The Principles of Inclusive Excellence are Important to the Surgeon’s Mission

In higher education, inclusive excellence has become a buzz word as universities grapple with how to increase their diversity and inclusion on their campuses. Inclusive excellence is defined as, "active, intentional, ongoing engagement with diversity in interpersonal relationships, in the curriculum, in the co-curriculum, and in the communities with which students, staff, and faculty connect" (AACU, n.d.). The purpose of this study was to explore and strengthen how faculty members understand and demonstrate inclusive excellence in their classrooms at a small Christian university. "Grace University" is a predominantly white, small, Christian University located in the northeast region of the United States. This action research study utilized qualitative methods to engage in deeply understanding the phenomenon of inclusive excellence within the specific context of "Grace University" (Glesne, 2011; Jencik, 2015). The first Cycle of this study found that although faculty are motivated to engage in inclusive excellence and believe it is important, the implementation of inclusive excellence across the campus was "spotty." Subsequently, a community of practice, known as the Inclusive Excellence in Teaching Academy, was executed with nine faculty members from diverse departments on campus. The academy strengthened the belief that inclusive excellence is a Christian value, the knowledge about what inclusive excellence is, and actions related to how to implement inclusive excellence in the classroom. The study also found that the community of practice had inherent value in itself as the participants found great support from the group. These findings may inform other Christian higher education institutions on how to implement a similar academy focused on strengthening beliefs, knowledge, and actions related to inclusive excellence.--Author's abstract

The aim of this paper is to emphasize the value of developing cultural awareness in kinesiology students to prepare them to enter the workforce in a world where the principles of justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion are evolving. The authors provide examples of sustained and impactful practices from three kinesiology units in higher education that have been recognized with the American Kinesiology Association Inclusive Excellence Award. The case studies demonstrate that institutional support for inclusive excellence is instrumental in development of sustainable experiences. Kinesiology leaders can demonstrate commitment to inclusive excellence by supporting faculty who conduct teaching, research, and service activities that meet their institution’s inclusive excellence goals. Other areas where kinesiology units can influence student development include curriculum, student engagement activities, university and community partnerships, and leadership for inclusive excellence.

In this paper a novel metric for evaluating inclusive excellence in teaching is introduced and applied to students' performance in classes before and during the COVID-19 era. The novel metric, named the Inclusive Excellence Ratio (IER), is designed to simultaneously reflect the two desirable characteristics embraced by inclusive excellence teaching: strong student performance and low variation in performance across all students. The computation of the IER given student test score data is simple and straightforward: it is the statistical sample mean divided by the sample standard deviation. Consequently, the IER is high when the students' test scores are high and variance is low, suggesting it may provide a useful quantitative measure for those educational innovators seeking to experiment with new, effective teaching methodologies that boost inclusive excellence. The IER is applied to evaluate a posteriori student performance taken from cumulative aggregate data from the University of California, Irvine (UCI) undergraduate math finance classes involving 378 students over two academic years (2018 to 2020), spanning five quarters before and one quarter during the COVID-19 era of remote teaching at UCI. Conclusions are drawn and discussed comparing the quality of in-person teaching environments to remote teaching environments.

Several national organizations have issued calls for academic nursing to create inclusive environments. Inclusive environments are needed given the vast inequities that plague the demography of nursing coupled with the need to serve diverse populations. This article describes one school's journey toward inclusive excellence. A framework and infrastructure were developed detailing the strategy to enable the school to move toward an environment that supports inclusive excellence. The framework identified five priority areas to mobilize change: leadership for inclusive excellence, student service delivery and engagement, recruitment retention and advancement, community engagement, and research and scholarship in health equity, along with metrics and measures to monitor progress. Inclusive excellence is an ongoing journey rather than a destination that requires leadership commitment as well as faculty, staff, and student involvement to create a diverse environment where all individuals feel valued and respected. [J Nurs Educ. 2023;62(4):225-232.].

Academic leadership faces tremendous pressure to build sustainable environments that demonstrate a commitment to the principles of inclusive excellence. Currently, the convergence of dual global crises—the COVID-19 pandemic and reckoning of systemic violence and racism toward individuals from historically marginalized and oppressed groups—has led to prioritizing impactful inclusive excellence leadership processes that address justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion. However, too often, in times of crisis, the strategic prioritizing and, more importantly, allocation of resources to support inclusive excellence initiatives are seen as secondary, tangential, or nonessential to the core operational mission of academic units. In this article, the authors discuss the unique realities, challenges, and opportunities academic leaders face when leading an equitable and inclusive academic workplace and culture during and after a crisis. The authors provide fundamental inclusive excellence and justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion terminology and definitions. In addition, the authors provide attributes, behaviors, and action steps for demonstrating equitable and inclusive crisis leadership.

