The Arcadia Abroad Inclusive Excellence Plan

The Arcadia Abroad Inclusive Excellence Plan (IEP) is a comprehensive road map for changing Arcadia Abroad’s culture and placing equity, diversity, and inclusion at the core of educational excellence and institutional mission. The IEP is a call to action for every member of the College.

The IEP is led by The Council on Equity Diversity and Inclusion and inspired by the Association of American Colleges and Universities’ Inclusive Excellence framework. It organizes our work around the following five goals for improving our approach to equity, diversity and inclusion:

• Goal 1: Training, learning, and development to equip members of our community to excel at supporting a changing and diverse student population.
• Goal 2: Reconstructing The College's culture and community, so that all community members feel welcome, included, and confident that they belong here.
• Goal 3: Revamping our systems, policies, and procedures to promote diversity, inclusion, transparency, and accountability.
• Goal 4: Advancing access and equity in the way we recruit, retain, advise, support, and recognize students and transparency in our communication and relationships with advisors, faculty, and administrators. 
• Goal 5: Galvanizing our curriculum and instruction to ensure that our courses incorporate multiple perspectives and demonstrate critical inquiry, intellectual engagement, and respectful discourse. 

In the spring of 2020, CEDI convened and guided working groups toward realizing the goals of the IEP. While the global pandemic may have slowed our work, the ongoing incidences of global racism and inequity during that time only strengthened our resolve and commitment. 

To date, we have trained and sensitized staff, identified and addressed systemic discrimination and exclusion, and developed a more inclusive curricula. Here are several recent outcomes from our ongoing work on inclusive excellence:

Goal 1: Training, learning, and development

• We raised staff awareness with programs such as Teaching Civility in the Workplace and Race and Cultural Diversity in American Life and History.
• We encouraged external professional development opportunities for staff (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion in the Workplace Certificate at the University of South Florida Muma College of Business).
• We convened open discussions about racism and protests in the U.S. following the killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery.

Goal 4: Advancing access and equity in the Arcadia Abroad community 

• We practice equity-mindedness to establish just approaches to student access and success, to create diverse learning communities and to engender inclusive excellence as a central tenet of all our education endeavors.
• We restructured our need-based scholarship program to cultivate the combination of equity, diversity, and inclusion in the Arcadia Abroad community.
• We've made transparent the academic requirements for applying to our programs. This invites and supports students of diverse backgrounds and academic skill sets.

Goal 5: Galvanizing our curriculum and instruction to incorporate multiple perspectives and demonstrate critical inquiry, intellectual engagement, and respectful discourse. 

• We prioritize the hiring and retention of experienced in-country (local) staff and faculty who have decades of experience exploring the complexity of local communities with students of diverse backgrounds. 
• We created an Arcadia Abroad rubric for developing course content with diversity, equity, and inclusion as a guide, as well as amplifying voices of underrepresented and marginalized local communities.
• We organize diverse volunteering opportunities for students to engage with local communities and support marginalized and minority communities through our excursion and event planning.