Examining Culture

The goal of this interactive training is to provide participants with a basic awareness of cultural diversity as well as how culture influences the workplace, campus and clinical care environment at Washington University School of Medicine. The class is a combination of experiential and didactic training designed to:

  • Define diversity, equity and inclusion
  • Communicate the importance of diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives to the university
  • Explore the impact of exclusion
  • Understand the importance of being an ally.

How to attend

Sessions 1.0 and 2.0 are provided during New Employee Orientation. All employees are welcome to attend open training sessions offered monthly. In addition, departments, programs and other business units may request group training.

About 1.0 – 4.0

Diversity, equity and inclusion leaders provide a series of four one-hour group training sessions on the fundamentals of diversity education for departments, programs and other business units. Each session is designed to provide a greater understanding of:

  • What diversity means and how to define it
  • What aspects of diversity affect us (i.e., biases and prejudices)
  • How biases and prejudices manifest in our day-to-day thoughts and actions
  • How to recognize and mitigate biases and prejudices when we do encounter them

Facilitators use a standard format in each session that consists of psycho-educational presentations in the form of data from research presented in PowerPoint, and interactive, hands-on and experiential exercises to illuminate the concepts being presented.