New Reports and Webinars Explore Accountability, Roles in SEL and Capacity Building

Over the past two years, Pullias Center Director Adrianna Kezar, Senior Postdoctoral Scholar Elizabeth Holcombe, former graduate student Jude Paul Dizon (now faculty at Rutgers University), along with grad students Jordan Harper and Natsumi Ueda, have been working on a next phase study of Shared Equity Leadership (SEL).

The Pullias Center’s SEL work, in partnership with the American Council on Education (ACE), is aimed at developing practice-based insights relative to Shared Equity Leadership in higher education. Our next report, Shared Responsibility Means Shared Accountability — is now out, and the corresponding free webinar is set for September 29.

Phase I of the SEL Project featured the report “Shared Equity Leadership: Making Equity Everybody’s Work,” while Phase II began with our report “Organizing SEL: Four Approaches to Structuring the Work.” Over the next six months, three additional reports will be released that explore how functional role and level (senior, middle level or grassroots) shape leaders work, capacity building individually and organizationally, and emotional labor inherent in this work.

In the webinar, our panel of DEI experts — Sherri-Ann Butterfield (Rutgers University, Newark), Cynthia Jackson-Hammond (CHEA), Raquel Rall (University of California, Riverside), along with moderator Adrianna Kezar — will dive deeper into the idea of accountability and shared responsibility: What challenges do institutions and leaders face when more people are in charge of DEI and how do you address them?

The original SEL concept emerged from studying eight campuses of varying institutional types that had scaled equity work to faculty, administrators and staff across campus and made significant progress on their equity goals (link to original report). Over the two years since the original report, dozens of campuses have started the practice of Shared Equity Leadership as a way to scale work on their campuses and embed equity into the culture.

In order to support the adoption of SEL across all colleges and universities, ACE is hosting learning circles for faculty, staff and administrators. We are also excited to unveil a SEL Toolkit to support campuses who want to activate this model. The Toolkit offers ways for individuals and groups to undergo reflection aimed at implementing SEL.

We hope that your campus will also consider adopting this approach that makes the work of equity everyone’s responsibility and provides the individual development to ensure the work is authentic.

You’ll be hearing more from the Pullias Center as our next SEL reports and webinars are rolled out — “Roles in SEL” in October, “Capacity Building for SEL” in December, and “Emotions and Emotional Labor” in Spring ’23. All six reports, plus the Toolkit, make up the “On Shared Leadership” series. A third phase of research will explore how campus can start up this work and will begin in 2023.