Date Published: 2026
Course Context
Equity and Communication: Strategies for Institutional Change is primarily conceived as a Technical and Professional Communication course, although its topics and methods draw extensively on research and concepts from Organizational Psychology, Rhetoric, Education, and Communication Studies. It is taught at Carnegie Mellon University, a private Research I university in the Midwestern United States. The English Department at Carnegie Mellon offers undergraduate degrees in Professional Writing and Technical Writing, master’s degrees in Professional Writing and Rhetoric, and a Ph.D. program in Rhetoric. Students from all of these programs enroll in the course, alongside undergraduates from outside the department for whom the course often fulfills a general education requirement in either Communication and Expression or Perspectives on Justice and Injustice. As a result, the course brings together students with diverse disciplinary backgrounds, levels of expertise, and professional interests.
The course is designed for a 14-week semester and combines scholarly reading, discussion, rhetorical analysis, and applied project work. Because students come from a wide range of disciplines, assignments are structured to encourage them to apply course concepts to professional, organizational, and social contexts relevant to their own interests and career goals.
Reflection
This course is built around the short textbook Equity & Communication, part of the new Bedford Series in Technical and Professional Communication. My goal in writing the Equity & Communication textbook was to integrate extensive research on equitable communication from educational and organizational psychology into an accessible, classroom-oriented resource focused on professional applications. While this action-oriented scholarship utilizes core concepts like rhetorical framing and audience analysis, it remains largely unknown in the fields of Technical and Professional Communication, Rhetoric, and Writing Studies.
The course and the textbook are built around the following themes and topics:
- How stereotypes shape our perceptions of different forms of communication and the steps we can take to reduce their influence
- The inequities that emerge in public and professional meetings, and how meetings can be structured to promote more equitable participation
- Strategies for avoiding the inequities that often arise when providing feedback to others
- Why the dominance of English as a global language is an equity issue, and what native English speakers can do to help minimize these inequities
- How to design documents and communications that are accessible to people with disabilities
- Why psychological safety in workplaces is an equity issue and how organizations can cultivate it
- How to advocate for more equitable organizations using arguments that extend beyond equity-based appeals, such as making the business case for reform or drawing on organizational traditions and values to support equitable policies and practices
The final course project asks students to create and justify a bias-reduction artifact. To support this work, students review research on communication interventions that have produced meaningful—and often measurable—improvements for underrepresented groups. Examples of these research-backed interventions include:
- An hour-long workshop designed to strengthen students’ sense of social belonging, which has been shown to improve the GPAs and graduation rates of Black students and women in STEM
- Videos and posters highlighting peers’ pro-diversity attitudes, which have been shown to improve minoritized students’ sense of inclusion and academic performance
- Bias reduction training in hiring practices, which led to an 18-percentage-point increase in the hiring of women faculty in STEM departments
Alongside this research on successful interventions, students read research on the many diversity training programs, diversity messaging strategies, or other equity-based initiatives that do not live up to their promise, or, in some cases, backfire and reinforce existing biases or normalize biased behaviors.
In this project, students research a topic that has not been covered extensively in the course and identify equity-focused research related to that area. Drawing on this research, students propose a bias-reduction artifact, which may take the form of a workshop or training, a poster or video campaign, a proposal directed toward a particular organization or community, or other media. Students then use scholarly research to justify the design and potential effectiveness of their artifact.
Examples of successful bias-reduction artifacts developed in this course include:
- A training program for healthcare professionals aimed at reducing LGBTQ bias in healthcare settings
- A negotiation script designed to help working mothers request maternity leave and workplace accommodations while minimizing backlash
- A revised mental health handbook adapted to better address the needs and experiences of Asian Americans
- A proposal urging university officials to allow students to select “multiracial” as a distinct category on institutional reporting forms
Because of the constraints of the semester timeline, students are not required to fully implement their artifact. Instead, they submit a prototype or detailed proposal outlining the artifact they would create. Most of the project grade is based on students’ ability to explain how their artifact draws on research-backed communication and equity strategies while avoiding approaches that research has shown to be ineffective or counterproductive.
The assignment is both intellectually challenging and creative. Students often need to question their initial instincts in order to develop a document that is rhetorically effective and grounded in research. Projects that require substantial revision—which often reflects significant opportunities for learning—typically include artifacts with messaging that unintentionally reinforces biases or artifacts that fail to incorporate communication strategies shown to be especially effective in a particular context.
Overall, the course encourages students to approach equity-focused communication as a research-driven and rhetorically complex practice. Through sustained engagement with scholarship, revision, and applied problem solving, students develop strategies for creating communications and organizational practices that are both more effective and more equitable.
