The Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Justice Leadership master's program is designed to prepare you to become an effective, informed, and skilled leader who can facilitate the creation and development of just and inclusive organizations. Graduates from this program go on to become chief diversity officers, DEIJ managers and directors, consultants, educational administrators, human resources professionals, and corporate leaders equipped with the tools to strengthen their organizations and communities.
Tufts offers this program in two formats: a residential option, which offers both in-person and online courses, and a fully online option, which offers courses in a range of fully synchronous to partially asynchronous. Both tracks allow students to pursue the program either full-time or part-time.
To be an effective leader in anti-racist and anti-bias efforts, you must understand the complex sociological, economic, and historical contexts that have led to conscious and unconscious biases, discrimination, and marginalization. The Tufts Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Justice Leadership master's program is designed to provide the foundation and tools to serve as change agents in this pursuit for inclusive excellence.
As a graduate of the Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Justice Leadership master's program, you will be prepared to implement changes to enhance diversity, inclusion, and equity; design and evaluate programs to enact change; and lead organizations through sustainable transformation. You will develop a deep understanding of foundational and scholarship while acquiring practical tools to implement changes within and across organizations and institutions.
You will join students from a variety of backgrounds and scholarly fields, all united in their desire to explore diversity in interdisciplinary contexts. Upon completion of the Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Justice Leadership master's program, you will be capable of:
• Engaging in organizational observation using appropriate methods
• Implementing necessary changes to enhance equity and prevent marginalization
• Prioritizing these changes based on the culture and needs of the organization
• Designing and evaluating programs to enact these changes
• Leading organizations through sustainable transformation
This program is interdisciplinary and courses are prepared and delivered from multiple perspectives. Additionally, the program collaborates with faculty from several departments such as Education, Psychology, Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning, and Child Study and Human Development departments in course and curriculum development process.
This program is dynamic and flexible in order to meet the needs of our students and is available in a residential or fully online format. Both program formats allow students to pursue their degree full-time (minimum of 9 credits per semester) or part-time.
Students enrolled full-time can complete the program within two years if some courses are taken over the summer. Students interested in the full-time option are admitted for Fall entry, though they may choose to accelerate the program by taking courses during the summer of their admission year. Part-time students may be admitted in Fall or Spring.
Students enrolled part-time typically take two to three years to complete the program. The availability of courses online and in the evening makes the part-time study option particularly appealing for students who are balancing their education with full-time or part-time employment.
The Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Justice Leadership program is committed to holistically reviewing all applications. This means that each application will undergo a balanced review across all components to assess the student's fit with the program.
See Tuition and Financial Aid information for GSAS Programs. Note: This program is eligible for federal loans and Tufts tuition scholarships.
Average Salary: $90K - $150K+
Average Age: 32
*Sources: GSAS-SOE Graduate Exit Survey 2020 - 2021 and Academic Analytics (Alumni Insights)
Research/Areas of Interest: Social Cognition, Stereotyping, Prejudice, Discrimination
Research/Areas of Interest: Sustainability policy and planning; environmental and food justice; intercultural cities
Research/Areas of Interest: Organizational Leadership Lived Experiences of CDOs
Research/Areas of Interest: Linda's research interests include developing effective partnerships between higher education and public schools, training teachers to teach in urban settings, and integrating technology into classroom teaching. Her articles and book reviews have been published in Childhood Education, International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, The Newslink, Helping Young Children Learn, and Massachusetts Department of Education publications.
Research/Areas of Interest: Animal Cognition and Learning
Research/Areas of Interest: Environmental health; occupational health; economic analysis
Research/Areas of Interest: Social welfare and housing policy; policy implementation; public and nonpro.t management
Research/Areas of Interest: Org Leadership; International DEI; Adult Learning; Executive Coaching
Research/Areas of Interest: Adult learning; online education; mentoring; experiential learning
Research/Areas of Interest: • Solidarity economies and economic democracy • Community land trusts • Popular education, social movements, community organizing • Community and climate resilience.
Research/Areas of Interest: Early childhood education, school success of young children at risk due to poverty, parenting and family-school partnerships in diverse ethnocultural communities, culturally inclusive STEM curriculum, community-based research collaborations.
