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Tracey Wyman explains to Morris Dees how Century used Speak Up! |
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White Bear Lake, Minn. — Center resources are in widespread use in classrooms across the country. But its newest anti-bias handbook, Speak Up!, has garnered a first. It was chosen as Century College's first campus-wide common book project, distributed to each incoming freshman last fall as well as to all the school's faculty, administration and staff. A total of 6,000 of the free guides are in use there.
"Reaction was incredibly positive," said Tracey Wyman, who headed the project. "It certainly contributed to improving the climate here. We'd see students in the hallway with their Speak Up! book, reading it on their own. People have been so excited about it."
When Wyman joined the Century staff in 2000, only about 5 percent of the college enrollment were students of color. Today, Wyman's diversity initiatives have helped increase the number of minority students to about 24 percent. They are mostly of Hmong descent with Hispanic students ranking second.
She implemented an international program, Seeking Educational Equity and Diversity (SEED) when she arrived, making Century one of the first higher education institutions to incorporate the 30-year-old program into its protocol.
"I've been on the Teaching Tolerance e-mail list forever and have ordered and used all kinds of your materials in my classroom over the years," Wyman said. She discovered Speak Up! soon after the Center released it. "I saw it and I went crazy," she said.
She described the school's environment as unwelcoming for those who are not a part of the majority. "People will fake nice and cut you behind your back. To do programming for people who are in such denial is hard," Wyman said. "I had been looking for something like Speak Up! through every network, something that the average person could read and understand. When I saw it, I went nuts because it was exactly what I could use with everyone."
Wyman presented the guidebook to school administrators, and they were equally enthusiastic. "Everyone from maintenance workers to faculty staff read the book and began having conversations about what it means to them," she said.
All new students were given a copy during the school's orientation and told to hang onto it. Then the book was distributed to all the college's administration and staff. Extras were offered to faculty wanting to use it in their classroom. During a faculty-wide conference at the beginning of the school year, Wyman offered two sessions that addressed Speak Up! and how to use it in class. Discussion questions derived from the book's content, designed to provoke introspection and help understand and eliminate bigotry, were posted on the college's website. Special posters promoting the book were hung all over the campus.
Speak Up! was used in a variety of campus classes, from Reading to Radiography. "The students commented that the book was great, and from their papers, I believe they really got something out of the experience," said Laura Chaffee, a radiography instructor.
Some classes asked students to write descriptions of their own encounters with everyday bigotry. On April 5, a professional acting troupe will be on campus to act out these scenarios for an all-staff conference. A dialogue will follow each in which faculty can discuss how they could handle such situations. "I think it'll really have an impact," Wyman said.
Center founder Morris Dees spoke at Century in January. "It turned out to be a beautiful parallel. Students loved him. It was a feather in our cap," Wyman said. The faculty who used Speak Up! in their classrooms had an hour-long session with him to talk about their experience.
SPLC Report
Spring 2007
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