Appendix H. Faculty of Science - Indigenization and EDI Action Plan

The Faculty of Science (FoS) at UFV has and always has run under the umbrella of tolerance, respect and fairness, including equity, diversity and inclusion (EDI) which seems to be the trending ‘item’ of the year. This is something that was built into the DNA of the sciences and is not a trend of current times or a “response to action”. EDI has been a staple to the Sciences and we don’t necessarily TALK the talk but we WALK the talk, i.e., we do it.

When I arrived in the FoS in 2012, I was one of two deans (out of 6) considered a minority because of our visible racial origins. UFV also had an Associate Dean of Research of Asian descent, so in general, UFV had been ahead of its times.

Within the FoS, the gender balance was closer to 50:50, than other units, although some units had more women representation than others. There were several nationalities of diverse racial backgrounds already represented in the faculty, including Chinese, Indian, Iranian, Latino, etc.

Fast forward to 2021 and we have increased our diversity, not because of a “call to action” but because we chose the right candidates regardless of gender, race, or chosen affinities. We chose balanced progressive scientists that were the best teachers we could find with best research/scholarly potential that we could attract to UFV.

Thus, based on this background, UFV FoS: • acknowledges and embeds Indigenous world views and Indigenous ways of knowing/being into learning practices; • uses approaches to teaching and evaluation of learning that are inclusive and respects diverse student learning needs; • incorporates universal design principles; • engages students in the global impact of concepts learned.

Our experiential learning principles teaches respect for cultures as we do with our field trips, or in our outreach events where we go to schools and teach aspects of science. We respect the environment, the land and its living entities, and this is very much in agreement with what our aboriginal ancestors have done for millenia.

We bring role models to our seminars to further engage students with what diversity has to offer. In recent years the Dean seminar series has had several speakers with diverse backgrounds: • an orthopedic surgeon of Nigerian descent (Dr Charles Ikejiani) speaking about his life experiences and how sciences got him into med school; • a Government of Canada Senator (Dr. Rosa Galvez) who is of Peruvian aboriginal descent and is an engineer and a scientist, speaking about the environment and the impacts of humans • please see more: https://ufv.ca/science/deans-office/science-speaker-series/

See also attached specific examples performed by individual faculty members. Note that there are more initiatives that have not been included here, including work by Drs. Alan Reid, Nathan Bialas, Steve Thomas, James Bedard and others (Biology), Dr.s Stan Manu, David Chu, Shaun Sun, Lonlong Huang (Math & Stats), Drs. Linus Chiang, Golfam Ghafourifar, Pedro Montoya (Chemistry). Please also check the Excel spreadsheet as noted by Dr. Stefania Pizzirani for a list of courses and indigenization efforts within SLUEC (https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1zz8sZJ6cJRqLnBuZKMrVQijwiun98uH3xbudDzzoAo/edit#gid=0 ).