Students of color continue to be underrepresented in terms of study abroad participation. Inclusive excellence shifts diversity efforts from a focus on numbers to a comprehensive examination of systems and the ways in which the contributions of all community members are recognized, enhanced, and facilitated (Milem, Chang, & Antonio, 2005). The concept of inclusive excellence and the inclusive excellence scorecard are tools that can be utilized by international educators to examine the participation of students of color in study abroad within our own institutions, to evaluate efforts to resolve underrepresentation, and to inform best practices to support all students throughout the study abroad process. The inclusive excellence scorecard, modified for study abroad, examines access and equity, campus climate, diversity in the formal and informal curriculum, and learning and development. Until institutions have a clear understanding of the experiences, challenges, and opportunities on their own campuses and study abroad programs, they cannot effectively create change to better serve students of color and impact underrepresentation.

The COVID-19 pandemic has dramatically altered the 2020 residency application cycle and resulted in many changes to the usual application processes. Particular attention should be placed on the obstacles faced by applicants who are underrepresented in medicine (URiM) as they may be disproportionately affected by the changes in 2020. These challenges are especially relevant in competitive surgical specialties, where racial and gender diversity already lags behind other medical specialties. Inclusive excellence is a guiding philosophy in creating equitable resident selection processes. It focuses on the multilayered processes that form the foundation of inclusive institutional culture, while recognizing that excellence and inclusivity are mutually reinforcing and not mutually exclusive. A key tenant in inclusive excellence for resident recruiting involves applying an equity lens in all decision making. An equity lens allows programs to continuously evaluate resident selection policies and processes through an intentional equity-forward approach. In addition to using an equity lens, programs should emphasize the importance of equity-focused skill building, which ensures that all individuals engaged in the resident selection process have the tools and knowledge to recognize biases. Finally, institutions should implement specific programming for URiM applicants to provide them with information about key aspects of department culture and mechanisms of support for URiM trainees. Every residency program should adopt a sustained perspective of inclusive excellence, in this application cycle and beyond. The status quo has existed for far too long, and COVID-19 offers institutions and their residency programs a unique opportunity to try new and innovative equity-forward practices.

Higher education is faced with an increasingly diverse student body and historic opportunities to foster inclusive excellence, meaning a purposeful embodiment of inclusive practices toward multiple student identity groups. Although the benefits of inclusive excellence are well established, college faculty often cite barriers to promoting it in classrooms, and this creates an opening for faculty developers to support them in weaving promising practices for inclusive excellence into their teaching. This chapter highlights the practices of inclusive faculty and the methods faculty developers can use to promote inclusive excellence along five dimensions: (1) intrapersonal awareness, (2) interpersonal awareness, (3) curricular transformation, (4) inclusive pedagogy, and (5) inclusive learning environments.

This chapter identifies pedagogical strategies promoting equity for all students. Historical roots of Inclusive Excellence (IE), theories surrounding IE, and ways to affirm student identity are described, as well as factors that may interfere with the adoption of inclusive pedagogy.

The term Inclusive Excellence (IE) is being applied to many efforts in higher education to address past exclusionary practices. IE is more than a term, it is a vision of what could be. It is a deliberate set of actions to ensure that all students, especially those who have historically been underserved by the fragmented attempts in higher education to address the disparities in student learning outcomes. Readers are expected to learn about strategies to genuinely make excellence inclusive to address existing inequities in education.

Introduction. In the 21st century, there is an active involvement of universities in inclusive processes; however, against the backdrop of increasing diversity, new types of inequality arise in higher education. The processes of transformation of organisational cultures in universities and their research agenda under the influence of inclusion need to be studied.The aimof the present research was to analyse the convergence of concepts of academic and inclusive excellence in foreign universities of the world level, the impact of convergence on their missions, the values expressed in official strategies, the research agenda and the infrastructure of scientific collaborations.Methodology and research methods. The authors conducted a content analysis of three strategies of world-class University associations (the Association of American Colleges and Universities, the Association of Universities in Canada, the League of European Research Universities), nine strategies for the development of universities in the USA and Canada, the European Union, and Australia. A scientometric analysis of Web of Science metadata was performed using the VOSViewer software.Results and scientific novelty. The current research confirms the convergence of values of academic excellence and inclusion in research universities. It is revealed that the concept of inclusive excellence of the university is an enriched version of its academic excellence and denotes a set of university strategies and practices aimed at achieving the best results in training, research and services through maintaining diversity and inclusive processes. The world's leading universities are actively involved in the process of creating an inclusive friendly environment and services, which are accessible to all members of the educational process, regardless of their social status and development characteristics. When universities reach academic heights, they recognise inclusion as the next level of their development. In turn, inclusion becomes a factor in the movement of the university towards academic excellence. The key characteristics and contradictions of the convergence of the concepts of inclusive and academic excellence of universities are identified. The local models of inclusive excellence of universities and the contexts, which influence these models, are described. The gaps between educational policies and research agendas of leading universities are revealed. The clusters of international studies on inclusive processes in higher education are highlighted.Practical significance. Russian universities, which implement the federal programme for improvement of international competitiveness based on the values of academic excellence, are developing in accordance with global trends. Therefore, the model of inclusive excellence of the university can be used in practical terms to implement inclusive strategies and overcome social inequality both at the university and outside of it within the framework of a new educational initiative of Russia on academic leadership.

