Posted by blissers on Friday, December 26, 2014 in News.

Hello Crucial Conversations members and supporters! We hope you all have had an enjoyable holiday thus far.

First, some updates:

1. The current set date for the 2015 Crucial Conversations event is Thursday, January 29th at 7:00pm. Mark your calendars!
2. For those of you who attended last year’s event, we are looking for additional facilitators to help in making this event come to life! Time commitment would include a couple of trainings and meetings in January about facilitating, plus the event itself. If you are interested, please contact Richard at richard.s.blissett@vanderbilt.edu.
3. The Orientation and Mentoring task force has submitted a proposal to Dean Shields to create the Peabody IDEAS program (inter-department exploration and support), a discussion group targeted at all first year Peabody graduate students slated to start in fall 2015. These discussion groups would focus on issues around race, diversity, and the graduate student experience. We have partnered with the Center for Teaching, the Psychological and Counseling Center, and the Office for Intercultural Affairs for training the group leaders. We are also creating a coalition of Peabody faculty members to assist us with creating the curriculum.
   
4. The Peabody IDEAS program, mentioned above, is going to be piloted this spring. We need students to participate as facilitators! To read more about it and get involved, see this post from our Mentorship and Orientation task force.
5. The Recruitment and Retention task force is working on evaluating the websites of faculty and the guide to current students that gets sent out each year to get preliminary information about the current state of Peabody’s diversity.
6. The Curriculum and Teaching task force has compiled a final list of courses required at Peabody. Additionally, we have compiled a list of programs that have at least one course with a title seems to deal explicitly or implicitly with the issues core to the CC mission, as well as a list of programs for which, based on title, there do not seem to be any specific requirements to engage explicitly or implicitly with issues of race and power in a focused learning environment. We realize this just scratches the surface of what we are trying to determine, so our next step will be to decide how to assess this information on a deeper level. We welcome feedback and suggestions. More information will be shared about our findings as they are developed.

As we go into the new year, we are actively looking for additional contributors to our work. If you or someone you know here at Peabody would like to be more involved with our work, please email Richard at richard.s.blissett@vanderbilt.edu.

Lastly, the months of November and December have involved a lot of discussion about the future of this initiative and the structure of our work going forward. Thus far, the organization of the Crucial Conversations initiative has been fairly freeform, which has been equal parts liberating and challenging for many. We will be working over the next couple of months to formalize parts of our structure, and these discussions will cover things from whether to become a student organization to voting procedures to the development of bylaws. As we have not, to this point, established any specific delineation for active/inactive membership, for the purposes of these group-forming discussions, we are considering the full list of people on our mailing list to be the main stakeholders with an active voice in this process. As such, please pay attention to your emails over the next few months, as there will likely be several items from which we will be soliciting feedback from all of you.

As always, take care of yourselves, and we appreciate your support.