Faculty Highlights
The following faculty members from across academic disciplines engage teaching, learning, and research practices centered on inclusive, diverse, equity-minded, and/or HSI pedagogies. By highlighting their work, we aim to facilitate transdisciplinary partnerships, engage in a community of learners to improve teaching, and create a teaching mentoring system for colleagues across UTRGV. Collectively, we can build more inclusive and diverse spaces of teaching and learning where all students showcase their knowledge and achieve success.
Faculty members highlighted here are advocates and collaborators who assist the CTE on:
- Developing a guide to inclusive and equity-minded pedagogies at UTRGV
- Providing feedback and offering recommendations on resources and readings on the website
- Facilitating teaching conversation
- Designing and/or facilitating faculty learning communities
- Serving as teaching mentors to faculty members across the University.
- Engaging university leadership and all necessary stakeholder about the transformation of teaching and learning for social justice
- Incorporating and encouraging the use of student performance data in decision-making processes.
If you are a UTRGV faculty member who would like to be highlighted on this page, please send an e-mail to cte@utrgv.edu.
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Dr. Israel Aguilar Assistant Professor Department of Organization and School Leadership |
Describe your teaching values and research interests. How do these already relate to or how can they relate to diverse, inclusive, culturally-relevant practices in higher education?
My teaching philosophy stems from principles of social justice and cultural competence. This aligns with my department (Organization and School Leadership) mission. Furthermore, my department is affiliated with two organizations that have standards for culturally-relevant practices in higher education: University Council for Educational Administration (UCEA) and Carnegie Project on the Educational Doctorate (CPED). With the assistance of these standards and my research interests, I strive to work at the nexus of theory and practice. Thus, my research interests include the examination of school principals for social justice, teacher leadership for school improvement, identity politics, Hispanic Serving Institutions, and qualitative research and representation. As a professor in principal preparation and in the Ed.D. leadership program, I provide equitable and individual opportunities for adult learners so that they may reach their fullest potential as school, organization, or community leaders. Specifically, I design content and activities for leaders to use as new ways of knowing. For example, in the Summer 2020 term, I created a course for the doctoral program called, The Self as a Problem to Explore. In this course, students learned about critical reflection and how facilitating social justice as leaders starts when we examine our own beliefs, biases, practices
What specific teaching strategies, beliefs, or resources do you draw on to create a learning environment that is inclusive, diverse, and accessible to all students?
First, I articulate my own experiences and differences in the form of a critical reflective narrative. To model for students how leaders can move towards social justice in the organizations they lead, I use my own narrative to illustrate content and examination competencies. Also, I include autoethnography research, which further gives credibility to what I speak about. By using published autoethnographies in the classroom, I am able to encourage students to understand others and to be understood. I believe research in this form helps students build places of learning they can learn while also incorporating similarities and differences in identity. Lastly, I also use lots of humor in my class to make students understand that I am a faculty member who is also human and embraces the process of learning. Ultimately, I am able to build trusting and caring relationships that help us look to one another for support. This has been especially important during social unrest.
What is one quick action step we can take to challenge racism, implicit bias, and systemic barriers in our teaching, research, and service to embrace difference (e.g., racial, linguistic, cultural, gendered, sexual orientation, ability) as integral to learning, knowledge-making, and all students' academic achievement?
In the name of excellence, not only efficiency, invite all students to participate in teaching, in service, or in research with you. Once students understand you SEE them as holders of knowledge and contributing members of a global society, a faculty member will have opportunity to challenge beliefs, racism, or bias.
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Dr. Friederike Bruehoefener Associate Professor, Department of History Co-Director, Gender and Women’s Studies Program Multidisciplinary Studies Coordinator, SIPCE |
Describe your teaching values and research interests. How do these already relate to or how can they relate to diverse, inclusive, culturally-relevant practices in higher education?
My teaching and research interests focus on Modern (19th and 20th centuries) European history, especially German new military history, women’s and gender history, as well as the history of masculinities, sexuality, and new social movements. I am particularly interested in the emergence, development, and impact of specific gender ideologies, orders, and hierarchies. I teach and study how nations, societies, and different members of civil society understood, articulated, and sought to institute ideas about sex, gender, and sexuality. By discussing with my students these processes and mechanisms, I hope they learn to discern past, present, and future power structures that lead to both privileges and oppressions.
What specific teaching strategies, beliefs, or resources do you draw on to create a learning environment that is inclusive, diverse, and accessible to all students?
