📓 1.0.0.03 Making Epicodus an Inclusive Place
One part of being at Epicodus is making it a place where everybody can feel like part of our class's community. Before class starts, read this article about the experience of a black woman after 13 years of working in tech:
"The Other Side of Diversity" by Erica Joy Baker If you're a person of color, a woman, or another minority, you might find it helpful to hear about Erica's experience. If you're not a minority, use it as an opportunity to better understand how it might feel to be in that position, and what you can do to make everybody in our class feel like they fit in.
Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Curriculum​
Like Erica Joy Baker's experience demonstrates, the tech industry has traditionally not been a diverse place. We at Epicodus are committed to changing that. Epicodus coursework includes Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) curriculum to intentionally engage with important topics in DEI in order to encourage personal reflection and growth. If we are going to make a safe and inclusive learning community at Epicodus, and if we are going to work towards improving diversity in Tech, we need to approach it together, intentionally.
In this lesson, we introduce the five principle aspects of our DEI curriculum. All of these are outlined below.
Community Agreements​
DEI discussions can be emotionally charged and uncomfortable at times, so we created a set of community agreements to guide students towards a respectful and educational conversation. In the next pre-work lesson, we will review the community agreements in detail. You can also find the community agreements listed on Discord's #welcome channel, and at this location on LearnHowToProgram.com.
At Epicodus, learning about diversity, equity, and inclusion is an important part of our curriculum and we ask all students to take it as seriously as learning how to code.