Gender and Diversity Studies

Professor Mich Nyawalo

Introduction to Gender and Diversity Studies

Professor Mich Nyawalo has been integrating community engagement within his courses for nine years.  As a relatively new faculty member at Xavier, he began designing a course that would introduce students to issues related to gender and diversity. His participation in the Eigel Center’s Academy for Community Engaged Faculty provided him with additional tools to engage his students with projects outside of the classroom led by local and national organizations tied to race, gender, immigration, and LGBTQ rights.

“I generally do not think of the classroom as this hermetically sealed space that is divorced from questions about social justice that pervade our contemporary social and political realities,” Dr. Nyawalo notes. “Instead, I want my students to think of the classroom as part of a larger community that does not just include the University but also neighborhoods and groups that populate our city.”

Nyawalo’s course, Introduction to Gender and Diversity Studies, provides an intersectional and interdisciplinary introduction to the academic study of social diversity, focusing on a number of different dimensions of privilege and oppression within the national and international context. To animate the course outcomes, Nyawalo collaborated with four organizations this fall including Equality Ohio, Casa de Paz, Cincinnati Immigrant Transit Assistance, and a University of Cincinnati digital history project. Following in class presentations at the beginning of the semester, students were able to select partners and projects that spoke to their own interests, and engage with a number of integrated service and research experiences, including tutoring and mentoring with our immigrant community, collaborative research support for a study on redlining practices, and educational and advocacy materials addressing equal rights. 

Nyawalo views these service experiences as complimentary to his in class instruction and assignments that include readings from a widely diverse group of authors representing often marginalized voices.  He also sees the integration of community engaged learning as an opportunity to introduce students directly to the organizations in communities addressing important human and civil rights issues.  He notes,

“As members of this community, when (students) learn about concepts in class - concepts such as intersectionality, for example - I want them to be able to use these ways of thinking about the world so that they can engage with social issues that are important to communities that we, as a class, or as a University, are a part of.”