Actions Taken to Support Our JEDI Goals

Goal 1 | Enhance representation in the student body

• Admissions Review Committees for our graduate programs work to identify top applicants through a holistic process, with underrepresented students receiving additional scholarship funding consideration.
• A new mentorship connection method was launched to allow students to seek mentors based on criteria better tailored to individual needs. 
• CAP received over $390,000 in funding for JEDI scholarships.
• Student representatives participate as members of all faculty search committees, including the search for a new department chair. 
• Landscape Architecture Department
  • Opened up Spring term for new admits, providing students more options for enrollment to accommodate diverse scheduling needs.  
  • Direct student support includes graduate tuition awards for recruitment. 
  • Competitive research and teaching assistant positions on a semester-by-semester basis (ranging between $19–22.50/hour). 
  • Employment opportunities in our research centers (for example UTAP). 
  • A few college-based work-study positions if a candidate has qualified for these through the federal student financial aid process. 
  • Established a JEDI Scholarship from DIG Studio.
• Architecture Department
  • The pre-architecture designation was discontinued to remove the perception of unequal treatment between Pre-Arch and BS Arch students.
  • New scholarships were created for undergraduate Transfer and First-Generation students as well as for school districts with historically high populations of students of color.
  • Developed partnerships with and active recruitment from Pre-Collegiate (First-Generation students), National Hispanic College Fairs, and other organizations and high schools.  
  • A student representative from both the Bachelor of Science and the Master of Architecture programs attends every departmental faculty meeting. 
  • A student from the Master of Architecture program was on the selection committee for CU Denver’s new chancellor in 2019. 
  • Established a new National Organization of Minority Architecture – Students (NOMA-S) and All for Women in Architecture Students (AFWIAS) chapters.
  • Students in the department elect “Studio Representatives” every semester who meet monthly with the associate department chairs. 
• Urban and Regional Planning Department
  • Accepted students receive personal attention, such as being individually contacted by faculty; invited (and sometimes funded) to attend a robust, full-day program preview event that includes interaction with current students, alumni, and faculty; multiple follow-up contacts with deferring students; etc. 
  • Leveraging research grants and scholarship funds to maximize financial offers that include research assistantship positions as well as scholarships. The average amount of support offered per accepted student has increased from $1,344 in 2015 to $6,900 in 2022 (including JEDI and other college scholarships).

Goal 3 | Incorporate the values and practices of justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion in what and how we teach

• Our Associate Dean led an effort to visit each cohort to discuss equity and the learning environment and emphasized student responsibilities for inclusion in collaboration. 
• Lecturers in the Department of Architecture are now required to complete training in equity in the learning environment. 
  
• CAP's Student Advising team added a virtual meeting component to accommodate student schedules and individual needs. 
  
• Landscape Architecture Department 
  • Un-grading work for equity in beginning design – this is an attempt to level the playing field and foster a sense of belonging in our intro to landscape graphics class. 
  • The biggest change to the program was the reorganization of the curriculum to enhance the student experience by loading the core content knowledge classes into the first year to prepare students equally with the needed skills to be successful in studios that follow. 
  • LDAR 5521: Revisions to our history course content, focus, and presentation to include more diverse landscapes, peoples, places, and cultures.  
  • Natural and cultural systems are covered in LDAR 5572 Ecology for Landscape Architects, LDAR 6670 Plants in Design, LDAR 5532 Landform Manipulation, and in the variety of courses that deal with living systems, as well as studios in which these issues and content come to the fore (e.g. Komara’s Immersive 2020 with water in the West). The concept of sustainability is treated as an ethical concern as well, and thus would be covered in courses that engage issues of environmental balance. Cultural systems are covered in design studios dealing with local communities. Additionally, studio courses address this through projects where systems knowledge is applied. 
  • LDAR 6630 Site Society and Environment (SSE) is the class where site planning, visual impact assessments, landscape performance, and post-occupancy evaluation are addressed. The class covers a triple-bottom-line approach to sustainability and discusses everything that relates to the site, society, and the environment. Site inventory and analysis are expanded upon in this class, which runs concurrent to Studio 1 – students are learning these processes as they start to practice them in design. Every studio has elements of analysis and research on site history, culture, and ecology, and the learning outcomes from SSE are carried beyond into all subsequent studios. 
  • Public policy and social justice are introduced in Site Society and Environment, and Theory & Criticism, but are concerned that our faculty are well-versed in, and students are familiar with red-lining, historic land reappropriation, and issues of race, class, and social structure. Special Topics (for example Contested Terrains as well as Redefining Place: Refugees in the Landscape) address divisive politics and humanize immigrant populations, respectively. Our faculty supports an Olmsted nominee each year and in recent years they have addressed issues of refugees, inclusive design for LGBTQ+ individuals, therapeutic design, resistance, and play. We have had two national award winners and two nominees. and we are proud to be working toward a more equitable curriculum in every class.
• Architecture Department 
  • Expansion of history survey courses to include a more global scope: in the spring of 2022, the department voted to expand the M. Arch program’s history curriculum to three required history survey courses. This expanded history survey course offering allows for the history and theory faculty to present students with an expanded, non-western perspective on the history of architecture, including regions like India, China, Africa, South America, and other global regions with non-Western traditions.
    
