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Jan 17

AGEP Postdoc Afi Rawlings and Dr. Nils Walter

Faculty Allies for Diversity in Graduate Education

Although the Rackham Graduate School at the University of Michigan encourages diversity from “the center,” students’ experiences are grounded in their particular program, making it important for each program to address its own diversity issues. The precise nature of the diversity challenges varies by program, as does the nature of the best solutions. For that reason, the Graduate School sought to identify Faculty Allies within the programs. Our hope was that in this way we could support and encourage “local” efforts to recruit and retain diverse students.

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Jan 3

Michigan State University

MSU/AGEP Learning Community

For the last three years, the Michigan State AGEP Learning Community has gathered on the first Thursday evening of each month. This tradition began when three faculty members and three graduate students started meeting informally to discuss a wide range of topics related to graduate education, inclusiveness, and the preparation of future faculty in the STEM and SBES disciplines. Now these monthly community meetings regularly attract more than 40 graduate students and faculty members from several departments on campus. A student steering committee keeps the content of the meetings relevant and the structure flexible to serve the needs of the participants. The meetings are open to all members of our institution who share the goals of the AGEP initiative, namely the development of a professoriate that reflects the demographic profile of our nation.

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Dec 20

Michigan State University

Setting Expectations and Managing Conflict between Graduate Students and Faculty

The Graduate School at Michigan State University developed a workshop in the 1990s to train graduate students and faculty members on how to use an interest-based approach to set expectations jointly and manage conflicts germane to faculty-student interactions. Since 1996, these workshops have been offered regularly at MSU, and upon request by a variety of other institutions and national conferences. As a contribution to the Michigan AGEP Alliance, MSU opens this workshop to graduate students and faculty members from the four Alliance institutions and features the workshop at the multi-university Alliance conferences. A “train-the-trainer” variation of the program is also available, and plans are under discussion for offering it to faculty members and administrators from the other three institutions, and for using technology for wider dissemination of the program.

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