Southeastern professor co-authors publication on diversity

Press Release Date: 07-12-2010

DURANT, Okla. – Dr. Lisa L. Coleman of Southeastern Oklahoma State University and Jon Kotinek of Texas A&M University have co-edited "Setting the Table for Diversity," a monograph published by the National Collegiate Honors Council.

In chapters gathered from honors administrators and honors faculty and their students from around the United States, their book argues that diversity in honors education must be coupled with equity and inclusion to be just.

Coleman, Professor of English and Director of the Southeastern Honors Program, serves as the Co-Chair of the Committee on Diversity Issues for the National Collegiate Honors Council and has recently been nominated to appear on the ballot for the 2010 Board of Directors election that will take place in fall 2010. She has planned and coordinated the Diversity Forum at the national conference since 2005 and served as a member of the NCHC conference planning committee for four national conferences, including Philadelphia (2006), Denver (2007), Washington D. C. (2009), and Kansas City (2010).

Following Sylvia Hurtado (1999) and Finnie D. Coleman (2008), Coleman and Kotinek maintain that while we may begin with "structural" diversity, or a consideration of diversity in terms of numbers, a "transformative" diversity that values and nurtures the differences we bring to our shared table is the ultimate goal. The lead chapter sets the table for diversity by calling on Hannah Arendt's "visiting imagination" as a means to adopt once unfamiliar perspectives, including feminist teaching practices. Subsequent chapters in Part I define diversity by investigating the roles that disability and ethnicity play in honors education.

Part II delves into the challenges and opportunities that diversity presents through chapters on first-generation and African American students in honors higher education and the role that curricula responsible and responsive to diversity may play in preparing students to be engaged local and global citizens. The chapters comprising Part II also explore diversity issues in relation to the fields of science, gender, sexual orientation, American literary studies, international travel and cultural studies, and First-Year Honors Composition -- the subject of Coleman's chapter, "Psyche as Text: Diversity Issues in First-Year Honors Composition." This section offers innovative pedagogical approaches that highlight the goal of social justice and the theories that inform such practices.

Part III argues that social justice calls not just for diversity, but for the trinity of diversity, equity, and inclusion in honors.

In Part IV, the monograph closes with diversity statements garnered from honors program websites and provides as well structural diversity figures on honors program student populations from a number of U.S. institutions large and small.

In addition to her work in honors education, Coleman is a Virginia Woolf scholar. Her chapter, "Writing as Unraveling: Woolf's Gendered Deconstruction of War," has been published in "The Theme of Peace and War in Virginia Woolf's Writings: Essays on Her Political Philosophy" by Edwin Mellen Press in 2010, and she has also contributed a chapter titled "Woolf's Feminism Comes in Waves" to "Virginia Woolf in Context," a book forthcoming in 2011 from Cambridge University Press.