Chair/Lead: Dan Beach

Members: Nolan Arnold, Craig Rice, Andy Prehall, Alex Cardenas

The Problem

Who we are is expressed in many ways, but our names and gender identity are two of the primary ways we tell others who we are. When someone’s preferred name is not used, their name is mispronounced, or the wrong pronoun is used, it can lead to that person feeling disrespected, excluded, or alienated. In some cases, technology can be used to resolve the issue, but in other cases, the technology, itself, creates or magnifies the problem.  

Some of the code for the current Student Information System (SIS) and other software written in-house at St. Olaf was unintentionally written with built-in constraints such as the length of fields or the number of fields available to use. These constraints limit our ability to honor requests to store and display things such as preferred names or gender identities.  Some of our applications were written by commercial vendors and we have no control over changing the software, except for lobbying the company to update their software or selecting a replacement system. Name pronunciation is not a typical feature in most software, but brings significant value to many people and many situations.

Goals

1. Provide students and employees with the option to include their pronouns in St. Olaf’s online directory and SIS.

2. Provide students and employees with the capability to record the correct pronunciation of their name and make that recording available for others to listen to and use.

3. Update our in-house software so that students and employees can update the display of their pronouns and name.

Actions Taken

1. Integrate appropriate field lengths and fields to properly display names, pronouns, and 

2. Incorporate a process to evaluate new software to ensure that it can appropriately display legal and preferred names, pronouns, and gender and make this part of the purchase criteria. We will ask the vendor how their software handles such issues, and if it does not, when it will do so.

3. Submit enhancement requests to add appropriate functionality for identity fields they are lacking or that are problematic. 

4. Incorporate a process to verify that we have sent all appropriate data to vendors for the display of legal and preferred names, pronouns, and gender.

5. As an ongoing effort, we will work with the Wellness Center and the Taylor Center for Equity and Inclusion to make sure we include new, related types of identity information as they emerge.

6. IT will create methods in SIS (for students) and StoFaces (for faculty/staff) to select from a list of pronouns (provided by the Gender and Sexuality Center/Taylor Center) that will then be displayed in places like class rosters, advisee listings, and the online directory. We will extend this to other software systems where appropriate and feasible.

Accomplishments so Far 

1. We have created a robust pronoun application that allows students to set up to two sets of pronouns, and then display them in many prominent, student body-facing locations, such as class lists or the directory. 

2. We have incorporated pronouns into Moodle so that they will show up in the class rosters.

3. We have been adding preferred names in place of the first name for any student facing interface. This work is not complete and is ongoing.

4. For employees, we are now including the preferred name parenthetically. 

5. To help the community correctly pronounce names, IT developed a name pronunciation tool. This tool lets employees and students make a voice recording of their name. IT will incorporate the pronunciation into SIS, Moodle, and the online directory. The recordings will be available to on-campus users or those users connected via VPN.

The pronunciation tool will be integrated into Moodle in 2021.