Before heading to sessions, join Dr. Amy Landis and Dr. Kate Youmans online to help launch the Celebration and hear what to expect from the day’s activities.

Join the virtual room

What the “X”? Pronouns and the Evolution of Gender Neutral Language
Facilitators: Megan Rose and Savannah Allshouse
Yes it’s grammar and language, but it can be fun! Join us to workshop pronoun usage and to talk about gender within the English language. Plus, we’ll explore how the “x” has made its way into our ever evolving English language.

Solidarity, Not Model Minority
Facilitators: Dr. Zhao Han and Brianna Wolfe
In this workshop, we will watch and discuss a documentary on Model Minority to explore the origins of the stereotype and the intersections with past and present anti-Asian violence. It also examines the harm created by this divisive narrative and opportunities to build power and make progress towards addressing systemic racism in America.

Being Civil in an Uncivil Environment
Facilitator: Nicole Brodrick
We live in a very challenging time. Stress and anxiety levels are affecting our neurobiology. How can you stay composed when confronted with negative behaviors and actions? Learn ways to remain civil in a stressful situation and ways to create a civil environment.

Orediggers Helping Orediggers: Bystander Intervention Skills – Virtual Session
Facilitators: Sareen Lambright Dale and a Mines Peer Educator
Inclusion and belonging are so important to the Mines experience and one of many ways we can build these qualities is to ensure that individual community members are activated to help one another when situations arise. This can be challenging for a variety of reasons. Bystander Intervention training helps Orediggers develop awareness, courage, and skills for intervening in potentially harmful situations where someone may need help or support. Bystander intervention is useful in many types of situation, and for the purposes of the DI&A Symposium, this 45-minute session will focus on DI&A-related inclusion & belonging scenarios.

Reframing Imposter Syndrome: Developing a New Lens to Interrupt the Cycle of Self-blame and Shame
Facilitator: Sheena Martinez
Pulling from the work of Ruchika Tulshyan and Jodi-Ann Burey, in their Harvard Business Review article, “Stop telling women they have imposter syndrome”, this session will provide new insights and perspectives to recenter the historical and societal impacts of what we have come to understand as imposter syndrome. The ownness to address imposter syndrome has traditionally been placed on the person experiencing it, with a high level of impact on women and people of color. This session will provide an opportunity for participants to investigate the environmental phenomena and triggers that bring about imposter syndrome and impact our sense of belonging in the workplace. With opportunities for individual and group reflection, this session will create space for how we as individuals and leaders can begin to consider how our work environments might be the key to more effectively addressing the experience of imposter syndrome.

Proposal Writing: How to measure DI&A and Broader Impacts
Facilitators: Alyssa Von Lehman Lopez, Megan Sanders and Heather Houlton
If you don’t measure it, it didn’t happen, right? Join us as we dig deeper into how to measure impact related to the DEIA and Broader Impacts components of academic and research grant proposals. This sessions covers what makes a project goal “SMART,” when and how to work with an external evaluator, and the types of support RTT, Trefny Center and Mines DI&A offices and teams can offer.

Empowered by Iron: How Lifting Weights Increases Confidence in Women
Facilitators: Kelly Sorge and Colleen Pritchard
Looking to boost your confidence and challenge your self perceptions? This session provides an overview of Empowered by Iron, a fitness class specially for womxn at Mines, that teaches participants to trust their own internal and external strengths. The goal of this program has been to make the gym a more inclusive space for womxn at Mines. Session facilitators will share data from past participants that correlates weight lighting and confidence.

Each department/unit will provide a poster which will be on display during the Celebration. These posters are intended to highlight department and units’ top diversity implementation plan goals, their alignment with the Mines DI&A strategic plan and the outcome/impact of those efforts. Posters will be displayed and staffed by a dept/unit representative so community members can ask questions and explore future collaborations.

Mines is honored to have Dr. Angie Paccione, the Executive Director of the Colorado Department of Higher Education lead the Celebration’s keynote lunch. Dr. Paccione’s talk will center on “Power of the Spoken Word: Activating Potential.” Lunch will be catered by No Ke Aloha and is free, but registration is required.

About Dr. Paccione

Dr. Angie Paccione was appointed executive director of the Colorado Department of Higher Education by Gov. Jared Polis, assuming the role on Jan. 10, 2019, and unanimously confirmed by the Senate Education Committee on Jan. 17, 2019.

