilitators Committee which is responsible for conducting all the diversity training for the Division of Student Life. He was previously at Colorado State University where he served as the Director of the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Student Services and was on the faculty in the Student Affairs in Higher Education Graduate Program where hic area of academic interest was Organizational Behavior.

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