Projects / Southwest Minnesota State University,
Project Title: Promoting Pluralism and Academic Freedom on Campus PI: Judy Wilson, Director of Creative Writing. Location: Office of the President.
The University’s service region, including four Dakota Reservations, is situated to open dialogues between Indigenous Peoples of America and the Euro-American population that dominates the campus and the community. The project is an effort to create a campus environment in which faculty feel free to discuss sensitive or controversial subjects. It aims to educate faculty regarding difficult political, religious, racial, and cultural issues specific to the region and to the growing international population and to serve the needs of the much neglected Indigenous Peoples population on and off campus.
The project intends to strengthen faculty capacity to deal with political, religious, racial, and cultural issues specific to the region and its changing population and to better serve the needs of the Indigenous Peoples population. It aims to create student awareness of these needs through curricular and co-curricular activities.
The project will support four activities. First, it will connect the campus community to the annual conference hosted by the Indigenous Nations and Dakota Studies Program. Second, it will create four new undergraduate courses dealing with difference. Third, it will conduct two Faculty Development Awareness Sessions to build faculty strength on issues of difference. And fourth it will partially support the publication of a biannual journal of Indigenous writing, art, and thought to promote and highlight indigenous writers and artists.
See the project's site here.