Christopher D. Valentino

Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion

 

My understanding of social justice and the concepts of equity, diversity, and inclusion has developed greatly over my time at BGSU.  When I first came to BGSU I thought I had an advanced level of social justice knowledge due to my undergraduate experiences at San Francisco State University (SF State), an institution dedicated to the advancement of social justice and accessible higher education.  However, my experiences with social justice at SF State did not easily translate to BGSU given the environmental and cultural differences between a highly diverse metropolitan institution and a more rural predominately White institution.  My time at BGSU has provided me the opportunity to conduct meaningful reflective introspection to better my ability to serve as a social justice advocate.  While at BGSU I was able to find safe spaces to gain a deeper and more nuanced understanding of my own intersectional identities.  BGSU has also provided me the opportunities to facilitate multiple workshops to help assist others in learning about social justice concepts.  Ultimately, my experiences at BGSU has developed my equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) competency level to an exemplary level.   

 

Over the past two years my understanding of my identity has deepened due to the introspective reflection caused by the shock of attending a predominately White institution for the first time in my life.  For the majority of my life, I tried desperately to avoid identifying as an Asian American.  Although I did not have the language to describe it, I recognized as a child that being of Asian descent placed me in a subordinate position in the American racial hierarchy.  As such, I saw my biracial identity as a way to escape and “opt out” of the American racial hierarchy (Renn, 2004).  As a biracial person I could ignore half of my racial identity by focusing exclusively on my white lineage and the highly diverse demography of the San Francisco Bay Area permitted me to do so.  Although I cannot speak for the experience of others, growing up in the Bay Area gave me a degree of racial privilege as I rarely racially identified in a way that made me feel like a “marked outsider” (Johnson, 2006, p. 33).  Throughout high school and college I was almost never read as exclusively Asian American.  I was often asked “what are you?” from other Asian Americans and I took joy in being able to escape instant categorization.  My youth in the Bay Area provided me a degree of privilege, as I never had to explore my identity as a biracial person of Asian descent (Watt, 2007).

 

Whatever privilege I may have had in the Bay Area disappeared when I moved to Bowling Green as I was instantly and constantly identified as an Asian American.  For the first time in my life, I no longer had the opportunity to choose my racial identity.  I experienced a significant amount of dissonance my first semester at BGSU as I tried to work through and develop my identity.  During the spring 2014 semester I had the ability to work through my dissonance through my practicum with the Office of Multicultural Affairs.  I worked under Dr. Krishna Han to organize and facilitate BGSU’s inaugural Asian American Heritage Celebrations.  This was a cathartic experience that allowed me explore my identity and facilitate several workshops on the Asian American experience in the United States.  For example, I facilitated workshops on Asian American stereotypes in the media and the Japanese American internment.  In the aftermath of those programs I felt pride in my heritage for the first time in my life.  Although I am still working through my internalized feelings around my identity, this process of identity exploration has provided me with a greater degree of self-awareness, which is essential for the appropriate facilitation of social justice conversations and workshops (Obear, 2007).    

 

In addition to my self-work, I have also developed my EDI competency through my experiences in CSP 6035: Multicultural Competence in Student Affairs.  In CSP 6035 I was able to intentionally improve my facilitation skills by designing and facilitating a workshop on gender inequity.  The workshop was titled Breaking the Box and was designed to provide students with knowledge around gender stereotypes and basic techniques to address inappropriate comments in the residential community.  Although the program was well designed, the workshop did not go as planned as the audience was comprised of individuals with vastly different levels of preexisting knowledge.  I had to modify the program flow spontaneously in order to respond to participant needs.  Ultimately, this experience improved my facilitation sills by showing me that I need to be more prepared to meet students at different knowledge levels and utilize those differences to promote dialogue and development.

 

I utilized the knowledge I gained from the Breaking the Box workshop during RA training in January 2015 when I facilitated a similar workshop on implicit racism in popular media.  The workshop had 35 participants and in order to determine my audience, I asked the participants to discuss why they attended the workshop during the introduction portion of the session.  I was then able to utilize that knowledge when I broke participants up into smaller discussion groups.  I ensured that each discussion group had a mixture of people with pre-existing knowledge in order to push quieter students into the conversation.  Although the formal assessment utilized for RA training only assessed satisfaction, the results indicated that students generally enjoyed the workshop, leading me to believe that my intentional participant grouping was at least partially successful in creating meaningful conversation around the topic area.

 

I have also developed my EDI competency as a Graduate Hall Director mediating roommate and floor conflicts.  During the 2014-2015 academic year I worked in McDonald Hall, a 737 person building that houses primarily first year students.  In October 2014 I recognized a trend in room change requests, White females were requesting to move out of rooms that they shared with a student of color.  After talking with several of my RAs, I realized that for many of these situations, roommates of different racial backgrounds were experiencing conflict because they have differing expectations regarding acceptable roommate behavior.  After sitting in on several RA facilitated roommate mediations, I recognized that the differences in expectations was often due to a cultural disconnect between the roommates.  To help address the issue, I trained my staff members to have candid conversations with their residents about how backgrounds and experiences help to shape their expectations of their roommates.  After the RA staff began to have these conversations with their students, the amount of roommate conflicts in the hall decreased. Ultimately, my experiences as a Graduate Hall Director connect directly with the NASPA/ACPA competencies by developing my ability to facilitate others’ learning on social justice concepts. It also reflects my ability to apply my advocacy skills in the development of a “more multiculturally sensitive” community (ACPA & NASPA, 2010). 
 

Although I believe my EDI competency is at an exemplary level for a graduating master’s student, I still have much to learn about being an advocate for social justice at an organizational and systems level.  In support of my exemplary self-rating I have attached below an article published in the Bowling Green Sentinel Tribune covering a workshop I facilitated for 2014’s Asian American Heritage celebration as an artifact of my competency.  This artifact directly relates to my ability to design and implement impactful educational experiences. I also believe that the article directly reflects my ability to facilitate an interchange of cultural knowledge that brings awareness to the interconnectedness of worldwide media consumption. I have also attached a copy of my presentation slides for the Asian American Stereotypes as it pertains to my ability to integrate “cultural knowledge with specific and relevant cultural issues on campus” as I tried to connect the presentation material with relevant examples that would connect with the students (ACPA & NASPA, 2010).