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit and all higher education pivoted to online learning, the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) created ‘Finish Line’, a programme designed to help former students with some college, but no degree to complete their studies, often several years after they had left the institution. More than 200 students have done so to date, which was a surprising pandemic silver lining for an institution with fewer than 5 per cent of all courses delivered online before 2020. But was Finish Line just a temporary strategic initiative to get through a global health crisis? Or could it also be a proof of concept for how to meet and support ‘non-traditional’ adult learners where they are — and want to go? In this reflective case study, we offer candid lessons learned to go beyond the logistics of an enrolment management strategy of ‘re-recruiting’ former students through the affordances of online education to reassessing and redefining our ‘inclusive excellence’ mission in a post-pandemic, often digital-first world.

Underrepresentation of Black biomedical researchers demonstrates continued racial inequity and lack of diversity in the field. The Black Voices in Research curriculum was designed to provide effective instructional materials that showcase inclusive excellence, facilitate the dialog about diversity and inclusion in biomedical research, enhance critical thinking and reflection, integrate diverse visions and worldviews, and ignite action. Instructional materials consist of short videos and discussion prompts featuring Black biomedical research faculty and professionals. Pilot evaluation of instructional content showed that individual stories promoted information relevance, increased knowledge, and created behavioral intention to promote diversity and inclusive excellence in biomedical research.

In this paper, I explore a particular formation of institutional racism within academic organizations. First, I detail the recent positive recognition of systemic barriers to inclusion in Canada through the rhetoric and policies from national research funding agencies, university managements, and faculty unions. I go on to suggest, however, that there is a contradiction in the promotional framing of these commitments as ‘inclusive excellence’ because the discourse of excellence implies that the institution is already performing at peak function and hence needs no systemic organizational change. I argue that this contradiction undermines the development of genuine motivations to address exclusions and reduces equity policies to tokenistic promotional branding. The excellence discourse appeals to the vanity of the academics who are being encouraged to be more inclusive, a vanity of ‘excellence’ that is a manifestation of the broader epistemological understanding of our profession as both very intelligent and neutral or objective in our approach to generating and assessing knowledge. This professional epistemology anchors our understanding of why the profession looks the way it does: white ethnic dominance is taken as a reflection of objective merit, which then prevents any consideration of whiteness as a contributing privilege to entering and progressing through the academy. I term this equation of whiteness with our professional capacities as ‘professional snowblindness’ because it prevents recognition of the whiteness of the profession precisely through recourse to our professional skills and capacities. I argue that this ‘snowblindness’ is the particular formation of institutional racism in the academy and, crucially, that it needs to be named and discussed if we are to create genuine motivations for equity.

<p>Dr. Margaret-Ann Armour’s career as a research chemist, educator, and advocate spanned more than 40 years. Much of her work took place within a disciplinary culture ignorant of the scholarship supporting organizational change towards inclusive excellence. Her contributions are extensively covered in other articles in this special issue, and her achievements are all the more remarkable given that her colleague, Dr. Gordon Freeman, held gender-biased attitudes that he shared in a peer reviewed article in a national science journal. Three decades later, another Canadian chemist, Dr. Tomáš Hudlický, published a peer reviewed essay in an international chemistry journal that included his views on the negative impacts of diversity initiatives on organic synthesis research. Both articles were retracted, but clearly a faulty and pervasively biased peer review system enabled the distribution of prejudiced opinions that were neither informed by demonstrated expertise, nor supported by data. These two events are reflective of challenges that Dr. Armour faced in her efforts to diversify chemical sciences. We need to build on her critical work to increasing awareness about inclusive excellence in chemistry, as well as educating scientists on what constitutes an informed opinion. Here, we use Freeman and Hudlický incidents as case studies to indicate how pervasive bias can be superficially perceived as scientific scholarship. Furthermore, we use analogies of analytical processes to illustrate how talent gets systemically excluded. Finally, we provide recommendations to chemistry community members for improving outcomes in terms of synthesis of new knowledge, ideas, and solutions, toward leveraging all the available human talent and creating an environment that is both excellent and inclusive.</p>