More than 700 senior international administrators, student affairs professionals, study abroad office staff, faculty and more will gather in Boston for Diversity Abroad’s 7th Annual Conference this March.
This year’s conference – along with the Global Student Leadership Summit and the Minority Serving Institution (MSI) Global Education Summit – will be a comprehensive forum to advance policies and practices that promote access, diversity, equity and inclusion in global education.
Education stakeholders from across the country will share and learn how to build inclusive global education for underrepresented students through concurrent and deep dive sessions, “Big Idea Talks” and Diversity Abroad’s “Access, Inclusion, Diversity, & Equity” (AIDE) Roadmap.
“The main thrust of the conference is to provide participants with a rich array of sessions that they can easily take back and use on their campus” regardless of if their institution is a historically Black college or university (HBCU), a Hispanic-serving institution (HSI) or a small, private college, said Dr. Eduardo Contreras Jr., conference chair, assistant provost for International Education, Diversity, and Inclusion and the director of Studies Abroad at the University of Portland.
Conference organizers expect more than 700 global education stakeholders, including student leaders, employers and graduate program officials, to attend the conference this year. There will be sessions discussing intentionality in culturally responsive advising, how to build alliances with different campus partners to break down barriers for students, equity in the curriculum, study abroad recruitment and intersectional identities, among other topics.
Contreras said that campus representatives will also work with Diversity Abroad’s “Access, Inclusion, Diversity, & Equity” (AIDE) Roadmap, which is a self-assessment tool institutions can use to develop and measure DEI practices, policies and procedures that move their campus towards more inclusive internationalization.
“It is one of these tools that we’ve seen really help study abroad offices think about what does inclusive mean in their context because it may look different campus to campus, study abroad office to study abroad office, state to state,” said Wagaye Johannes, director of operations and organizational development at Diversity Abroad.