In my classes, I want students to not only encounter diverse voices from the past, but also find their own voices. When choosing, for example, study materials I pay close attention that they represent a multitude of perspectives, ideas, and voices. In addition to ensure that the scholars whose scholarly work we study are diverse, I aim at utilizing primary sources that show history “from the bottom up” and that shed light on the lives of those who have been forgotten, underrepresented, marginalized and disempowered. At the same time, discussion is a vital part of my traditional, face-to-face classes. Through varying techniques, I encourage students to “say something” every class session, believing that if they find their voice
What is one quick action step we can take to challenge racism, implicit bias, and systemic barriers in our teaching, research, and service to embrace difference (e.g., racial, linguistic, cultural, gendered, sexual orientation, ability) as integral to learning, knowledge-making, and all students' academic achievement?
I believe it is vital to self-assess our work as educators throughout and at the end of each semester. It is important to pay close attention—in every class to students’ reactions to and engagement with teaching methods, study materials, and assignments.
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Dr. Alyssa Cavazos Associate Professor Department of Writing and Language Studies |
Describe your teaching values and research interests. How do these already relate to or how can they relate to diverse, inclusive, culturally-relevant practices in higher education?
My pedagogical and research interests center on language difference in the teaching of writing, translingual writing across communities, professional development in higher education, and border rhetorics. Through my research on how linguistically diverse faculty and students navigate and negotiate diverse languages in their writing, scholarship, learning, and pedagogies, respectively, I am inspired to identify ways in which we can make our classroom spaces more welcoming, especially as it relates to the languages we use to make meaning, learn, connect with others, and transfer knowledge to other courses and beyond.
What specific teaching strategies, beliefs, or resources do you draw on to create a learning environment that is inclusive, diverse, and accessible to all students?
As an educator, I want to create spaces where all students believe and feel they are capable of making contributions, and most importantly, I want to ensure that all of my students know they can draw on their knowledge of multiple languages to learn and create new meanings. I design my classes in ways that will help us collaboratively explore what building socially just, equal, and quality linguistically inclusive practices in writing and writing instruction means as we draw on our diverse experiences with writing. Specifically, I value students’ meaning-making and self- realizations, and I especially value their feedback and collaboration on our teaching and learning experiences. Their feedback, whether through course evaluations, mid-term reflections, or purposeful engagement reflection journals, inspire me to be self-reflective and adapt my teaching practices when necessary to increase student engagement and success in the course.
What is one quick action step we can take to challenge racism, implicit bias, and systemic barriers in our teaching, research, and service to embrace difference (e.g., racial, linguistic, cultural, gendered, sexual orientation, ability) as integral to learning, knowledge-making, and all students' academic achievement?
We must be open and willing to self-assess our own teaching strategies, assigned readings, exams, assignment designs, and assessment practices. We can ask ourselves: how does this course design or teaching approach disenfranchise, marginalize, or privilege a certain type of learner? Then, we must be willing to make changes, to seek feedback from students and colleagues, and to commit to pedagogical shifts on a daily basis. As an example, for the past several years, I have learned about labor-based assessment practices, and I have also explored inclusive and equity-based teaching approaches, particularly in relation to linguistically inclusive pedagogies. After our transition to remote instruction due to the pandemic, I decided to make a change to my grading policy, which helped me reflect on how I can purposefully enact a more compassionate and equity-minded grading policy in my teaching. For these reasons, I have shifted my assessment goals and created a grading system that values reflection, revision, and critical meaning-making beyond the classroom. I created this shift in the spirit of enacting inclusive and equitable teaching and learning practices by removing the burden of “grades” on individual assignments and move the focus to empowering learners and future professionals to take ownership of their learning and meaning - making process for their own goals and intentions.
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Dr. Teresa 'Paty' Feria Arroyo Professor of Biology and Associate Dean for Faculty Success, Diversity and Inclusion School of Sciences |
Describe your teaching values and research interests. How do these already relate to or how can they relate to diverse, inclusive, culturally-relevant practices in higher education?
I am a Full Professor in the Biology Department. The core of my research is focused on the distribution of animal and plant species. I am committed to providing different strategies for my students to succeed and feel that helping them to strengthen their critical thinking and resilience is key. To keep my teaching updated on diversity and inclusion, I constantly improve my course materials based on teaching trainings and workshops as well as own past experiences and students’ comments, reflections, and course evaluations. Per the past years I have used a highly structured active learning method in my courses that encourages students to relate course content to their cultural context. This is a teaching and learning process I embrace, largely because of my life story and educational experiences but the larger benefits of it are also supported by research. For example, according to Cook-Sather and Des-Ogugua (2018), Hispanic students often perceive their culture as a deficit that prevents them from succeeding. In my own experience, to have a strong accent, for example, is sometimes seen as a barrier to effective speaking in public. Flipped classroom assignments greatly help to overcome this obstacle, as evidence students have commented in their end of the course evaluations “we present every week, not only has it helped with my fright to talk in front of people, but it has helped me better understand and learn the material”.
