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In service to the missions of De Anza College and the Foothill-De Anza Community College District as well as the broader community, we provide expertise and supportive leadership in the following areas:

Education and Human Development

The Equity Office will provide, and work collaboratively with other programs to provide, students, faculty and classified professionals with resources and ongoing opportunities for increased understanding of equity, social justice and equal opportunity as well as inclusion policies and practices.

Our education and development services include some of the following, as well as trainings by request:

Examples of Available Trainings

  • Developing Your Diversity/Department Equity Initiative and Student Equity Plans
  • Cultural Humility in the Classroom
  • Cultural Responsive Curriculum Planning

Some Past Trainings, Seminars and Retreats

  • Part-time Faculty Workshop: Compassionate Communication in the Classroom
  • Title III Math Team Retreat: Creating a Culturally Competent Context for Connection
  • U.N.I.T.E (Understanding New Ideas Towards Empowerment) Event Program
  • Working with LGBT Students (Student, Faculty Panel)

Supportive Advocacy and Coaching

We aim to ensure that the core principles of equity, social justice and multicultural education are embedded in all relevant college policies and procedures and demonstrated in staff and faculty practices. Coaching and technical assistance is available to staff, faculty and students. We also aim to ensure full inclusion of all staff, providing technical assistance and coaching in the areas of cultural responsive leadership, cultural responsive supportive supervision, intercultural trust and team building and effective communication skills.

Equal Opportunity Counseling, Discrimination Consultation and Investigation/Discovery

The office will resume its role as the EO support center in the Fall of 2012. The office will provide general advising to individuals and departments on existing, perceived or potential discrimination and retaliation. We will work expediently to resolve issues of discrimination through formal and informal processes of mediation and counseling; addressing potential violations of the policy against nepotism. Additionally, we will provide all hiring and selection committees with equal opportunity representation and training. We will ensure equality in our hiring and selection of faculty and staff, in order to sustain and improve the diversity that has been achieved in our staffing to date.

Community Engagement

At De Anza, we are deeply committed to community building and civic engagement, and the Equity Office works in support of these values. We work diligently to build mutually meaningful partnerships with the culturally diverse groups, both internal and external to our college community as it pertains to issues of equity, social justice and multicultural education.

Furthermore, we work to help students by implementing initiatives, providing staff, students and faculty development and training that address the needs of students to be able to achieve their educational goals in an environment that is free of bias and discrimination. For example, the Equity Office has worked in conjunction with other learning communities to help students from all walks of life enrich their learning experience.

We outlined in the 2005 Pathways to Student Equity initiative specific criteria that every academic and student services department can utilize. This tool can measure and improve their effectiveness in relation to the achievement of students who are historically underserved as well as students with lower rates of academic success.

We also serve as a resource for the campus and provide consultation with specific programs, departments, and divisions who are initiating activities to maintain the equity, social justice and multicultural commitment of our campus.

You give but little when yoiu give of your possessions. It is when you give of yourself that you truly give.

I have learnt silence from the talkative, toleration from the intolerant, and kindness from the unkind; yet, strange, I am ungrateful to these teachers.

Knowlege of the self is the mother of all knowledge. So it is incumbent on me to know thyself, to know it completely, to know its minutiae, its characteristics, its subtleties, and its very atoms.

If he is indeed wise, he does not bid you enter the house of his wisdom, but rather leads you to the threshold of your own mind.

- Kahlil Gibran, mystic and poet, 1883-1931
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