Inclusive Excellence by Design
The Office of Inclusive Learning, Engagement and Leadership works to bring the University of Arizona's core value of inclusion into practice by offering various learning and development programs related to diversity, equity and inclusion. The learning opportunities help build awareness, strengthen skills and develop new skills that contribute to a just and equitable campus community. We are committed to a deep, collective understanding that an institutional and personal commitment will help us navigate a more culturally and linguistically diverse world.
Take the Next Steps
We invite the campus community to explore the diversity and inclusion learning, engagement and leadership opportunities below. You will find a mixture of self-paced and team learning options that strive to connect, empower, and transform those who engage with our office.
Self-paced Learning
The Office of Diversity and Inclusion has curated a list of self-paced courses from LinkedIn Learning to break down time, place, and pace barriers. These on-demand learning opportunities allow you to complete a workshop at a time and pace that is convenient for you. In addition, these courses provide a practical framework for understanding diversity, equity, and inclusion issues in your work. Experience plus reflection equals learning that lasts, so each course ends with a reflection activity for you to contextualize the new knowledge and its applicability to your work.
LinkedIn Learning is currently ONLY accessible to full benefits-eligible staff and faculty.
What does it take to be a great communicator, particularly in a global and culturally-diverse modern workplace? The answer is, largely, authenticity. In this course, Jonathan Wilson teaches key principles of authentic communication, real-world tips for practicing authentic communication, and how to develop cultural awareness so you can build relationships, support colleagues from underrepresented groups, and be a more effective professional. Jonathan explores what it means to be authentic in a way that celebrates who you are, resonates with others, highlights the importance of cultural differences, and energizes those around you. It may take a while and some work to attain competence and expertise in these areas, but if you’re looking to be someone who can connect with anybody with ease, navigate tricky conversations, and learn what matters to people, join Jonathan in this course
Learning how to communicate with each other despite our differences is an important skill to have in both your professional and personal life. Discussions about cultural differences can be uncomfortable in the workplace, though, and navigating the terrain can be intimidating and daunting when speaking with colleagues. In this course, Kwame Christian helps you build self-awareness and skills to navigate conversations about culturally sensitive topics and to generally communicate in a culturally sensitive way. Kwame also imparts the skills needed to take responsibility and apologize when you’ve made communication mistakes. He provides a framework of negotiation and conflict resolution skills that empowers you to have difficult conversations while avoiding common pitfalls, and helps you structure these conversations in a way that makes it more likely for you to connect in constructive ways.
In this course, instructor Lori Nishiura Mackenzie shows you how to create and hold space for others using gender-inclusive language at work. Language shapes how we understand ourselves, our world, and our relationships. The words we use can create a sense of belonging. Still, they can also be exclusionary without our realizing it, particularly when they touch on elements of our unique identities such as gender, race and ethnicity, disability, sexual orientation, and more.
Inclusive work environments can yield greater creative output, boost employee morale, and benefit a company’s bottom line. But inclusion doesn’t just happen, and one of the key factors is cultural competence—the ability to recognize, engage, and adapt across cultural differences. In this course, DEI expert Mary-Frances Winters explores key skills to help you better understand cultural differences and explains how to leverage them to foster inclusion in the workplace. Mary-Frances starts by breaking down the concept of cultural competence into its pieces. She then helps you examine your intersecting identities that help you to begin to have more empathy towards others. And learn how to differentiate between stereotyping a culture versus recognizing cultural patterns. Join Mary-Frances in this course to learn how you can apply cultural competence concepts to create a more equitable and inclusive environment for your entire organization.