What specific teaching strategies, beliefs, or resources do you draw on to create a learning environment that is inclusive, diverse, and accessible to all students?
Rather than the conventional lecturing still used in most STEM courses, my courses are designed with multiple inclusive active learning and culturally relevant pedagogical teaching strategies, such as interactive lectures, hands-on activities, field work, laboratory work, service-learning, community service, peer-to-peer and group discussions, flipped classroom, mock exercises, and student research projects. In addition, most of my courses are bilingual (English Spanish). I want all my students to feel integrated, included and comfortable to participate in my courses. I can tell that I am achieving these goals as per students’ evaluation comments such as: “Dr. Feria is an amazing professor that encourages students to take learning into their own hands and enforces that everyone is placed at an equal opportunity in the classroom.” Analyzing students feedback help us to grow as educators and to provide them equal opportunities to succeed.
What is one quick action step we can take to challenge racism, implicit bias, and systemic barriers in our teaching, research, and service to embrace difference (e.g., racial, linguistic, cultural, gendered, sexual orientation, ability) as integral to learning, knowledge-making, and all students' academic achievement?
A quick act is answering how do we want to be treated if I were another person? I choose kindness. I choose to be fair. As a Hispanic female in science, I consider myself three times underrepresented, however, the challenges that I experienced during my career trajectory have helped me to grow as both a scientist and educator. I have been fortunate to work at this Hispanic Service Institution (HIS) that has brilliant, outstanding students who have inspired me to succeed as an educator. After being selected to join the UT System Chancellor's Network for Women's Leadership in 2017, I attended the corresponding Leadership Sponsorship Workshop in Austin, Texas in January 2018. This rich experience reaffirmed that I do not have potential bias on race/ethnicity, gender, or sexual orientation – I took a bias test! I advise all faculty to take this test.
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Ms. Marlene Galván Director Writing Center |
Describe your teaching values and research interests. How do these already relate to or how can they relate to diverse, inclusive, culturally-relevant practices in higher education?
My research interests are embedded in cultural rhetorics and grounded in Chicana feminist epistemologies. The practice of cultural rhetorics centers stories as rhetorical, theoretical, and situated in cultural and community-specific contexts. What this means pedagogically is that I deeply value the stories and lived experiences students bring with them to the University. I believe the diversity that students bring with them to the University is both valuable and integral to their success here.
What specific teaching strategies, beliefs, or resources do you draw on to create a learning environment that is inclusive, diverse, and accessible to all students?
In the classroom and at the Writing Center, it is my goal that students from diverse backgrounds and perspectives be valued and respected, that students' learning needs be met, and that the diversity that students bring with them be viewed as a resource, strength, and benefit. This means empowering student voices, helping develop confidence in their abilities, and providing support and resources for their successful navigation of the University.
What is one quick action step we can take to challenge racism, implicit bias, and systemic barriers in our teaching, research, and service to embrace difference (e.g., racial, linguistic, cultural, gendered, sexual orientation, ability) as integral to learning, knowledge-making, and all students' academic achievement?
Embed time and space for students to share their stories with you and with each other (whichever stories they feel comfortable sharing) and listen. The trust and rapport this sharing can establish will enhance any learning environment (whether in person or online). More importantly, listening to students’ stories demonstrates value and respect their learning and knowledge-making processes. This might seem a small gesture, but it could be the gesture that sparks greater changes toward a more equitable environment for everyone.
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Dr. Natasha Altema McNeely Associate Professor Department of Political Science |
Describe your teaching values and research interests. How do these already relate to or how can they relate to diverse, inclusive, culturally-relevant practices in higher education?
All of the undergraduate and graduate courses I have taught allowed me to pursue goals that I have had since my first semester at UTPA and have continued to implement after transitioning to UTRGV. First, I strive to present concepts in a manner that students understand. In all of my courses I use strategies such as class discussions and reading assignments. I also engage students in discussions of current events in all of my courses. Across all of my undergraduate and graduate classes, my students have consistently been active participants during the class discussions. I believe that using current events as a teaching tool allows me to engage the students because our discussions helped them to better understand the concepts that had been featured in my lectures. The students were able to connect these concepts to the events that were going on around them. My second goal has been to create an environment (both in person and online) that inspired respect among the students. I encouraged the students to respect their peers’ opinions, especially when they differed from their own. I also emphasized that disrespectful reaction during class discussions would not be tolerated. I reiterate these conditions during my discussion of the syllabus in my in-person classes. For my online classes, I emphasize the idea of “netiquette”. As part of its syllabus template, COLTT includes a discussion of “netiquette” which enforces the expression of ideas in a respectful manner especially online. Reinforcing this idea helps me to help the students to feel that they can express their opinions freely without receiving judgment in return. The third goal has been to push my students to move beyond their own expectations for the courses. Specifically, I encourage them to aspire for more than just “passing the class,” to apply themselves in order to see how well they could do.
