Embedding diversity, equity, and inclusion principles into professional development activities

Recommendation

How to do this

Create a DEI statement.

Create and publish an organizational DEI statement that speaks to your organization’s commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion.

• Define what DEI means to your organization and how it relates to your organizational values. 
• Identify DEI gaps within your organization; develop a plan that demonstrates commitment to your employees and consumers.

External resources: 

• A Model for Crafting Diversity, Inclusion, Respect, and Equity (DIRE) Policy Statements Towards Catalyzing Organizational Change

Support a health equity lens.

Increase instructors' capacity to discuss and address equity-related issues through awareness of their own identities, social position, bias, privilege, and power (Agic et al., 2022). 

• Provide ongoing personal bias training, cultural empathy training, and structural competency training for all staff, including external instructors.
• Provide multimodal resources to increase an instructor’s understanding of values, norms, beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors associated with different groups. 
• Hold peers and leadership accountable for ongoing dissemination of knowledge about diverse client groups.
• Help instructors understand they are in a position of power while delivering educational content, and its effect on a leaner's comfort level in sharing perspectives.

Recommendation

How to do this

Include community perspectives.

Gather and include the perspective of diverse groups during planning and developing. Incorporate a variety of embodied knowledge, experiences, and perspectives from the communities impacted to ensure educational content speaks to the person, community, systemic barriers, and occupational injustices (Alozie et al., 2021).

• Conduct participatory research, surveys, informal listening sessions, and/or focus groups as methods to have clients, community organizations, advocates, and other subject matter experts contribute to sourcing of knowledge. 
• Provide a platform for practitioners and clients to contribute their lived experiences and misconceptions and/or barriers they have witnessed in the past. 
• Invite community members, representing varying social identities, to vet content (e.g., resources/handouts, PowerPoints) on an ongoing basis. 

Create an inclusive learning experience. 

Maintain focus on creating an inclusive learning experience. Ensure use of inclusive and respectful language, be aware of learner diversity, and eliminate stereotypes in educational content and materials. 

• Ensure images reflect diversity and do not reinforce stereotypes. 
• Conduct screenings, by multiple people of diverse backgrounds or those with subject matter expertise, to broaden DEI lexicon and to ensure an activity's images are representative. 
• Use frameworks that were designed to help educators develop educational content through a health equity lens, create an inclusive environment, and consider diverse perspectives. 

External resources:

• Health Equity and Inclusion Framework for Education and Training
  
• NERCHE Self-Assessment Rubric for the Institutionalization of DEI in Higher Education

Integrate social determinants of health (SDOH). 

Acknowledge impacts of social determinants of health and discuss mitigating factors. Expand comprehension of specific population needs and the intersections with systemic oppressions.
Ground professional development activities in social context (e.g., cultures, histories, community needs, current events, sociocultural sources, occupational injustices, systemic barriers) to promote social accountability (Noone, 2022).

• Incorporate learning activities (e.g., vignettes, questions, role-playing scenarios) related to social determinants of health. 
• Educate learners on the health disparities in the communities they are serving.
• Provide education related to structural barriers (e.g., policy) and their influences on community health. 
• Include content on mitigating factors to improve patient outcomes (e.g., public policy that promotes social justice, connecting to community resources).

External resources:

• Structural competency: Theorizing a new medical engagement with stigma and inequality  

Recommendation

How to do this

Encourage self-awareness. 

Incorporate teaching strategies that facilitate cultural self-awareness. Facilitate learner self-reflection on thoughts about themselves, their identities, biases, and broader societal context that influences their perspective during clinical decision-making.

• Include reflection time that promotes self-awareness about personal bias and cultural empathy.
• Use case studies to facilitate clinical reasoning related to barriers to DEI.
• Include discussions about how a practitioner's relevant characteristics and group memberships (e.g., mental or physical ability, age, gender, gender identity, national origin, race and/or ethnicity, sexual orientation) may influence their clinical decision-making. 
• Include a reflection question related to DEI or health equity in a PD activity’s learning outcome assessments.
• Devote curriculum time to guiding students to explore diverse perspectives.

External resource: 

• Constructing Critical Conversations: A Model for Facilitating Classroom Dialogue for Critical Learning

Cultivate an inclusive environment.

Foster inclusivity through delivery of educational content. 
Create an inclusive learning environment that includes varying perspectives and invites participation for better understanding of others’ viewpoints.

• Establish ground rules at the beginning of a PD activity to cultivate a space that welcomes all perspectives.
• Begin PD activities by sharing an intersectionality statement. An intersectionality statement acknowledges the relationship between social identities (e.g., sexual orientation, race, gender) and systems of oppression. The purpose of an intersectionality statement is to recognize factors that shape one’s perspective. 
• Welcome active learner participation through sharing of meaningful experiences.
• Use language that is respectful, nondiscriminatory, and free of stereotypes in delivery.

External resources: 

• Positionality and Intersectionality
  
• Inclusive Language Guidelines

Recommendation

How to do this

Seek feedback.

Implement a method for seeking feedback (e.g., post-evaluation) inquiring about how well the PD activity and instructors addressed DEI. Add questions related to DEI to post-evaluations.

Address questions such as:

• How well did the PD activity consider diverse perspectives?
  
• How well did the PD activity represent the client/practitioner population in images and statistics?
  
• How well did the PD activity support health equity?
  
• What changes could be made to make the activity more equitable and inclusive?