For her efforts to transform the conversation about diversity within the College of Education, Jenny Penney Oliver won a 2009 President’s Fulfilling the Dream Award earlier this semester.
Oliver, a senior academic professional in the department of counseling and human development, won the award for spearheading the education college’s Multicultural Initiative, which has been operating for more than 15 years.
The award recognizes people at UGA and in the community who show commitment to the ideals espoused by the late Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
“In the academic environment, we have a responsibility to produce a climate where everyone can be successful, where everyone feels welcome, where we can inquire about topics that are controversial or that make people feel uncomfortable,” Oliver said. “That’s all part of a healthy academic environment and one that we feel students should be exposed to here.”
Holistic approach
The initiative was a holistic approach to increasing diversity and multicultural education in every aspect of the College of Education. The initiative asked faculty and staff to comb through syllabi, restructure courses and create more opportunities for diverse faculty recruitment and retention. For the first nine years of the program, the college also implemented diversity mini-grants designed to support faculty, staff and students working toward greater inclusion.
“Every department did an analysis of what they were doing in their courses to show multicultural education. Early on, the initiative was characterized by annual conferences that brought in prominent multicultural scholars to talk to us about what we were doing and what we could do,” she said. “It also focused on professional development. For the past 13 years, we’ve had an ongoing monthly seminar series related to multicultural education.”
Multicultural mission statement
The transformative effect of Oliver’s work began with a multicultural mission statement, which the college officially adopted on April 28, 1993. It broadly defines multicultural education and states: “The college will institute a process of continuous reflection and evaluation to accomplish the mission of multicultural education for an equitable democratic society.”
Since then, the initiative has grown and evolved within the college. Some programs have flourished while others have faded or been replaced by more focused alternatives. Overall, the college’s multicultural aims are now trained on social justice, or the concept that justice and equality should reach into every aspect of treatment instead of only administration of law.
Fighting for inclusion
Oliver is aware of the changing nature of diversity education and the battles one has to fight for inclusion. She was part of the first integrated elementary school class in Wallace, N.C.
“I was aware of how it opened my eyes to opportunities I wouldn’t have had,” she said. “It was important to me that my class do what we needed to do to get along well and to be able to do all the things the classes ahead of us got to do.
“For example, they didn’t think we should have a homecoming dance because we were integrated,” she added. “And I thought, ‘No. We’re going to have it. We need to do this.’ ”
Though she won the President’s Fulfilling the Dream Award, Oliver insisted that the faculty, staff, students and administrators throughout the College of Education were vital to the creation of a more multicultural education and experience.
“I’m very proud that our faculty and our college consistently identified diversity as a priority,” she said. “We’ve had four deans since I began, and every one of them has been supportive of the initiative and identified it as something to remain a priority.”
