Pomona College

Institution Type: Baccalaureate Colleges

MSI: no

Policy Level: Institution

Policy Status Under review

Keywords: learning, reflection, inclusion, equity, evaluation

Theme 1: Align policy change with what matters

The commitment to a diverse community (faculty, staff, and students) is a long-term priority for Pomona. The most recent Strategic Plan reiterated this value. Bringing in a diverse population and supporting inclusive practice are central to Pomona's identity. But it takes effort to make practice and policy reflect those values.

Pomona recognized that the work of making the college an inclusive place was landing mostly on a few faculty and staff and that their efforts were not always recognized or rewarded. To address this issue, the College has made a concerted effort to pay faculty for "outside of the ordinary" engagement with inclusive excellence. For example, faculty receive a small stipend for participating in faculty programming related to diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging (year-long faculty cohorts). In addition, there was a move to spread the work of fostering inclusive classrooms by including it in tenure and promotion criteria.

Faculty also receive additional modest compensation for submitting a written reflection on their own evolution and practices related to inclusive teaching, based on a set of question prompts. These reflections go to the Inclusive Excellence Core Team and have yielded a working definition of inclusive teaching at Pomona.

Theme 2: Be strategic about policy content

In 2016, Pomona faculty voted to change tenure and promotion criteria to include a requirement that faculty foster an inclusive classroom where all students are encouraged to participate. This change to the handbook language became official policy but it did not define what "inclusive" meant nor how to measure it. This strategic choice enabled the policy change to pass, but it lacked the clarity necessary to bring the faculty culture along.

To build consensus, the college engaged in a collaborative process to establish a definition of inclusive teaching. Faculty were offered stipends to reflect on their practices related to diversity, equity, and inclusion in their teaching spaces. An analysis of those reflections was used to establish the following definition of inclusive teaching: Inclusive teaching builds community, is student-centered, cares for the whole student, teaches critical content, and is accessible to all students.

In Fall 2020, the Teaching and Learning Committee (TLC) highlighted the need for improvement in Pomona College's student evaluation form. After reviewing the literature on course evaluations and investigating shifts in practice at other institutions across the United States, the TLC drafted a "Student Feedback" form to replace Pomona's current default "course evaluation" forms. The shift in the form's title from "evaluation" to "feedback" was considered key, as research had shown that students were not in a position to evaluate their instructors' effectiveness and pedagogy. Instead, the focus was on students' own experiences in a particular course. The TLC emphasized that this approach would be more valuable for instructors as they seek to support students in achieving the learning objectives of their courses. The literature they reviewed supported this recommendation, highlighting the importance of students' understanding and engagement in the learning process. By prioritizing students' experiences, professors can promote deeper learning. Consequently, the Student Feedback Form was approved and is currently being used alongside the previous standard evaluation form. Faculty members have the flexibility to choose which form they prefer to use.

Theme 3: Make policy change someone's job

At Pomona College, the push to bring diverse experiences and backgrounds into the community was led from the top, via Strategic Plans, but the work to strengthen inclusive practice has largely been driven from the bottom up by a number of individual faculty as well as some official committees. This individual and committee work is sometimes considered to be part of their service to the college.

• The push to include fostering an inclusive classroom in the tenure and promotion criteria was spearheaded by individual faculty members.
• The Inclusive Excellence working group recommended the creation of a center for consolidating and disseminating initiatives related to DEIB. This became the Institute for Inclusive Excellence.
• The Teaching and Learning Committee (TLC) led the work related to creating the new Student Feedback Form.

A key aspect of this work is that it is exhausting. People need to be able to cycle in and out of change efforts in order to avoid burnout and to balance their lives. This makes it necessary to have a team of people engaged in the work. The presence of the Inclusive Excellence Working Group and Core Team has made a significant positive impact on being able to maintain momentum on change efforts at Pomona.

Theme 4: Approach policy change as a process

The change process at Pomona has illuminated the interrelation between policy change and culture change. Both are important to making progress on difficult issues, but these changes will likely be out of phase. For example, the initial work to change the tenure and promotion requirements focused on generating agreement that inclusive practice should be included without focusing on what that would mean. This provided a leverage point to engage the faculty in reflective practice on what inclusive practice looks like in their classroom and begin synthesizing that into a broad definition that could work for the whole campus. This practice pushed back against resistance to a unified (e.g. "one size fits all") approach to inclusive teaching as a necessary cultural shift to enable the next step of generating support to put that definition into official policy. This ratcheting back and forth allows policy and culture to both move forward.