(112) Diversifying Business Course Syllabi

So what? Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) is an important topic in academic libraries. Some ways it has appeared in the business library literature include articles about critical librarianship in information literacy (IL) workshops and enhancing a bridge course that included IL to prepare underrepresented students for their freshman year. This poster would add to that content. The objective of this poster is to describe a library workshop that supported a faculty member who redesigned her marketing class to focus on DEI. Other business librarians could find this useful and help them think about how they might be able to incorporate DEI in their IL workshops. The business librarian developed a workshop that included identifying how to find out if and how a particular company incorporated DEI, using Mintel’s multicultural section to learn the diversity and inclusion issues that mattered for a product, using eMarketer to identify whether diversity and inclusion mattered to U.S. adults, as well as maintaining other elements of traditional business research, such as determining market share for a select number of companies.

Conclusion: This course required that the project focus on how a company could use DEI to help their company create value for their customers and companies. In selecting their brand/product students learned about the types of biases and other ways that companies discriminated and undermined individuals from underrepresented groups and other identities. Finally, the fact that the instructor initiated the process to incorporate DEI was crucial in developing a library workshop focusing on DEI.