Diversity and Scholarly Communications Librarian
Key Terms
Access - Refers to the ways in which educational institutions and policies ensure—or at least strive to ensure—that students have equal and equitable opportunities to take full advantage of their education. Increasing access generally requires schools to provide additional services or remove any actual or potential barriers that might prevent some students from equitable participation in certain courses or academic programs.
Achievement gap - Refers to any significant and persistent disparity in academic performance or educational attainment between different groups of students, such as white students and minorities, for example, or students from higher-income and lower-income households.
Class - Refers to how much wealth you have access to through property, inheritance, family support, investments, or other wealth not directly associated to wage earning. It is different than socioeconomic status.
Classism - refers to the prejudice against or in favor of people belonging to a particular class, which is a relative social rank in terms of income, wealth, education, status, and power. Also known as class discrimination, it includes the attitudes, behaviors, systems of policies, and practices of an individual or society that are set up to benefit one social class at the expense of another.
Income inequality - Regards the differences in the levels of personal income or wealth in a narrow sense; in a broader sense, it includes all the values that directly or indirectly derive from economic activities, which can be used in obtaining them or can be exchanged with them. In the first case, its interpretation is straightforward, in the second, it requires the integration of different systems of inequality that include, besides income and wealth, elements such as health, knowledge, power, or availability of public services, and so on, whose distribution among individuals does not coincide with that of income.
Opportunity gap - Refers to the ways in which race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, English proficiency, community wealth, familial situations, or other factors contribute to or perpetuate lower educational aspirations, achievement, and attainment for certain groups of students.
Socioeconomic Status - The amount of money you earn in wages each month or year. This can change rapidly.
Social Welfare - Organized educational, cultural, medical, and financial assistance to those in need. Measures of assistance include care of destitute adults; treatment of the mentally ill; rehabilitation of criminals; care and relief of the sick, the handicapped, the young, and needy families; and educational activity for children. Access to such programs is considered a basic or inalienable right of those in need.
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Boone, Laura. “Classism.” Salem Press Encyclopedia, 2019. EBSCOhost.
"Diversity, Equity & Inclusion Vocabulary," The Avarna Group. https://theavarnagroup.com/resources/equity-inclusion-diversity-vocabulary/.
"Social Welfare." The SAGE Glossary of the Social and Behavioral Sciences, edited by Larry E. Sullivan, Sage Publications, 1st edition, 2009. Credo Reference.
Somaini, Eugenio, and Somaini. "Inequality, Economic," International Encyclopedia of Political Science, Bertrand Badie, et al., Sage Publications, 1st edition, 2011. Credo Reference.
The Glossary of Educational Reform, Great Schools Partnership. https://www.edglossary.org/