“What does your name mean to you?” Micah Weiss ’10 asked a group of 15 first-year and transfer students gathered in the Nicolson Lounge last Sunday night. After receiving these instructions for the icebreaker, the students split off into pairs to discuss the origins of their names, as well as their likes and dislikes of them.

Weiss and Marcus Warmington ’09 are the WesDEFs—Wesleyan Diversity Education Facilitators—for Nicolson 5 and 5.5, as well as Clark 1 and Clark 2. Every month, Warmington and Weiss, as well as 17 other WesDEFs, will lead discussions focused around power, identity and oppression in first-year and transfer halls across campus. Each pair (and one group of three) is assigned four halls to work with and meets with the same group every month.

According to its mission statement, the WesDEF program conducts workshops, in which students facilitate conversations about race, gender, sexual orientation, class and other identities and their effect on community.

“[WesDEF seeks] not to provide answers but to incite questions and to provide participants with the knowledge and tools for further personal explorations and social awareness,” the mission statement continues. “Workshops will also help to create a space that emphasizes safety to engage in productive in-depth dialogue to promote understanding about how oppression works at Wesleyan and in society.”

Founded in 2005 by Iris Jacob ’06, WesDEF first ran through the academic year of 2005-2006 as a program affiliated with Residential Life, which gave monetary compensation to the facilitators.

“It was a really innovative and creative program and something that was absolutely necessary for the Wesleyan community,” said Molly Birnbaum ’09, who was part of this original team and is part of the new one—in which none of the facilitators receive pay—as well.

When Jacobs graduated in 2006, the program ran under a WesDEF intern in the Office of Diversity and Academic Achievement (ODAA). According to Birnbaum, however, administrative differences caused the program to fall apart in the fall of 2006.

The ODAA then sent out applications for WesDEFs in the spring of 2007. Birnbaum noted that since the applications were due during reading week, only five students applied—all five, including the former WesDEF intern, were hired.

The new WesDEFs spent the fall of 2007 working with Dean for Diversity and Student Engagement Danny Teraguchi and the ODAA to try to revamp the program. However, because there were only five of them, Teraguchi designed a different program model specifically for a group of their size and also presented the students with the option to create their own program. When the new facilitators still didn’t have a plan of action at the end of the fall semester, they decided to split from the ODAA and start their own group.

“We had Danny’s support and he told us he hoped we’d apply for a grant from the ODAA [even after the split], which we did end up getting in the spring,” said Sarice Greenstein ’10, one of the five ODAA WesDEFs and the only one who is still a WesDEF now. “He always presented us with the option that we could be a student group and then we wouldn’t have to report to him or work within his budget.”

Additionally, the ODAA budget didn’t allow for any more WesDEF’s to be hired, and at that point the program had shrunk to four.

“The only people who applied were white women and it’s important for WesDEF to have different groups of people,” Greenstein said. “We needed more support. This wasn’t WesDEF. We needed more people. We were all inexperienced with WesDEF—it just didn’t make any sense.”

After registering as a student group with the Community Outreach Committee (COCo), Greenstein and the other three WesDEFs spent the spring of 2008 trying to recruit new members so that the program could at last be revived this fall—no workshops had occurred over the 2007-2008 year.

“We had a training in the spring, but afterwards we still didn’t feel adequately prepared to go do workshops in the dorms,” said Sara Quinn ’11, who joined WesDEF that spring. “We also thought that the process of recruitment was not finished.”

Birnbaum explained the difficulties of recruiting from all communities within the student body.

“Outreach can’t just be in e-mail, it needs to be an effort,” Birnbaum said. “It was a very organic process. It was a coordinated process to reach out to all different types of people.”

Students continued to join the program at the end of the semester and throughout the summer, until there were 19 WesDEF’s, six of whom now make up a Coordinating Committee, which meets weekly to set the group’s agenda.

