Assistant professor of theater Melanie Dreyer-Lude has always felt comfortable incorporating such diversity issues as gender and sexual orientation in her classes. But with race and ethnicity, she stood on less stable ground.

For example, she had cast African-American students in white roles but never felt comfortable with the reverse. She also wondered if she shouldn't be offering roles to African-Americans that had been written by African-American playwrights. But some students didn't necessarily want to be identified primarily by their race, she said. "And I didn't want to impose that on them."

Dreyer-Lude and 18 other Cornell professors found ways to better navigate those complex territories at the Cornell Faculty Institute for Diversity, held June 7-10 at the ILR Conference Center. The institute provided participants with the intellectual and pedagogical tools to infuse diverse perspectives into their courses and among their students. Now in its second year, the institute is an initiative of Cornell's University Diversity Committee.

Some faculty members signed up because they had had class situations that they weren't sure how to handle, said Frank Tuitt, assistant professor of education at the University of Denver who co-facilitated the institute sessions with Sue Rosser, dean of Ivan Allen College, Georgia Tech's liberal arts college. Other participants talked about the limitations of their disciplines, he said. "For example, in the classics it may be hard to find ways to diversify."

Stacey Langwick, assistant professor in anthropology, was excited to learn new pedagogical techniques to foster more productive discussions about race, class and gender politics, especially in her Medicine, Culture and Society class, she said. "The course, taken by many pre-med students, requires thinking critically about the process of becoming a doctor, the ways that economics and culture shape clinical experiences and the politics of pharmaceutical research and sales," Langwick said. "I'm looking forward to drawing out and building on the experiences of the diverse students who enroll."

The institute curriculum centered on feminist theory and "inclusive excellence" -- that a high-quality, practical liberal arts education should be the standard of excellence for all students, and that diversity and intercultural competence are essential elements of a contemporary liberal arts education.

"Often we think about having to separate inclusivity and excellence, that to have one you have compromise on the other," Tuitt said. "It's been reframed to say, no, you really can't have one without the other."

After covering theory and research, Tuitt asked participants to identify how the primary aspect of their identity (i.e., geography, religion, career) affects their teaching.

"That's a hard part of the work," Tuitt said, "getting people to understand that who they are shapes the way they approach a variety of things, and teaching is just one of them."

In the last sessions, each faculty member modified a syllabus for a course they'll teach next year. Langwick may establish ground rules for interaction in a class that regularly deals with controversial subjects, so that every student feels comfortable participating. She also may introduce the debate about new race-based medicines, she said.

For Dreyer-Lude, the biggest change will be how she integrates diversity into all aspects of her teaching, she said, "… how I offer feedback to students during class presentations, how I spontaneously respond to teaching moments that provide a chance to talk about diversity and how I handle hot moments of conflict in the classroom."

And in her first class, she plans to assign scenes at random, she said. "Men may play women, whites may play a role written for an African-American, Asians could play a Latino or Latina," she said. "The institute helped me see that I can cast color-blind and gender-blind without fear."