Dr. Paccione has more than 20 years of experience in secondary and postsecondary education. She was a high school teacher, coach, and administrator at Smoky Hill High School in the Cherry Creek School District before earning a Ph.D. in education and human resource studies from Colorado State University (CSU). There, Dr. Paccione served on the CSU faculty for nine years as a teacher educator in the “Project Promise” program, a nationally recognized program of excellence in teacher preparation for mid-career professionals. She also conducted research in the teacher education field, examining educators’ life events that led them to become committed to issues of diversity and inclusion. Her findings informed a teacher preparation program and were later published in Teacher’s College Press, which has been cited in over 75 academic papers.

Dr. Paccione left higher education to pursue public service and was elected to two terms in the Colorado House of Representatives, rising to become house majority caucus chair. She served on the Education Committee during all four years in the legislature, helping guide the education environment for the state of Colorado. In 2006, she ran for U.S. Congress and came within 2.5 percent of unseating the incumbent.

From 2007 to her appointment as executive director, Dr. Paccione worked for Verus Global where she specialized in the areas of leadership development, diversity and inclusion, talent development, and change management. She has worked with leaders from the shop floor to the C-suite in 40 countries and all 50 states. Dr. Paccione has also co-authored two books on leadership: One Team: 10-minute Discussions that Activate Inspired Teamwork and Do Big Things: The Simple Steps Teams Can Take to Mobilize Hearts and Minds and Make an Epic Impact.

Growing up biracial in New York City, attending college in California, and residing in Colorado, Dr. Paccione bridges many divides. She was raised to believe you can accomplish anything to which you set your mind, a philosophy that runs through her life’s accomplishments. Playing basketball at Stanford University and professionally in the 1980s, Dr. Paccione’s credo is that she’s as committed to your success as she is to her own.

When she’s not working, Dr. Paccione can be found reading, traveling, enjoying theater and films, or gardening. She counts her family and friends among her greatest blessings.

How Companies Support Diverse Identities via Employee Resource Groups: A Panel Discussion with Aera, Chevron and NREL
Panel: Representatives from Aera, Chevron and NREL
Moderator: Dra Stepheny Beauchamp
Employee resource groups (ERGs) are employee-led groups at companies whose aim is to foster a diverse, inclusive workplace aligned within the organizations they serve. They’re usually led and participated in by employees who share a characteristic or identity, such as gender, ethnicity, lifestyle, or interest. The groups exist to provide support and help in personal or career development and to create a safe space where employees can bring their whole selves to the table. Attend this panel to learn more about how ERGs at these companies achieve these goals. The panel will discuss: i) the benefits of engaging with ERGs at your future employer and at Mines, ii) how your student org or group can collaborate with corporate ERGs now, iii) ERG best practices, and iv) questions you might ask companies about their ERGs as you’re deciding on your career path.

Cultural Calisthenics: Harnessing Your Interests to Inspire Diverse Audiences
Facilitator: Dr. Suveen Mathaudhu
Science and engineering degrees are well known to suffer from the lack of diverse, inclusive pipelines. This absence of exposure starts from an early age, but extends to more senior populations pursuing lifelong learning. This lecture will focus on key strategies that can transition the interests of the speaker or teacher into effective tools for piquing the curiosity and inspiring longer-term connectivity and engagement. More pointedly, research-based outreach practices that prioritize inclusivity and ensure engagement in an era of remote instruction will be emphasized. Examples from Mathaudhu’s successful usage of pop-culture, comic books and hip-hop music to teach engineering principles will be presented, along with interactive heuristic application of the presented concepts to assist the audience in developing their own unique outreach tools.

Connected: Creating a Culture of inclusion in Online Courses – Virtual Session
Facilitator: Olivia Livneh
As Mines expands its collection of online courses, it is important to offer training on and raise awareness of inclusive course design. This is especially true in the online learning sphere, where marginalization can often go unnoticed or fail to be communicated. In this interactive workshop, attendees will explore three important elements of inclusive course design—Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) compliance, Universal Design for Learning (UDL) guidelines, and Culturally Relevant Teaching (CRT) practices. Attendees will leave with useful resources and strategies to foster inclusive online learning communities, and meaningful learning experiences for all.

“You’re Wearing THAT?!”: Deconstructing Norms and Stereotypes Surrounding Self Expression
Facilitators: Savannah Allshouse, Kelsi Diaz and Megan Rose
Join us for a conversation about the history and expression of self through fashion and attire as we deconstruct stereotypes and perceptions of clothing, gender presentation, body art, and body type. We will share a brief history about fashion and gender presentation in attire, as well as consider how these perceptions shift based on the body type of the wearer. We will then move to break down these old-fashioned understandings to create a more inclusive and welcoming campus.