The problem remained, however, that Birnbaum was the only WesDEF who had been part of the organization in its earlier form—and therefore the only one who had had facilitation training. Over the summer, Birnbaum attended a three-day anti-racism workshop and a one-day anti-oppression workshop so that she could be a resource for the new WesDEF’s. There, she met Rosaida Morales Rosario ’72 and Deanne Shapiro—of Rosario/Shapiro Consulting Group, which specializes in diversity training—who agreed to come to the University during orientation and train the WesDEFs.

Two days after the freshmen arrived at the University, the WesDEFs met to begin their three-day intensive training, which ran from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. on Thursday, Friday and Saturday. While Rosario and Shapiro ran roughly half of the training—and at no charge—former Visiting Professor of Sociology Eyal Rabinovitch led a session on group facilitation and conflict mediation, and Birnbaum supplemented the rest with her knowledge from the summer. Bon Appétit even agreed to provide food for the group while they were staying on campus.

“The training was really intensive, because of the hours, the difficulty of the subject matter, and the difficulty of making a functioning group,” Quinn said. “But it was also a really exciting experience to see the group come together, to get to know each other, and to realize that the program was actually going to happen.”

Bulaong Ramirez ’11 described one particularly powerful training activity in which facilitators split up into those who identify as white and those who identify as students of color, and had each group answer four questions: What we want you to know but would never say? What we never want to see from you? What we never want you to see from us? What we never want to hear, see or experience again?

Each group had to discuss amongst themselves, and then appoint two representatives to stand in the middle of the circle and read their groups’ responses, while the remainder of the facilitators remained quiet.

“It was something I had never thought to do before,” Ramirez said. “I think it was a really healthy activity, and it was really empowering, I think, for both sides.”

Quinn, who was one of her group’s representatives in the center of the circle, agreed.

“For me, it was the most important moment of the training,” she said. “Because it was a moment when I had to answer to myself and I had to answer to the group.”

After the training, the WesDEFs began their facilitations with their assigned halls.

“Going into your first facilitation and meeting your hall for the first time, even if you go in with a plan, you’re still going to have to adjust to the dynamic of the halls,” Ramirez said. “All you can do is pay attention to the mood of the group during the facilitation, because some students have heard about issues of oppression millions of times but others have not technically been exposed to it on a greater level.”

Quinn explained that the slightly improvisatory aspect of the facilitation fits in line with the program’s mission.

“It’s intended to be generated by the students who participate,” she said. “They will generate the content of the program in their conversations, through their questions, their experiences and their response to WesDEF. We’re there to listen to them and to help them listen to each other, while acting as a resource for their conversations.”

Birnbaum stressed this collaborative element of the program as well.

“We’re not trying to preach nor do we claim to be experts or have the answers,” she said. “Right now we hope to establish ourselves on campus as an integral group in the Wesleyan community and prove ourselves and the importance of the program, as well as try to find a place within the institutional structure.”

Warmington noted that, like Ramirez and Quinn, his first facilitations have varied, as the small size of the group in the Nicolsons may have inhibited some members from feeling comfortable participating, which differed from his experience facilitating in Clark.

“Overall, in my personal experience, a smaller group is often harder than a larger one,” he said. “With a larger one, more people are willing to raise their hand and participate more, so then more people participate. It’s a domino effect. I think people just felt safer in a larger group.”

The Nicolson presentation, however, was still well received.

“Even if the Wesleyan things are a little corny and politically correct, I think the presenters are doing a really good job and they are really honest with themselves,” said Bryce Fintel ’12, who attended the session. “They were really cool.”

Rachel Goodman ’12, however, took some issue with the program’s mission.

“I feel like in this meeting and on campus in general, we are obsessed with defining our identities,” she said. “From gender pronouns to religion to politics, everyone always wants to know who you are. But I think it’s more important to just be comfortable with who you are without having to announce it or confine yourself to language and words and categories.”

Despite varied student feedback, Weiss is happy to see the program back in action.

“WesDEF was really important to me as a freshman,” he said. “And I’m really excited that it’s been revitalized for this year. It helps create a great community and a space for these dialogues.”