While inclusion and equity are increasingly important to organizations as they build and maintain their modern workforces, workers with disabilities are still often overlooked. While these oversights may often be unintentional, they can still have a detrimental impact on disabled employees’ ability to do their jobs and on their overall wellbeing. In this course, disability inclusion advocate and Paralympic gold medalist Liz Johnson details the actions your organization can take to ensure equity and inclusion for disabled employees. She starts with basics: what inclusion looks like for disabled employees, and what exclusion looks like. She then covers the requirements needed in an equitable environment and shares some resources you can use to support inclusive practices. Finally, Liz covers tools to help you measure the success—and failure—of your initiatives
It’s important to become more aware of mental health in the workplace, but it isn’t always easy to know what’s best for your colleagues, or how you can better support them so that they feel recognized and fully valued as human beings. In this course, instructor Tiffany Jameson helps you get a better understanding of the impact of ADHD in today’s workplace. Find out how to identify and recognize ADHD by learning more about what it actually looks like and how it manifests on the job. Explore ways to be an ally to your coworkers with ADHD, acknowledging their strengths and weaknesses and being more empathetic about where they’re at. Get the skills you need to communicate more effectively and deliver better results for your team. Along the way, Tiffany covers best practices by sharing some real-world stories and first-hand experiences of working professionals with ADHD.
You may have heard the word neurodiversity, but what exactly does that mean? Our recognition that our workforce is filled with minds that don't always think like we do is important in our more inclusive world. Neurodiversity is an umbrella term that refers to autism, dyslexia, ADHD, and other learning differences. In this course, HR professional and organizational psychologist Tiffany Jameson addresses neurodiversity and the importance of recognizing how different individuals’ learning and communication style influences how they work best. She covers common challenges the neurodivergent face in the workplace, and how to best support candidates and current team members who learn and communicate differently. Tiffany also explains how helping HR identify how to adapt to a neurodivergent world and workforce is critical. As she shows, recognizing and incorporating the strengths of neurodiverse employees can lead to a better and more effective workforce.
A professional with a disability may also have an aptitude for project management, graphic design, or full-stack development. But physical and social barriers in the world of work can make it difficult to fully capitalize on those skills—or worse, prevent them from securing gainful employment at all. Liz Johnson, a Paralympic gold-medalist and founder of The Ability People, seeks to knock down these barriers by helping organizations redefine how they view people with disabilities in the workforce. And in this course, she shares strategies that can help you do the same. Discover how to sidestep conversations that don't serve your colleagues. Learn how to classify the appropriateness of offering assistance. Plus, get tips on how to select the best employee for a role by focusing on the desired outcome of a task—not the methodology. Upon finishing this course, you'll be ready to start creating a more accessible workplace where employees with disabilities are set up to thrive.
Much progress has been made in recent years in making professional settings free from harassment, discrimination, bullying, and other forms of incivility. However, aggression and violence—both physical and psychological—still exist in many places. If your workplace is not deemed safe by employees, this can lead to resignations, reputational damage, and financial losses. In this course, Bella Ikpasaja shows you how you can take an organisational approach to avoiding the pitfalls of psychological, emotional, and physical harm to your staff. Bella explains how to build employee safety, embed and assess personal safety culture, implement procedures for supporting and signposting, and many more systems and policies that can help you protect your staff, wherever work-related risks come from—within or outside your organization.
People around the world are having difficult conversations about race and justice. But few are talking about how to talk about race. This has left some professionals sitting on the sidelines because they don't know what to say or how to say it. In this course, negotiation and conflict resolution expert Kwame Christian shows how to apply a useful framework to open up an effective dialogue at work and facilitate understanding. Kwame highlights the barriers that make talking about race so challenging. He then shares how to apply a framework that provides a consistent tool for how to have these conversations. Using this framework, you can acknowledge and validate emotions, use curiosity to open up dialogue, and work with others to determine what you're trying to solve. Plus, Kwame shares general tips for talking about race, including how to avoid common pitfalls and talk to your kids about race and society
Welcome to our Nano Tips series, where LinkedIn Learning creators deliver impactful lessons in literally seconds. In these video tips, DEI expert Desiree Coleman-Fry sheds light on several unconscious biases that creep into the workplace and shows you how to overcome them. Learn how to actively identify organizational dynamics that create unfair barriers to success for women of color. Explore how to address workplace dynamics that cause a double bind. Go over the concrete ceiling, the punishment gap, and the impact of the racial and gender wage gap. Learn about unseen stressors that women of color face in the workplace and the self-editing coping technique that many historically excluded groups use to survive in challenging workplaces. After exploring these issues, learn some promising practices to foster inclusive and welcoming workplaces for women of color. These nano tips can help you identify strategies to foster belonging and unbiased outcomes at work.