Graduate Certificate in Diversity LEADERSHIP

Advancing Multicultural, Intercultural, and Intergroup Relations

through Dialogue and Action

CERTIFICATE DESCRIPTION: The Graduate Certificate in Diversity Leadership is an innovative diversity education program geared for professionals who teach, facilitate, train and lead in educational, community, corporate and public settings. The overall purpose of this four-course, 12-credit hour graduate program is to create reflective practitioners who require advanced skills, knowledge and strategies to implement diversity-oriented pedagogy, programs, practices and policies. The broader vision is that certificate holders will contribute to the creation of responsible, ethical citizens able to collaborate in an increasingly diverse world.

Participant Feedback: The course gave me a theory and practice for facilitating dialogue about diversity. I've been teaching race studies for years, without knowledge of how to create trust, the kind of trust needed for true dialogue.

PEDAGOGY: The GCDL is based on Transformational Social Therapy (TST), a process used internationally to promote knowledge sharing and collaborative action involving diverse parties in municipalities, civil society, educational settings, and other public arenas. TST is informed by the theory and practice of multicultural citizenship and theory and research on learning and equitable social change in the context of diversity. TST’s grounding in depth psychology and critical social theory provides a robust understanding of the ways human needs and social structures interact and influence intergroup behavior.

This certificate will take participants through the unique TST approach to working with groups with a history of conflict based on such factors as race, gender, class, sexualorientation, religion and national origin. Participants will develop an essential skill for intergroup leadership and facilitation.The relevant knowledge includes (a) the social and professional “masks” people wear; (b) engaging fears, hatreds, and prejudices; and (c) psychoanalytical dynamics, including projection and transference. For an extended overview of the certificate model and course descriptions, please click here.

Charles Rojzman, a renowned French social psychologist, author, and international consultant, invented Transformational Social Therapy twenty years ago as a method for transforming institutions by helping people address the hatred and violence that separate them and prevent them from working together. Rojzman has been introducing professionals in the Philadelphia region to Transformational Social Therapy through the GCDL at Temple since 2009. For a brief description of Transformational Social Therapy by Charles Rojzman on video, please click here. Rojzman gave the keynote address at Temple Unviersity on June 20, 2012 to members of the Pennylvania Association of Liaisons and Officers of Multicultural Affairs.

Participant Feedback: As a professional the course has helped me understand how to deal with conflict in the workplace in a healthy positive way. I am not as afraid of it as I was before. I understand that to bring any work team together you have to build trust and harmonize their motivations.

CERTIFICATE AND CURRICULUM: This is a four-course Graduate Certificate in Diversity Leadership. The GCDL is jointly sponsored by Temple University’s College of Education and Office of Institutional Diversity, Equity, Advocacy and Leadership. Both the course and certificate are open to Temple students and employees, as well as professionals interested in advancing their knowledge and skills in diversity facilitation. The entire program includes four, three credit courses.

The four courses include:

• Course 1: Educational Administration--Emotions, Diversity, and Democratic Leadership: This course introduces students to relevant literature on emotional intelligence, leadership and diversity and to the practice of leading diverse groups. Leading diverse groups requires, first, the group leader’s self-awareness about his/her own positionality and attitudes regarding diversity; and second, the capacity to develop trust and shared motivations among diverse group members. You can download a generic copy of the syllbaus by clicking here.
• Course 2: Urban Education--Special Topics: Group Practices for Multicultural Democracies: This course builds on Course 1 and deepens students’ understanding of how to work with diverse groups in educational settings. We review our personal and professional masks, their origins in unmet human needs, and the ways our fears influence our attitudes toward authority and power and thus our ability to experience and participate in democratic group life.
• Course 3: Educational Administration--Educational Reform: In this course we explore educational reform practices in the larger context of diversity and ways to use diversity as a resource in reforms. We move from personal and interpersonal work with diversity leadership to exploring institutional contexts for reform practice. This includes exploring how power relations affect us and the institutions in which we work and how we can use positive power to support collaborative reform practices.
• Course 4: Urban Education--University-School-Community Partnerships: The course revisits and deepens the framework developed in previous courses. It introduces models, practices, and theories for developing partnerships involving diverse groups, between schools, universities, community-based groups/agencies, and neighborhoods.

Participant Feedback: I was able to put to use the skills learned in class, immediately.

COST AND REGISTRATION: Participants in the Graduate Certificate in Diversity Leadership program will register for certificate courses through the College of Education. While any graduate student can enroll in the first course, all subsequent courses are reserved for certificate participants. For non-Temple employees, the cost for a 3-credit graduate course is $2061 for in-state and $2883 for out-of-state students, in addition to university fees, for the 2012-2013 academic year. Temple employees can apply their tuition remission benefit toward the cost of the course; however, university fees are required for all students.

Individuals interested in pursuing the Graduate Certificate in Diversity Leadership must complete a registration background survey, provide evidence of completing a bachelor's degree, and register for the first course in the program. For complete registration information and procedures, please click here.

CERTIFICATE SCHEDULE--2013-2014:

Course #1 is a prerequisite for subsequent courses. All courses are offered on-site with no online options on the main campus of Temple University.

Course#1: September 7-8 (Sat: 9-5 Sun: 10-3) and 13-15 (Friday: 3:30pm-9:30pm, Sat: 9am-6pm, and Sun: 10am-5pm.) Enrollment deadline is August 2.

Course#2: November 8-10 and 15-17. Friday: 3:30pm-9:30pm, Saturday: 9am-6pm, and Sunday: 10am-5pm.

Course#3 (2014): February  7-9 and 14-16.Friday: 3:30pm-9:30pm, Saturday: 9am-6pm, and Sunday: 10am-5pm.

Course#4 (2014): April 4-6 and 11-13.Friday: 3:30pm-9:30pm, Saturday: 9am-6pm, and Sunday: 10am-5pm.

__________________________________________________________________ CERTIFICATE FACULTY: The Certificate utilizes faculty with a wide range of experiences as university faculty, administrators, researchers and scholars. Dr. Novella Keith, an Associate Professor of Urban Education at Temple, has been the chief academic visionary for the Certificate. Charles Rojzman, an internationally known consultant and creator of Transformational Social Therapy, has partnered with Temple University to provide instruction in TST, a method of helping people address the hatred and violence that separate them and prevent them from working together.Through the Charles Rojzman Institute, Rojzman has done extensive work in resolving intergroup violence and conflicts in France, Rwanda, Chechnya, and Israel.

INFORMATION: Contact Person: Tchet Dereic Dorman, Director, Center for Social Justice and Multicultural Education,Office of Institutional Diversity, Equity, Advocacy and Leadership, Temple University, Conwell Hall, Suite 303, Mail Code 033-00, 1801 N. Broad Street, Philadelphia, PA 19122, Office Phone: 215-204-5509, Fax: 215-204-8052, E-mail: tchet@temple.edu. For information about the Urban Education Program, please contact Dr. Novella Keith at 215-204-6940 or keithnov@temple.edu.