Digital Diversity Guide Goes Online

For the Diversity Day (5 June 2018), the University of Siegen published a Diversity Guide. The guide bundles all services that support diversity.

How can teachers support deaf students in their seminars? Where do students from financially weaker families receive scholarship advice? Whom can expectant mothers or fathers turn to at the university? The University of Siegen offers contact points for all these cases. On the occasion of the 6th German Diversity Day, which is celebrated by all the signatories of the Charter of Diversity (5 June 2018), the University of Siegen published a Diversity Guide.

It is a compact, needs-based digital guide for university relatives dealing with various dimensions of diversity such as gender, interculturality, health impairment, socioeconomic educational background, etc. With the help of the guide, lecturers, students, and staff in technology and administration quickly find the contacts inside the university for their individual life situations and specific issues. In addition, it provides a direct overview of all target group-specific and diversity-oriented offers, measures and services at the University of Siegen. "We hope to provide pointed support for the daily teaching and consulting activities, and thus to a more open, informed and solution-oriented approach to diversity in study and teaching", says Prof. Dr. Gabriele Weiß, Prorector for Education and Diversity. The guide has emerged from the desire of many teachers and employees to bundle existing service offers to provide a better overview.

"With the guide, we would like to sensitize to the topic of diversity," says Weiß. University access and academic success should ultimately not depend on cultural or social origin, educational background or living conditions, but on individual motivation and capability.

Many of the university's institutions have participated in and contributed their expertise to the Diversity Guide, including International Student Affairs (ISA), the Equal Opportunity Office, the Inclusion Service Office, and the Student Services Unit. The action was led and initiated by the university didactics and the prorectorate for education and diversity.

On June 5th 2018 and on the following days all university members have also received a flyer for the Digital Diversity Guide in their mailbox via in-house mail.

An English-language and barrier-free version of the diversity guide is currently being edited.