AAC&U News | December 2005

Wheaton College Builds "Inclusive Excellence" through Curricular Infusion

When faculty at Wheaton College in Massachusetts approved the school's new curriculum in 2001, they resolved to teach about "race/ethnicity and its intersections with gender, class, sexuality, religion, and technology in the United States and globally." Rather than creating a new general education requirement to achieve this, however, the faculty decided to infuse diversity education throughout the curriculum. Diversity was to be taught in every department and every major; the faculty as a whole would be responsible for teaching diversity.

Wheaton's curricular infusion--part of an "inclusive excellence" program aimed at transforming the institution's culture--reflects a broadening consensus about the educational benefits of diversity. As recent briefing papers commissioned for AAC&U's Making Excellence Inclusive initiative have argued, all students can benefit from learning about diverse perspectives and from learning in diverse environments. In addition to producing cognitive gains, diversity initiatives such as Wheaton's help prepare students to become engaged citizens in a diverse world.

A New Curriculum

The curricular infusion is not the first step Wheaton College has taken toward incorporating diversity into the curriculum. In the 1980s, a different initiative focused on teaching gender issues across the curriculum--an approach that often overlapped with consideration of racial and ethnic diversity. Later, in the 1990s, a faculty working group was formed to more directly address diversity education. This group ultimately recommended that the college's old diversity requirements--general education courses that were isolated from the rest of the curriculum--be replaced with a more integrated approach to teaching about diversity.

According to Derek Price, an associate professor of psychology and Wheaton's coordinator of curricular infusion of race and ethnicity, the resulting diversity component of the new curriculum recast diversity education altogether by focusing on departmental programs. Crucially, Wheaton's plan also recognizes the need for flexibility in practice. Diversity infusion, Price says, "will vary dramatically across disciplines--and will be defined differently across disciplines and among faculty colleagues--and may not even be appropriate in some areas of some disciplines."

Wheaton sent a team of faculty and administrators to AAC&U's Greater Expectations Institute in 2002 and again in 2004 for assistance with implementing the new curriculum. At the institute, Price says, Wheaton's team came to realize that "successful curricular infusion can happen only in a broader campus context of multicultural inclusion." The institute thus prompted the team to consider institutional culture, including faculty and student cultures, more closely. It also led the college to strive for greater openness in its diversity work: as a result, the college has reexamined its own history with respect to diversity--positive and negative--and has initiated conversations with students as well as faculty about the curricular infusion.

The Departmental Approach

The core goal of curricular infusion is to ensure that all students learn about diversity in the context of their major. According to this approach, diversity should be neither an "add-on" to an existing course nor something that is to be "gotten out of the way" by completing a requirement; instead, it should be infused throughout every student's course of study, so that all students learn both about how diversity intersects with the concerns of their major and about its role in the culture at large.

Departmental diversity work at Wheaton is supported by Derek Price and Alex Vasquez, the coordinator of cocurricular infusion. Together, Price and Vasquez meet with departments as they frame their individualized strategies for infusing diversity content into major programs. But Price and Vasquez also stress that "infusion is as much about pedagogy as it is about content." Workshops for the infusion program thus provide opportunities for faculty to reflect on how their own sociocultural perspectives may inflect their teaching.

So far, Price and Vasquez have met with about a dozen departments, and many more meetings are planned for the coming year. Resulting strategies for infusion vary. In the psychology department, where Price himself teaches, diversity infusion focuses on Quantitative Research Methods, a sophomore-level course, and on the department's senior seminar. Elsewhere the effects of curricular infusion can be seen in individual courses. As a result of her participation in infusion activities, sociology professor Hyun Kim now encourages students in one course to consider how the racial construction of Asians in the U.S. is related to that of African Americans; in another course, she encourages students to consider how racial contexts, even when hidden from view, affect the work of various sociological theorists.

Strategies for Change

Wheaton College has adopted AAC&U's notion of "inclusive excellence" to describe its linking of efforts to embrace diversity and raise academic standards. Campuses that wish to achieve such institutional change, as Derek Price emphasizes, must address the faculty culture as well as the larger campus climate.

Price attributes some of the current momentum behind Wheaton's curricular infusion to the school's approach, which is not dictated by administrators but instead is grounded in voluntary action by faculty. "The advancement of an infusion approach or plan," he says, "must come from faculty who agree on its importance--even if not on its definition." And leaders of Wheaton's curricular infusion make a point of encouraging "a wide range of perspectives," including those that are criticize or question the program, says Price. Such openness acknowledges the complexity of the issues at stake and can make an initiative's successes more persuasive.

The program has also been helped by enthusiastic student responses to infusion efforts. According to Price, discussions of infusion plans with students as well as campus-wide infusion events have been well received. Guest speakers like Derald Wing Sue, a multicultural psychologist, and Lori Arviso Alvord, the first Navajo woman surgeon, have drawn large crowds--and, Price adds, have inspired students of all racial and ethnic backgrounds. He expects future assessments--which will rely on student surveys, the tracking of student research topics, and information about students' activities after graduation--to produce a more detailed picture of the impact of infusion on students.

But the most convincing case for such curricular infusion lies in the very mission of liberal education, Price suggests. Different sociocultural perspectives "must be recognized and understood if students are to become full citizens and leaders in a socially diverse country and world," he says. "These perspectives also are important in locating and fully comprehending disciplines themselves and the discipline-related professions that students will populate." An across-the-curriculum effort such as the one underway at Wheaton represents one way of ensuring that diversity is integral to every student's course of study.

More information about Wheaton's curriculum is available on the college's Web site.

AAC&U is currently following up on the institutional change efforts of Wheaton College and other schools that have participated in the Greater Expectations Institute; Jeannie Brown Leonard, a graduate student intern in AAC&U's Office of Education and Institutional Renewal, is conducting these institutional assessments. Visit AAC&U online for more information about the Greater Expectations Institute, the Making Excellence Inclusive initiative, and for resources on institutional change and diversity. The three briefing papers commissioned for the Making Excellence Inclusive initiative are also available on AAC&U's Web site.