Previous Offerings
Bias Busters Certification
Bias Busters Certification for groups, labs, and facilities to signify their efforts towards making their spaces safe and inclusive. The BB Certification is an optional certification that gives labs and research groups the opportunity to express to the community-at-large that their space is working at being safer. After accomplishing the training circuit, we offer our well-trusted name to ensure that students, staff, postdocs, faculty, industry partners, and other universities recognize that your group is applying themselves towards improving and creating a diverse, equitable, and inclusive space on campus that will promote belonging among students.
The BB Certification will be noted on our website, updated semesterly, and a badge of completion will be offered for each year of completion, with honors noted for those with exemplary and exceptional performance throughout the years to come. This badge is yours to use on your website and any further documents for the duration of the year it was awarded, and no further.
Train-the-Trainer (3T) Certification
Train-the-Trainer (3T) Certification for supplying individuals with the skills necessary to lead Bias Busters approved sessions. 3T Certification is intended to improve the ability of the community to address anti-bias issues on and off campus. Here we work to train potential leaders in the community who may be:
- Students: Undergraduate and Graduate Students
- Researchers: Postdocs and Staff
- Academics: Deans, Lab Heads, and Faculty Members
- Professionals: Scientists, Engineers, and Interns
- Etc.
Our multi-faceted approach to training includes a wide range of informational instruction and detailed scenarios that are based on real-world events and encounters.
Journal Group
BB@Cal is dedicated to advancing awareness in our community, as such, we hold bi-weekly journal readings where we choose a journal or a collection of journals to read and share our notes on. This serves to improve awareness in the group and provides easily digestible conversation and discussion around complex ideas from graduate students currently seeking to become experts in these fields.
Suggest a journal here.
Book Group
We know it isn’t always as entertaining to read journals and provide an alternate track for those not only looking to become informed and help spread awareness but also those who seek more engaging authorship. We often partner with other reading groups on campus. If you would like to partner with us, please use the contact form.
Suggest a book here.
Training Sessions:
Bias Busters at Cal facilitates a variety of trainings, the most popular of which are the Anti-Bias Pedagogy Course Training and the Implicit Bias Training Sessions with over 30 sessions offered across the nation, including over 500 participants, to date. We help a variety of clients identify and gain key practices to unlearn biases within their everyday life, address complex situations that may arise in the professional and academic contexts, as well as inform on the various contexts in which these situations may arise, such as over Zoom. Our clients have come from all stages of their academic and professional careers. If you would like BB@Cal to work with you on creating a training for your venue, please contact us.
Anti-Bias in the Pedagogy Course Guest-Lectures (375)
We work directly with the pedagogy courses (375 series) to establish evidence-based practices for Graduate Student Instructors (GSIs) to utilize in a classroom setting, virtual or otherwise.
Implicit Bias Training
The goal of Implicit Bias Training is to identify, uncover, confront, and unlearn biases that are present within us all and that might persist even with concrete action towards unlearning.
Our Implicit Bias Training options offer a range of diverse methodologies to inform many perspectives and backgrounds on how to address concerns through practice-based, lecture-based, or question/answer-based sessions. Among our training options is the ability to expand topics of interest to various disciplines and majors.
Active Bystander Training
During Active Bystander Training we will train you to implement well tested and useful strategies for being a proactive accomplice when potentially racist and sexist situations arise. During this training, we walk through scenarios that are designed to capture explicit and implicitly nuanced situations that will help bring confidence to trainees when confronted with racism, sexism, and the like on the spot.
Zoom-Relevant Training
Our newest and most socially distant and COVID-relevant addition to our training offerings is the Zoom Relevant Training. Here we discuss situational awareness on the virtual playing field, making clear biases and bystander situations that persist on the landscape of Zoom meetings. We train in how to handle Zoom-bombers, connectivity do’s and don’ts, and more.
Bias Busters Workshops:
BiasBusters has conducted a host of workshops on raising awareness of implicit biases and tools to counteract them. We have offered workshops geared towards faculty and staff, graduate students and postdocs, undergraduate students, and teaching assistants. If you would like to organize a workshop with a similar spirit, we are happy to offer a workshop for you! Please fill out your request on the contact form.
Speaker Series:
Reframing Tech Speaker Series:
EECS has historically struggled in recruiting and retaining a diverse population. By celebrating diversity in engineering and computer science and bringing conversations about diversity into the department, we hope to spark conversations around inclusion and affirm our desire for a more diverse body of faculty, staff, and students.
We are actively inviting a diverse body of speakers into the department. These speakers will include engineers and computer scientists from the top of the field and experts from outside EECS fields who can speak about the problems underlying diversity in tech from a variety of perspectives: social, environmental, ethical, educational, and psychological.
Each event will be followed by a discussion about how the EECS department could adapt to encourage a more diverse and inclusive environment, and how the department and students can spread this environment to the tech world as a whole.
Past speakers are:
Jocelyn Samuels
Tuesday, March 5, 2019 12 PM – 2 PM, Soda 430 (Wozniak Lounge)
Connecting LGBT Bias Research to US Law and Policy
Jocelyn Samuels is the Executive Director of the Williams Institute.
Dr. Colleen Lewis
Friday, October 26, 2018, 1 PM – 2:30 PM, Soda 306 (HP Auditorium)
Interrupting Bias and Creating Institutional Change
Dr. Colleen Lewis is an associate professor in computer science at Harvey Mudd
College who researches how people learn computer science. Dr. Lewis curates
CSTeachingTips.org, a NSF-sponsored project for disseminating effective
computer science teaching practices. She is also a UC Berkeley alum and
created CS KickStart here at Berkeley. Video.
Dr. Marcia Linn
Thursday, April 26, 2018, 12:30 PM – 2 PM, Soda 306 (HP Auditorium)
Education, Equity, & Underrepresentation in STEM
A conversation about the underlying causes behind underrepresentation of
women and minorities in STEM and the current state of science education.
Jill Hruby
Thursday, May 24, 2018, 12:30 PM – 2 PM, Soda 306 (HP Auditorium)
Succeeding as an Engineer: Obstacles and Responsibilities
Former Sandia National Labs director Jill Hruby reflects on her engineering
career, the barriers that exist in tech fields, and how they might be overcome.
Dr Martha Olney
Thursday September 13th 1230pm – 2pm, Soda 430 (Woz)
Addressing Diversity and Inclusion through Institutional Change