By MARTY LEVINE
The problem with some programs designed to encourage diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), Susan Graff noticed back in 2020, was that the participants didn’t feel connected to the issues.
“I thought at the time what was missing from DEI work was buy-in,” says Graff, assistant professor in the Department of Physician Assistant Studies at the School of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences. She heard people experience DEI programs and balk: “Why are we having this training? This isn’t an issue here.”
Then Graff took a new kind of DEI class online, featuring videos of on-camera interviews with staff, faculty and students at another university, talking about their lives, documentary style: about how their identities affected their daily existence directly.
It was so much more effective to hear how people actually experienced the world, to see how their identities really governed how others interacted with them, Graff realized.
“I was so moved by the stories of these people,” she recalled, that she contacted the course instructors at Cornell.
Now Graff’s adaptation of this idea has turned into a class called CUPID, the Community, Pedagogy, Identity and Difficulty Project: Fostering an Inclusive Community in the Schools of the Health Sciences. It is a six-week, self-paced course aimed at building community and support for underrepresented groups in the health sciences at Pitt. It recently earned one of two $500,000 Pitt Seed grants to fully develop over three years.
The pilot version of the course has several modules with many videos of Pitt faculty, staff and students in the health sciences talking about how their identities play out in their lives. They range from those with long-acknowledged marginalized identities in race and gender to those experiencing addiction (which is sometimes hidden behind the pristine image of the white lab coat).
“We all have multiple identities — personal identities that define what we are as individuals,” Graff says. Even our jobs can be a kind of identity that affects how the world sees us — or doesn’t.
The videos come with scholarly readings and other, more traditional class materials. Module 1 aims to get people to think about their own identities and experiences — “It disarms people,” Graff hopes. Some of the class activities are self-reflective, like journal entries written just for yourself.
“The second module is really the heavy stuff,” she says, covering everything from oppression to microaggressions, and “how these things manifest in the health care space,” discussion of which can make people’s armor go up, Graff notes.
No one is immune from this issue, she says: “Everyone is hurt by the usual norms we all have,” from race-based medical practices to “how racism makes us sick.”
The modules continue with discussion of “how to disrupt the system,” she says, while the culmination of the course is the CUPID Promise, which walks learners through things they can do in their own health-sciences workplace, immediately or longer term.
The biggest challenge for the course, Graff sees, is getting the word out and finding ways to get this class into the work and school time for faculty, staff and students. The largest group among the 66 people who have taken the pilot course have been students, followed by faculty and staff. She hopes eventually that CUPID could be a badge or certificate program, or even a class for credit. It might also be part of continuing education requirements for health professionals, although each profession has its own accreditation process for such offerings that might make this hard to achieve.
The Pitt videos have affected how she too sees colleagues and students, she says. One interviewee talks about recovery from alcohol abuse and how the white coats of the health-care professions don’t allow such professionals to be seen as having ordinary human problems — by themselves or others. The interviewee, and now Graff, have used this experience to be more aware of, and potentially help, students and patients with this same experience.
“And that is the best part of CUPID,” she says — offering lessons about “things we don’t think about.”
Some people, faced with DEI courses, think that, “If we acknowledge people’s identities we detract from our own,” she says. But acknowledging that others experience life differently and may have different needs “is not a zero-sum game,” she adds. “There is value in different perspectives and experiences. There is so much we don’t share with our colleagues and classmates, and the class will help us to share it.”
The principle behind the class, she adds, “is the recognition that there are things that we are going through that, if we just could share this, we will realize we have more in common than differences, and that we don’t have to be alone in our suffering.
“We’re not asking for anyone to agree with everything that is in the course,” she concludes, “but just be open to trying.” She believes it could bring “incredible change to the climate at Pitt.”
“What I want CUPID to be able to do is for people to come away from it and realize this is a problem, now, here. They don’t have to solve the problem but they are now aware of the problem.” The ultimate goal is for those who take the course “to just be kind, to give other humans space” and allow each person to be true to themselves.
Marty Levine is a staff writer for the University Times. Reach him at martyl@pitt.edu or 412-758-4859.
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