Cody Warner

This month we spotlight Cody Warner and Kate Kithil, who received the College of Letters and Science Outstanding Teaching award for Teaching Approaches that Enhance Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.

Cody Warner 

Code Warner is an associate professor of sociology in the Department of Sociology & Anthropology. He joined MSU in 2013 after completing his Ph.D. in sociology at the Pennsylvania State University. Cody grew up in a small ranching community in northwestern Wyoming and started college with very little background knowledge about sociology. This is similar to many of his students, and he gets a lot of joy from helping students develop their critical perspective through Sociology. As a scholar, Cody researches the social consequences of mass incarceration. He teaches courses on crime and the criminal justice system, including Sociology of Corrections, Crime & Inequality, and Communities & Crime. He was fortunate to receive a DEI grant in 2021 to integrate the work and perspectives of BIPOC scholars in his Fall 2021 offering of Crime & Inequality.

The United States is the world leader in incarceration, and the American criminal justice system reflects and creates social inequalities. The burden of criminal justice contact has fallen disproportionately on minority and disadvantaged communities. These communities have suffered generations of systematic and structural racism, community disinvestment, and urban decay. For me, it is pivotal that my students see connections between explicit processes like redlining and contemporary patterns of concentrated disadvantage, crime, and punishment. As a result, issues related to diversity, equity, and inclusion are central to my teaching. To learn about American corrections is to know about past practices of exclusion and inequality. This means that principles of DEI are essential in moving towards a more humane and just criminal justice system.

Do you have any recommended books/resources to help others learn about DEI?

I haven't read widely enough to recommend books explicitly related to DEI. Still, I can recommend two books I've read in recent years that have stuck with me. The first, about housing, is Matthew Desmond's "Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City." The second, about incarceration and what comes next, is Reuben Miller's "Halfway Home: Race, Punishment, and the Afterlife of Mass Incarceration."

Kate Kithill

Kate Kithil

is a German lecturer in the Department of Modern Languages & Literatures (MLL) and president of the Montana Chapter of the American Association of Teachers of German (AATG). At MSU German and MLL in general, her work encourages students to become global citizens by helping them view the world through different lenses and build connections to speakers of other languages within our Bozeman community and beyond Montana. To accomplish this, she regularly integrates Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion into her teaching with units on various topics. In the past year, for example, our German students have learned about gender-inclusive language in German. But they have also discussed the meaning of "home and landscape" in their lives and then listened to members of the Crow Nation share their impressions on the topic. They have toured the American Indian Hall and taken a trip to Yellowstone with a German photographer while hearing about both places' significance from a fellow MSU Crow student. They have read, watched, and discussed poetry, film, and texts from Afro-German artists.

Furthermore, they contemplated environmental issues because they are closely tied to the DEI framework (See UN Sustainable Development Goals: https://sdgs.un.org/goals). In MSU German and MLL courses, we teach students to use their new language to learn about the world from the perspectives of people who live in other places but also that breaking down boundaries does not just happen overseas. Instead, it happens in our state, in our city, and on our campus as well.

Do you have any recommended books/resources to help others learn about DEI?

One resource we use is Manuela Wagner and Fabiana Cardetti's Teaching Intercultural Citizenship Across the Curriculum, which emphasizes the need for thinking about "culture" as a framework and creating real-life units where students take action.

Another resource we use is the Learning for Justice website, which helps teachers integrate Social Justice Standards into our units (See https://www.learningforjustice.org/frameworks/social-justice-standards).