  • Adding curricular activities that support Equity, Diversity and Inclusion include our Social Context of Design course and our History I, II, and III sequences. 
    • The Social Context of Design course is being taught for the first time in fall semester 2022 by new Assistant Professor José Ibarra. It will evolve over time to address emerging issues in equity, diversity, and inclusion.  
      
    • A third course in the Master of Architecture history survey sequence is being taught for the first time in spring semester 2023 by Professor Amir Ameri. The intention behind this change is to more effectively expose students to non-Western histories of architecture, thus offering a more global, equitable, and inclusive perspective on the history of the discipline of architecture.
  • ARCH 6290: Special Topics in Cultural Studies: “Disturbing Behavior.” Disturbing Behavior is a graduate research seminar that asks students to conduct weekly expeditions to different constructed landscapes in the region and experience firsthand how they are both affecting and being affected by complex phenomena such as race, social class, and climate change. Site visits range from the very small, such as isolated markers that retell contemporary constructions and experiences of history through the eyes of previously marginalized historical actors, to the very large, like terraformed snow caves and relocated indigenous dwellings. Each environment highlights the ways that the human-made landscape is a cultural inscription that can be read at different scales of resolution to form a measured understanding of who we are and where we’re heading. Co-taught by Professor Aziz and Department Chair, Marc Swackhamer in spring 2022. 
  • All undergraduate and graduate students have unconscious bias and intercultural competency training through studio courses each semester. 
  • The Department has developed two mandatory Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion Workshops for both our graduate and undergraduate students to help them become more effective collaborators and leaders. The workshops address Unconscious Bias in one and Intercultural Competency in the other. Dr. Adriana Medina facilitates these workshops, which are funded through a gift from Stantec, Inc. Our B.S.Arch. students attend the Intercultural Competency workshop in their Design Studio IV and the Unconscious Bias workshop in Design Studio V. The M.Arch. students attend the Unconscious Bias workshop during Design Studio III and the Intercultural Competency during Design Studio V. The Intercultural Competency workshop is scheduled into the curriculum so that it coincides with or precedes a studio in which the students are required to work in teams. 
  • The department has overhauled its Professional Practice course to focus as much on how one acts as an architect as what one does as an architect. This involves more discussion and exercises on interpersonal, collaborative, listening, leadership, ethics, judgment, and empathy. 
  • As the department develops and refines its new Learning and Teaching Culture Policy, it will increasingly play a large role in our teaching workshops. The workshops will serve as a key opportunity for sharing this important document with the broader faculty and implementing it to advance the quality of teaching through the lens of equity and diversity. The LTCP will be included as part of the CANVAS shell for every course, and it will be included in every syllabus. 
• Urban and Regional Planning Department
  • We include on our one-year post-graduation alumni surveys the following question: “To what extent do you feel that the MURP program prepared you to work in a diverse work environment and/or with diverse communities?” Average positive responses range from 76% to 83%, demonstrating clear room for improvement. 
  • Starting in fall 2023, our core Planning Practice & Technology course will become Planning Practice & Engagement, bringing training on equitable, inclusive, and effective engagement techniques into the core curriculum. 
  • Among the explicit course goals in Planning History and Theory are for students to develop an understanding of structural disparities and injustices with regard to race, class, gender, sexual orientation, national origin, and/or physical ability; and to identify concepts and tools planners can employ to disrupt such structures to advance an inclusive public interest and socially just communities. 
  • In the 2022 Spring semester, the Urban Development course had the opportunity to review and provide input on the APA’s draft Zoning Equity Policy Guide being developed by the Zoning and Law Division of the APA. (The lead on this policy task force, Don Elliott, is a MURP long-time adjunct faculty member.) 
  • Within the core Urban Sustainability course, students explore the history and the current state of the environmental justice movement. The course addresses questions such as What are the origins of the uneven distribution of environmental goods and bads with which communities contend?  How can environmental inequity be measured?  And, how do environmental problems reflect and exacerbate social inequities? 
  • Many courses across our curriculum feature real-world projects that focus on bringing meaningful change to disadvantaged communities.
  • In courses across our curriculum, as well as throughout our extra-curricular activities, we intentionally invite diverse guest lecturers.