Planning + Designing for Diverse, Equitable, and Inclusive Campus Learning Environments

Join RWiD and Shannon Dowling online for a lunchtime learning program.

Over the 2020-21 academic year, Shannon used her position as a SCUP Fellow to engage with more than two dozen institutions around the topic of welcoming and inclusive physical campus environments. She interacted with 200-plus students to understand their comfort levels in different environments across campus and what design qualities drove feelings of inclusion and belonging. Drawing from student words and student work, Shannon created a playbook that gives strategies for campus master plans, facility plans, and building renovations to reinforce the goals and metrics outlined in an institution’s strategic plan around inclusion, belonging, and student success. The playbook serves as a conversation starter: a way to get planners, designers, and university stakeholders to the table and move the needle towards a more supportive physical environment. How can stakeholders across an institution work together to ensure the physical environment is welcoming and inclusive to marginalized students? What values manifest in the built environment, and what metrics can we apply to our projects to assure that our physical campus environments embody the mission, vision, and values of the universities they house? In this session, Shannon will share her process and her research. Using highlights from conversations with students, design solutions they proposed, and strategies outlined in the playbook, Shannon will illustrate how thoughtful planning and design can contribute to a more welcoming, inclusive, and thriving place for students to live and learn.

Earn 1.0 AIA LU|HSW

 Learning Outcomes:

1. Discuss how physical space can contribute to belonging from the perspective of students.
2. Assess your campus spaces from a DEI lens using specific criteria and metrics.
3. Strategize quick wins for immediate campus impact and long-term investment to create cultural change.
4. Develop collaborative design ideas that will help re-envision problem spaces on your campus.

Register online.