Kansas State University

Highlighting KSUnite topic sessions: Part 1

Submitted by KSUnite Planning Team

As part of the KSUnite movement, breakout sessions will occur as part of the event. These sessions will provide an opportunity for attendees to select topics they would like to engage with. As part one of a deeper look at the sessions, the topics of access and student success, accessibility, immigration, inclusivity, intercultural Leadership, and intersectionality are detailed below.

KSUnite will take place from 12:30-3:30 p.m. Nov. 6.All classes have been canceled to ensure the campus community may participate.  

Access and student access:

• "Essentials for Diversity Programming and Recruitment Success." This session will explore the academic hurdles involved with recruiting and retaining multicultural students. This session will also share direct examples of successes; present analyzed data of trainings to support success; and share best practices in recruitment and retention. The intended audience for this session includes faculty, staff, and students.  

Accessibility:

• "How Can I Help You? Improving Awareness and Maintaining an Inclusive Community for People with Disabilities."
• "Unite to Promote Digital Accessibility as We Move Forward Together."

These sessions will promote simple acts of kindness and increase participants’ awareness of the resources available on campus. These will be interactive and engaging presentations to help leaders to become aware of ways to improve accessibility for people with disabilities in our community. Participants will be invited to think about ways they can help individuals or ask questions about access on our campus. These sessions will also provide an overview of services available to all people with disabilities on our campus. Target audience: Employees and students who identify themselves as a leader or advocate, i.e. supervisors, committee chairs, mentors, student leaders. 

Immigration:

• "Student Stories: Opportunities and Challenges of U.S. Immigration."

The first part of this session, will provide a brief overview of our immigration system and brief introduction to immigration statuses of our student body (undocumented, DACA-mented, refugees, asylum-seekers). Student panelists will share their experiences (and those of their family) and effect on their college experience.

For second part of this session, our panelists and professionals in the areas of student counseling, international migration patterns and immigration law will reinforce our understanding of the current climate. We will discuss opportunities for engagement, collaborations and ways to continue the mobilization on our campus and community in support of these students. Including resources available to undocumented and DACA-mented students via K-State’s DreamZone efforts. 

Inclusivity:

• "Collegiality and Inclusivity: Tips for and Practice Being an Ally." In this interactive workshop, we work through two common interactional scenarios that disadvantage historically marginalized groups. We examine one strategy for being an ally in these settings and practice doing so. We also explore strategies for improving our own responses when it is pointed out to us that we behave in ways that exclude.

• "Intentionally Inclusive Innovation." This session will focus on the newly renovated Hale Library and highlight the Sunderland Foundation Innovation Lab providing access to 21st century technology many of us have neither seen nor used — technology that advances the way we think and encourages the way we learn and explore. K-Staters familiar with emerging technology and curious about it will feel at home in this space. Most importantly, K-Staters from a low-tech home, school, or community and those from academic departments traditionally underserved by technology (e.g. non-STEM) will be welcome and experience a sense of belonging in the Lab. 

Intercultural leadership:

• "Increasing Our Intercultural Competency: Practical, Personal Steps for Becoming More Inclusive." This presentation is geared towards anyone who would like to learn how they can set goals and make progress in becoming more interculturally competent. Through reflective exercises, participants will identify a culture or identity group they want to learn more about. Then, we will set goals and share ideas for how we each can make progress in our learning. The cohort will have the opportunity to stay in contact to hold each other accountable for the goal we have individually set and to learn from each other in the process of reflection, contemplation, and vulnerability.  

• "Leading Across Difference." The key to fostering inclusive communities is the development of interculturally competent leaders who move organizations forward in ways that validate cultural differences and commonalities. Grounded in the theoretical frameworks of Transformative Intercultural Learning, Leadership Identity Development, and Strengths-based Leadership, this 45-minute workshop explores how leadership styles and approaches are impacted in varying cultural settings. This workshop is largely experiential in nature and will connect these theoretical frameworks in order to provide a foundational understanding of intercultural leadership development. Participants in this session will engage in a presentation, interactive intercultural leadership activities, and facilitated discussion. Beginning with small-group dialogue on the complexity of identity, participants will explore how culture impacts how we navigate our experiences. This forum will aid us in moving forward effectively as we engage in the challenging task of experiencing unity in diversity. This session is suitable for faculty, staff, and students.

Intersectionality:

• "Challenging Gender Expectations: Understanding the Intersections of Gender, Race, Sexuality, Ability and Colonialism at K-State." What resources should we adopt and develop to create such an inclusive learning environment with technology? If the phrases emerging technology and digital literacy are foreign to you, please join members of the Innovation Lab planning team to learn and contribute to creating this space for all of us in the K-State Community. 

• "Poetry is Not a Luxury: Authors as Activists, Writing as Resistance." In 1985 legendary African American activist-feminist-lesbian-poet Audre Lorde persuasively argued that "poetry is not a luxury." This presentation explains why that is in a series of lightning talks that introduce the long, deeply intersecting history of literature, language, and activism. The presentation includes a brief introduction (five mins) and a series of five, five-minute lightning talks (25 mins total) on authors like Lorde, Chicana activist/theorist Gloria Anzaldúa, Mohawk writer-organizer Beth Brant, Indian activist-author Arundhati Roy, and gay rights activist-comics creator Allison Bechdel. The lightning talks will be followed by five-minute audience pair-and-share on the presentations and concluded with a final open discussion OR an audience poetry-writing session (their vote) on the intersections of literature, language, and social justice.

Be sure to continue to watch for KSUnite updates, including part two of the look at breakout session topics that includes: Race, religion, sexual violence, social justice, and tough conversations. 

For more information regarding KSUnite, including detailed schedule, speaker biographies and FAQs, visit ksu.edu/KSUnite.