By Piper Rutherford | Staff Writer
Leave Your Mark training sessions allow for students to realize their own biases and limited perspectives as they prepare for a culturally diverse world beyond Baylor.
Tranquility Gordon, associate director of Multicultural Affairs, said that the sessions are guided by the faithful trajectory model for cultural engagement by Dr. Kevin Villegas, dean of intercultural engagement. The model is expected to help students understand how to develop a respectful posture of humility.
“This is why individuals are coming to talk on campus like David Brooks,” Gordon said. “They are teaching students how to be a leader for the common good, which starts with becoming our best selves and getting to know one another deeply from a place of humility, passion and responsibility.”
In doing so, the training sessions offer students the chance to teach one another about how to be vulnerable when acknowledging their mistakes so that they can realize no one is perfect.
“We all make mistakes, but what we focus on in these sessions is how [I can] correct a mistake I made with compassion in the future,” Gordon said. “Whether the mistake you made was calling someone by the wrong name or holding the door open for someone who did not want you to, both of these examples require the realization of ‘I offended someone, and that is okay, but how can I now resolve this situation with civility?’”
According to Gordon, this sense of taking accountability for one’s actions is one of the advantages of these sessions, which help students learn how sit in the discomfort of being wrong or offensive as they work to become a better version of themselves.
Similarly, Senior Coordinator for Education and Training Priscilla Serrato said that some of the topics that are open for discussion at these meetings include microaggressions, cultural humility and cultural competence.
“We ask that students converse with other Baylor students who come from different backgrounds so that everyone can better understand how systemic inequalities and identities come to fruition,” Serrato said. “This starts with promoting self-awareness for students to identify their similarities and differences with other students and how this may allow them to become more caring individuals towards others.”
A caring community is essential for students to learn as they wrap up their college education, and prepare to go beyond the classroom, and beyond the walls of Baylor, Gordon said.
“During these sessions, the facilitators are preparing students not only for compassion towards their peers in the classroom, but for a worldwide community,” Gordon said. “We are all interconnected, and these training sessions help equip students with the necessary tools to go out into the world and have meaningful conversations with people who are different than them.”
