The SABES Program Support Professional Development Center (PSPDC) has compiled resources for adult education programs and practitioners to engage in individual or group self-education, reflection and action to make their programs more diverse, inclusive and equitable. Our professional development and supportive resources support adult educators in both examining and understanding identity and bias, and acting to make programs more equitable through authentic collaboration, bold leadership and a commitment to change. 

While SABES is creating a coordinated resource bank for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) materials across all of our PD centers, please see see a few highlighted resources from the PSPDC below to think, read, act and reflect now: 

 Read and Reflect

• Read Let Us Teach Us: A Diversity Call to Action for Adult Education, written by Daquanna Harrison for a special COABE issue on Equity and Immigrant Integration, and reflect on the actions you and your program can take compensate and support adult educators in order to recruit and attract educators from the same backgrounds as students. The article ends with four specific action steps and insightful questions to help programs, administrators, and educators begin to make meaningful progress toward the call to action.

Watch and Think

• Watch this webinar on Addressing Implicit Bias and ask yourself: "How do we acknowledge and respond to such biases?" The webinar includes numerous criteria, examples, assumptions, and recommended steps.
• Watch this half-hour documentary on Cultural Humility “mixes poetry with music, interviews, archival footage, and images of community, nature and dance" to explain what Cultural Humility is and why we need it. Cultural Humility is a process of communal reflection to analyze the root causes of suffering and create a broader, more inclusive view of the world.

Act and Discuss  

• Use the Social Identity Wheel worksheet with your colleagues and staff to reflect on their identities, visible and invisible, and on the various ways those identities become more keenly felt at different times. Individuals can explore how those identities impact and influence our views on the world as well as the ways others perceive us. Conversations from this exercise can be extended to exploring how privilege operates to normalize some identities over others.
• Use the Anti-Racist Education Self-Examination and Rubric to review your own biases and pedagogical assumptions. This document can act as a mirror to reflect back to us the assumptions we make everyday that are informed by our identities. Adult education colleagues can complete this examination and discuss as a group.  

• See the Calendar for upcoming offerings on DEI
• DEI and ADA PD and resources from the SABES Program Support PD Center
• SABES newsletter, Spring 2021: Perspectives on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (each article contains ideas and resources)

Attribution: graphics are from www.flaticon.com