Peralta’s Equity Rubric

Peralta Community College District logoIf you haven’t seen this before, I think this is a pretty big deal: Peralta Community College’s Equity Rubric. I have been thinking about this for a while now. There are similar efforts around Edu. There are some that attempt to assess diversity and inclusion but they use terms that are not well defined or are vague. One diversity and inclusion rubric I read from the University of Rhode Island included “actions” such as “can understand” which would be hard to demonstrate, and used sociological references from 1967.

According to their website, the “Peralta Equity Rubric is a research-based course (re)design evaluation instrument designed to help online teachers make the online course experience more equitable for all students.”

The rubric’s criteria include:

  • addressing students’ access to technology and different types of support (both academic and non-academic);
  • increasing the visibility of the instructor’s commitment to inclusion;
  • addressing common forms of bias (e.g., image and representation bias, interaction bias);
  • helping students make connections (e.g., between course topics and their lives with the other students);
  • and following universal design for learning principles.

As a consultant and instructional designer – this is very interesting. These are actually things that we can DO to make the educational experience more inclusive. This is exactly what Dr. Eddie Moore, Jr. was asking us at the Rendezvous 2018 conference: what is in your portfolio? We need to come up with ways to document and analyze our work toward inclusiveness rather than discuss what we think or believe. Developing rubrics like this is a concrete step in that direction.

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