Neurodiversity 101: Embracing Neuro-Differences in the Classroom and the Workplace
Facilitators: Professor Susan Reynolds and Dr. Eliza Buhrer
In the 1990s, sociologist Judy Singer coined the term “neurodiversity” as a way to describe human brains that diverge from the norm. She concluded that brain differences are normal and valuable to our species in the same way that biodiversity is normal and valuable in any population. The neurodiversity-affirming movement is based on the idea that neurodivergent people should be valued for their unique strengths, not stigmatized for their differences. While each individual is different, neurodivergent people can have a wide array of strengths, such as incredible focus on preferred projects, strong passion for social justice, an ability to think broadly and creativity, and the capacity to work independently. Despite these strengths, neurodivergent people often face significant challenges, such as feeling misunderstood, coping with overt or subtle bullying, masking neurodivergent characteristics to better fit in, feeling uncomfortable about asking for accommodations, and experiencing anxiety or mental burn-out. This session is designed to stimulate dialogue around the neurodiversity-affirming movement, provide training to those in our community that are unfamiliar with these ideas, and ultimately foster a more inclusive environment at Mines for all types of minds.
Presentation

The Rising TIDE at Mines: Strategies to Include Equity and Justice Curriculum in STEM Education
Facilitators: Dr. Derrick Hudson, Dr. Gus Grievel, Brianna Buljung, Seth Vuletich, Dr. Scott Houser, Dr. Becky Lafrancois and Dr. Chuck Stone
In 2022, Newmont Mining donated $100,000 to Mines to recruit seven to nine STEM faculty from across campus who would conceptualize, develop, and implement culturally relevant content on issues of equity and justice into their existing curriculum. Led by Dr. Derrick Hudson, the Newmont STEM Faculty Fellows have participated in workshops that raise awareness on mindfulness, raising self-awareness of faculty, understanding epistemic exclusivity in the engineering curriculum, and conceptualizing and implementing culturally relevant equity and justice content into existing coursework. This session highlights the year-long efforts of faculty members who span across departments at Mines, and the culmination of these efforts which will serve to develop the foundation for an Engineering Education Center.

Identifying and Confronting Gender Inequity
Facilitators: Dr. Christopher Coulston, TBD
During this interactive, scenario-based workshop, a co-ed group of Advocate facilitators invite men and women Mines community members to explore incidents of inequity experienced on campus. Participants will practice appropriate actions to take in those situations.

Accessibility on Campus Through the Student Lens: A Panel Discussion – Hybrid Session
Facilitators: Jamie Regan and Aryn Loew
A panel of students who have a disability share their experiences at Mines, their needs as disabled students, and facilitate a discussion on ways campus can improve accessibility. The session will begin with prepared questions to allow students to introduce themselves, their experiences, and conclude with questions and answers.

Mental Health Stigma in the Asian Community
Facilitator: Kayla Benson
A lecture-based workshop exploring the lack of mental health discussions in the Asian community. The history, its causes, its impacts, and its future will be examined, allowing both Asians and non-Asians to think critically about the situation. This workshop hopes to educate the Mines campus community about its Asian peers and the mental health stigma often present in their community.

Infusing Equity into Mines STEM Courses and Curriculum
Facilitators: Dr. Chuck Stone, Dr. Derrick Hudson and Mines Students
In Fall 2022, upper division engineering physics students were given an assignment to consider three elements: the global idea of “Physics for Everyone”, the general task of “Infusing Equity into Mines STEM Courses and Curriculum”, and the specific task of describing some proactive steps for inclusivity in engineering physics. Attend to hear students’ carefully crafted, extremely thoughtful, well-written, and in several cases, plausible opportunities Mines could pursue.

Creating Inclusive Classroom Environments – Virtual Session
Facilitators: Amy Hermundstad Nave and Carter Moulton
Are you interested in exploring ways to support students in your class? Are you wanting to learn strategies to make your classroom more inclusive? During this workshop, we will start by considering the impact of classroom environments on student learning and performance. Then, we will examine several classroom scenarios and identify strategies that instructors can use to make the classroom environment more inclusive. Instructors will leave this session with a list of strategies and ideas for how to make their classrooms more inclusive for students.

Join President Johnson, current DI&A Presidential Fellow, Dr. Amy Landis and new DI&A Presidential Fellow, Dr. Kate Youmans as they celebrate and review the past, present and future of DI&A at Mines and celebrate all that the Mines community has done for DI&A over the years. Beer, wine and light hors d’oeuvres will be served. IDs will be checked at the bar.