Empowering Faculty and Staff to Create Transformational Change through Curriculum Design and Implementation

Program Abstract: We will report on an institutional transformation mechanism called the Anti-Racism Learning Community (ARLC) developed at the University of Minnesota Duluth to address equity issues. The ARLC represents a distinctive grassroots model for leveraging campus transformation that enables communication across administrative units to use the talents and perspectives of faculty and staff who have a stake in addressing systemic inequities and improving undergraduate student outcomes. A key area of focus includes abrogating failure rates in foundational courses in STEM and non-STEM disciplines. Having built the ARLC structure with built-in communication with senior campus leadership, we are now proposing networks to disseminate work across our campus and strategizing funding sources and future directions for projects where we collaborate with senior campus leadership. We expect the lessons of the ARLC are transferable to other primarily undergraduate institutions with first-generation and Pell-eligible students.