Tools and Resources to Guide and Support Educators in Working Toward Antiracist, Anti-Oppressive Educational Spaces

• In Event: Building Antiracist, Anti-Oppressive Educational Spaces in the Health Professions: Frameworks, Tools, and the Way Forward

Abstract

As our understanding of what defines anti-oppressive, anti-racist educational spaces in health professions education advances, learners, faculty and institutions demand and deserve educational spaces that incorporate anti-oppressive principles. This presentation will describe three efforts at the University of California San Francisco (UCSF) to support faculty and programs in making changes to advance anti-oppression and anti-racism.

The UCSF certificate in Teaching for Equity and Inclusion (TEI) is a longitudinal faculty development series open to all institutionally-affiliated faculty.27 It includes 7 workshops totaling 21 hours of instruction that can be taken in any order over several years. Grounded in critical consciousness theory,28 the certificate builds educators’ abilities to foster critical thinking and awareness of power and inequity when working with learners in areas such as direct teaching, curriculum development, assessment and evaluation, and mentoring. Since inception in 2019, 391 faculty have enrolled and 36 have completed the certificate. Participants rated TEI workshops higher than other faculty development workshops. The TEI meets the needs of faculty motivated to advance their skills as equitable teachers.

The UCSF Center for Faculty Educators (CFE) created a tool to support faculty developers in preparing and revising workshops and materials. The tool guides assessment for bias and oppression and facilitates incorporation of inclusive and equitable content and methods. The tool includes 28 questions linked to resources. CFE staff use the tool to review existing workshop materials, then engage faculty developers in making updates aligned with CFE’s commitment to anti-racist, anti-oppressive educational practices. Compared to the non-revised version, participants in 8 revised workshops made significantly more evaluation comments on how the workshop addressed DEI (pre=40%(SD=26); post=75%(SD=18), p=.025) and were less likely to report that DEI was “not applicable” (pre=28%(SD=16);post=8%(SD=15), p=.023). The tool, with support from trained staff, enables faculty to make detectable changes in content and methods that advance equity and anti-oppression.

Although institutions may encourage the adoption of anti-racist, anti-oppressive approaches, widely accepted expectations for health professions educators do not exist. To bridge this gap, faculty representing multiple health professions and social identities initiated a project to define competencies for educators to engage in anti-racist, anti-oppressive educational practice. After a thorough literature review, the group structured these competencies based on the UK Academy of Medical Educators model29 resulting in 6 competency domains, each containing specific competency statements. With feedback from local and external experts in anti-racism, anti-oppression and faculty development, the authors have iteratively revised the competencies. UCSF faculty development leaders have adopted the competencies as central to updating all UCSF faculty development offerings using an anti-racist, anti-oppressive lens. Learning objectives are mapped to the competencies to ensure adequate offerings to support competency achievement and identify gaps requiring new faculty development opportunities.

Although understanding and defining the requisite components of anti-racist, anti-oppressive educational spaces remains an area of active investigation, these examples demonstrate that the work to evolve and improve can occur in tandem with ongoing work to define foundational principles and practices.

Authors

• Katherine Lupton, University of California - San Francisco

• Bridget Colleen O'Brien, University of California - San Francisco