Research/Areas of Interest: Families and children in challenging circumstances; parenting and family functioning among diverse families; ethnic-racial socialization processes; cultural and contextual influences; child and youth outcomes; adoption and foster care
Research/Areas of Interest: Educational Equity, Teacher Education, Critical Race Theory, Social Context of Schooling, Urban Schooling, Multicultural Education
Research/Areas of Interest: I approach my research through a lens of reflexivity, with an understanding that my own experiences and positions in the world have shaped the focus of my work. It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that as the effeminate child of a single mother, raised by a network of powerful women, with aspirations to raise children and in daycare throughout childhood, I was driven to study clinical and developmental psychology, as well as to deepen my studies of gender. I've always been fascinated by children and the relationships they co-construct with adults. For eight years I mostly focused on studying those raised outside of the context of a "traditional" family using (developmental) psychology lenses. My previous research projects demystified and reimagined Attachment Theory. We assessed the quality of Mexican public daycare settings -becoming the first study in Latin America that used the q-sort methodology to describe professional secondary caregiver-child interactions-; described parental sensitivity and attachment security in lesbian and gay parented families -an avant-garde project in testing the universality and the sensitivity hypothesis with other than heterosexual parents-, and centered the experiences of Black and Brown scholars to push the attachment field toward anti-racism. I lead a research team that analyzed the pedagogical function of legal protections of LGB individuals for promoting social changes, specifically the role of contact and comfort in shaping attitudes toward same-sex parenting in 15 countries. I also lead another group that examined parenting aspiration among folks with diverse sexual orientations and gender identities, and its association with internalized homo/transnegativity and community connectedness to the LGBTQ community -the first world-wide study including trans and plurisexual participants-. In Fall 2021, I joined the Eliot-Pearson Department of Child Study and Human Development at Tufts University as an Assistant Professor. I dedicated my first months in the U.S. to wrap up ongoing projects in Latin America. In 2022, Dr. Ellen Pinderhughes asked me to conduct further analysis on their pioneering "Gay Fathers" dataset and lead an article. I decided to focus on Latinx gay fathers' pathways to parenthood, social stigma, helpfulness of social relationships and comfort being out (manuscript in progress). Now I had the resources to book an eye examination and renew my prescription. It turns out that my near vision ([developmental] psychology) was okay but I needed to correct my farsightedness. Since my times in my beloved Mexico City, I've been thinking that psychology is often a frustratingly narrow discipline which tends to privatize, individualize, and depoliticize the phenomena it studies (Kitzinger, 1995). Don't get me wrong, is not that we don't have top Optometrists in the Majority World, but now I had the privilege to be covered by an elite health insurance that allows me to choose a provider. Via by my Faculty Research Funds, and the Summer Scholars Program 2022, Office of the Provost, I led the project "How Do Children Identifying Beyond the Gender Binary and Their Parents Understand Gender?" To the best of my knowledge, no research team had directly asked 5-8 y/o non-binary (enby) children about what being enby means to them (i.e., a child-centered approach which prioritizes their experiences over adult–centric narratives). When recruiting for the aforementioned project, I learned about Trans formative Schools (TfS) and my life transformed. TfS is a new, progressive education initiative centering transness and social justice. We are a community of students, educators, and families whose collective mission is to support trans futures. To trans is a way of seeing and knowing; an epistemological position to produce dissident forms of knowledge (i.e., brand new prescription lenses). Our mission of transing education embodies the work of liberation through rigorous academics, joyful connections, identity exploration, and progressive practice. TfS seeks to move toward societal systemic change, equipping our students with the scaffolding to challenge racist, ableist, transphobic, transmisogynistic, and other white supremacist systems of oppression. TfS co-founder Alaina Daniels and I co-constructed a longitudinal research proposal to facilitate trans-led ways of building, identifying, and testing evidence in order to trans education by centering and uplifting trans people in the design, execution, and application of research as the practice of education is fundamentally a relational one. We will apply a Youth Participatory Action Research-mixed-methods approach to explore how a middle school, designed toward subverting the cis-supremacist systems that govern educational practice, impacts the belongingness, health, wellness, and learning outcomes of trans students and communities. Through this condensed overview of my past, present, and future as a researcher I intend to illustrate not only how my vision has changed and will keep changing, but my commitment to investigate how historical and contemporary structural inequalities disproportionately shape outcomes for marginalized folks, families, communities, and institutions that serve them.
Research/Areas of Interest: Special Education, human development, teaching and learning, adolescence, gender, equity in education, qualitative research methods, child and adolescent literature and literacy, writing
Research/Areas of Interest: Memory and Aging