The Fulbright Seminar on Diversity and Access of Underrepresented Groups to Higher Education, held for Fulbright Faculty Development Program alumni in Guatemala in May 2006, provided 23 seminar participants with a comprehensive understanding of Guatemala’s approach to access for indigenous populations through lectures, panels, field visits, and discussions with indigenous Guatemalan students and faculty members.

The seminar announcement generated an exceptional applicant pool of 107 alumni engaged in initiatives designed to increase access in all of the categories of diversity. Given that the Guatemalan model focused on Mayan access to education, the decision was made to select 23 participants from 14 Latin American countries who had played substantive roles in forwarding initiatives to provide access to indigenous populations. Several of the participants were from indigenous backgrounds themselves and taught at institutions where the student body is primarily indigenous.

In addition to the agenda activities, four thematic group sessions during the seminar allowed participants to discuss their own contributions to access at their home institutions, to assess the relevance of access initiatives presented at the seminar to their own institutions, to make recommendations to the full group based on their areas of expertise, and to plan initial strategies based on their seminar experiences.

For a considerable number of participants, the well-developed initiatives to improve indigenous access to Guatemalan universities showed the existence and potential of pragmatic strategies that they had previously been exposed to as theoretical possibilities only. The EDUMAYA model—the indigenous access program of the Universidad Rafael Landívar in Guatemala City—was viewed as compelling, a model to be emulated when proposing reforms to admission policies and when creating strategies to increase retention of students from underrepresented groups at participants’ institutions. Participants left the seminar believing in the possibility of replicating some of the Guatemalan strategies, modifying or melding those strategies with access initiatives already in place in their institutions, or developing new strategies in institutions where no policies or initiatives existed.

Along with stimulating alumni efforts to expand diversity initiatives in national institutions, the seminar also served to forward the Fulbright Program’s emphasis on all forms of diversity in higher education. During the seminar, LASPAU and representatives from the Public Affairs Office of the U.S. Embassy in Guatemala discussed the Fulbright Program’s commitment to diversity and invited the participants to join with the Fulbright Program in promoting opportunities for graduate study abroad to individuals in underrepresented groups at their home institutions.

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