Digital Civility

With the continued popularity of online communication platforms and increased social media, we’ve all become publishers. We are eager to express ourselves and our opinions on our various social media outlets. But, are we giving consideration to whether we are using those outlets well? Are we being civil and respectful to one another? Are we fostering open communication and the meaningful exchange of ideas? Is there a downside to all of this social media communication?

ASHA is all about communication—and encouraging civility and basic respect for one another on all platforms. Check out www.asha.org/about/civility/ for background, guiding principles, civility scenarios, tools, guidelines, and references/resources. These tiles provide information for you to learn what ASHA and YOU can do to promote civility in the professions.

Resource—Designing for Inclusion: A Checklist

Here’s a new resource from The Learning Guild. In Designing for Inclusion: A Checklist, you’ll find a detailed list of questions that you should consider when creating your learning. This checklist has four categories:

1. Interpersonal Relationships
2. Systems and Processes
3. Culture
4. Person-Centered Design: Considerations for the Learner Persona

The Learning Guild is a community of eLearning professionals, where everyone has full access to all research reports and hundreds of online session recordings. You can download the checklist after joining The Learning Guild. There is no cost to join.

More on DEI – Unconscious Bias Training Using Free Resources

Hanger, the parent company of Accelerated Care Plus, an ASHA Approved CE Provider, has been conducting Unconscious Bias workshops since 2019, leveraging free public resources from Facebook (Managing Unconscious Bias) and from the nonprofit organization Project Implicit. Videos from Facebook’s program, along with social attitudes tests from Project Implicit, are key components of the Hanger workshops. In 2020, Hanger announced a comprehensive Diversity and Inclusion pledge that included a commitment to expanding the training. The workshop topics included performance and performance attribution bias, maternal bias, and competence/likeability tradeoff bias.

A workgroup led by Lisa Lodyga-Uhl, Hanger’s Chief Diversity and Inclusion Officer, created workshop guides and recruited interested Diversity and Inclusion (D&I) Ambassadors to facilitate these workshops. Accelerated Care Plus’s Continuing Education Administrator John Tawfik put his adult learning skills to use facilitating a number of these workshops with an aim to impact ACP’s Clinical Services. Each facilitation guide detailed the amount of time planned for each set of topic, content, and facilitator talking points. No one needed to be an expert—they just needed to be willing to guide the conversation. Staff attending each session arrived having watched the assigned video and having completed the identified implicit association test. At the end of each of the three sessions, staff were asked the same question: “What steps can this team take to elevate the discussion about bias, raise awareness, and mitigate the impact of bias?”

So . . . what about that impact? One meaningful change that Tawfik has noticed is that his in-house presenters are now more likely to include information on social determinants of health in course content. They also reported greater appreciation for diversity and recognition of implicit bias when conducting educational sessions and consulting with patients of very diverse backgrounds—as opposed to when they conducted the same sessions with non-diverse populations.