Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in the Curriculum
Regional, Ethnic, Religious, language, literature, Art, and Gender Studies
The words “diversity,” “equity,” and “inclusion,” run deeply through our curricula. Students can turn to a wide array of offerings in ethnic studies, religious studies, gender studies, and in the study of language, literature, and art. Moreover, many courses in Anthropology, Economics, Environmental Policy and Culture, History, Legal Studies, Linguistics, Philosophy, Political Science, Psychology, Science in Human Culture, Sociology, and Statistics address equity and inequity through different methodological frameworks. Our full list of academic units can be found here.
The diversity of our curriculum is visible by the many departments, programs, institutes, and centers in the College that devote their scholarship to cultural understanding, including:
Weinberg College Center for International and Area Studies
Crown Family Center for Jewish and Israel Studies
Latin American and Caribbean Studies Program
Latina and Latino Studies Program
Middle East and North African Studies Program
Center for Native American and Indigenous Research
Council for Race and Ethnic Studies
Department of Religious Studies
Sexualities Project at Northwestern
Instructional innovation
Weinberg College collaborates with the Searle Center for Teaching and Learning and the Graduate School on implementing best practices when it comes to inclusive teaching.
The Hewlett Fund Curricular Fellowship Program supports Weinberg faculty in the development of courses that explore the impact that issues of race, class, ethnicity, gender, and ability status have on our social, political, economic, and cultural institutions and on personal identity.
The College is implementing a new set of degree requirements, including two requirements that address diversity and inclusion, one focused on the equity and justice United States and another pointing toward global intercultural studies.
This two-part transdisciplinary overlay aims to infuse the Weinberg College curriculum with active discussions about how to navigate the local-global continuum amidst the complex and highly dynamic social and political movements of today and in the past. In particular, these overlays ask students to reflect on their own perspective as necessarily the product of interconnected webs of people, ideas, and events.
The US-focused overlay addresses the impact of histories, institutions, and/or social structures on groups and on individuals in the United States, focusing on the interconnected issues of equality/inequality and justice/injustice, while the global overlay explores varieties of human cultures through time and space, paying particularly close attention to the intricacies of cultural interactions—be they marked by war, peace, tension, inequality, or creativity—and to the grand challenges we face today in promoting understanding across traditional cultural boundaries. This requirement was approved by the faculty in 2019 as part of the Weinberg College modifications to curricular requirements.