2024 Diversity Summit serves to inform Geneseo community
Photo of Student Kaitlin Anzalone presenting on Ableism and Accessibility in the Classroom courtesy of Lamron Photo Editor FP Zatlukal
On Tuesday, Feb. 27, 2024, Geneseo hosted the sixth annual Diversity Summit. The summit consists of a full day of short sessions hosted by students and faculty members. The theme of this year’s summit was Taking Action: Advancing Equity at Geneseo.
The first four session time slots offered events focused on various topics relating to diversity, equity, and inclusion. The sessions LGBTQ+ in a Flash: Flash-Length Creative Writing Celebrating Identity, The Hair Monologues, Diversity in the Classroom Requires Diverse Faculty, Coffee Hour Open Forum: DEIB and Me, and Seeking Student Input: National Institute for Student Success Report were all hosted in the first slot. I attended Hair Monologues, arranged by the English department, where students and faculty spoke about their experiences with hair and its relation to their identity and personhood. Participants spoke about experiences, shared photos, as well as creative nonfiction writing on the topic.
The second session time offered topics such as Do White People Experience Racism?, Relearning Disability: Using Accessibility to Combat Internalized Ableism, Starting on the Same Page: Learning Strategies You Can Use Now, Exploring Identity Concepts & Advancing Equity with Athletics DEI Committee, and Live Your Life More Accessibly. I attended Do White People Experience Racism, which was run by Geneseo’s Resident Assistant Diversity Inclusion Community Educator (RADICE) students. They offered definitions of commonplace words for their discussion topics like racism and prejudice, and led a moderated discussion with the audience members, where anyone in attendance was invited to answer questions like, “How is white racism different to ‘typical’ racism?” and “How do microaggressions perpetuate racism in daily life?”
The third hour offered sessions titled Featured Speaker: Understanding and Navigating Cultural Dynamics in the Workplace, Making Waves of Ideas: Fishbowl Dialogue, The Okanagan Charter: Envisioning a Campus that Promotes Wellbeing, Ableism and Accessibility in the Classroom, and Building Connections. I attended Ableism and Accessibility in the Classroom, which was a presentation given by Kaitlin Anzalone, a senior sociomedical sciences and communication double major. Anzalone talked about ableism and the different kinds people can experience while taking examples from the audience and outlining language that is and is not appropriate to use when addressing a person with a disability.
She then covered a few types of accommodations that can be used in the classroom such as the live captions feature for presentations, and the use of closed captioning on videos—even demonstrating how to customize them to your personal needs/wants. Anzalone spent time educating the audience about service animals and the associated etiquette, as well as the distinction between types of service animals. The presentation finished with a discussion about accessibility, or lack thereof, on campus and what can be done to try and make more progress.
The fourth session consisted of Advancing Inclusivity In Sexual Health Education: The SEX[Ed] Program, Identity and Experiences in Study Abroad: Student Led Panel, A Taste of Home: Diversity in Menu Planning, Improving Inclusion in my Course or Club Today, and Being BIPOC at Geneseo. Then at 2:30 pm, there was a keynote address by Dr. Estela Bensimon, titled Tools to Transform Racialized Institutions of Higher Education. At 5:00 p.m. the day concluded with a virtual alumni panel on the topic of the Impact of Creating and Receiving a Scholarship at Geneseo.
The sixth annual Diversity Summit, like the ones before it, served a multitude of purposes and covered a wide array of topics and applications for Geneseo’s students, staff, and faculty. At its core, however, the event works to persuade and teach community members to treat each other with kindness and be more aware of the issues facing the population.