My research interests featured in my publications examine the impact of race and ethnicity in the context of public opinion, voting behavior, and political institutions at the local level. My manuscripts in progress have been arranged by the following research areas: Examination of factors that affect social capital, Immigration attitudes among Hispanics in South Texas, Race/Ethnicity, Gender and Political Institutions (State and Local levels), the impact of interracial marriage upon racial attitudes, and the politics of Black Maternal Mortality.
Both my teaching and research emphasize social justice issues. In both areas I try to emphasize the importance of breaking down existing systemic barriers that prevent full equity for all groups in the U.S.
What specific teaching strategies, beliefs, or resources do you draw on to create a learning environment that is inclusive, diverse, and accessible to all students?
In-person:
- Verbal reminders about being respectful toward each other and the professor.
- Reminder that everyone has unique lived experiences and we learn from each other through communicating respectfully including listening to each other.
- Reminder that laughing or disrespectful responses will not be tolerated.
Online:
- I include a statement about respecting each other’s opinions as part of the instructions for the discussion board assignment.
- I include the University’s policy on netiquette on the “welcome /start here” page for each online course.
For both online and in-person courses I diversify the authors of reading assignments:
- Including authors from diverse backgrounds
- Including concepts related to diversity (racial/ethnic and gender)
- In all of my classes (regardless of modality): I incorporate discussions of social justice-related topics in the classroom
What is one quick action step we can take to challenge racism, implicit bias, and systemic barriers in our teaching, research, and service to all students have opportunities to achieve success? (e.g., racial, linguistic, cultural, gendered, sexual orientation, ability)
Recognize the systemic barriers that exist and advocate for these barriers to be broken
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Dr. Sandra I. Musanti Associate Professor Department of Bilingual and Literacy Studies
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Describe your teaching values and research interests. How do these already relate to or how can they relate to diverse, inclusive, culturally-relevant practices in higher education?
“What the educator does in teaching is to make it possible for the students to become themselves” (Horton & Freire, 1990). As a teacher educator, I aspire to make possible for student teachers to embrace their bilingual and bicultural selves with pride and hope. I also aspire to inspire my students to engage in learning from and with their bilingual students. I believe teachers play a crucial role in a democratic society. I see education as the path for equity and social justice. We must strive to prepare teachers for roles as professionals, intellectuals, and advocates in a multicultural and multilingual society. I am committed to prepare bilingual teachers who are highly qualified advocates of bi/multilingual and bi/multicultural students.
What specific teaching strategies, beliefs, or resources do you draw on to create a learning environment that is inclusive, diverse, and accessible to all students?
I aim at providing opportunities for classroom dialogue, centering our personal experiences as a legitimate lens for understanding course content, to critically examine schooling contexts and educational opportunity, and to interrogate our (mis)understandings that may influence the ways in which we see the communities we serve. I also focus on fostering in my students a strong foundational knowledge of their field, and an understanding of the social and political influences on their work. In the field of bilingual education this means that we need teachers who are able to understand and leverage students’ cultural and linguistic repertoire, who can design instruction that challenges students to learn and afford them opportunities to see themselves as the capable learners they are.
What is one quick action step we can take to challenge racism, implicit bias, and systemic barriers in our teaching, research, and service to embrace difference (e.g., racial, linguistic, cultural, gendered, sexual orientation, ability) as integral to learning, knowledge-making, and all students' academic achievement?
I create situations that I identify as “approximations to practice” where students apply theories and concepts to plan and demonstrate different strategies to teach bilingual learners in a way that leverage their linguistic repertoire. I also keep in mind it is equally important that student teachers have meaningful opportunities to reflect on their practice through self-evaluations, specifically on how their lessons attend to cultural and language diversity.
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Ms. Valerie Ortiz Lecturer I Department of Writing and Language Studies |
Describe your teaching values and research interests. How do these already relate to or how can they relate to diverse, inclusive, culturally-relevant practices in higher education?
My research interests include cultural rhetorics and rhetorics of identity and embodiment. I am particularly interested in how they manifest in the literacy practices of first-year college students. In my classroom, I work to create spaces and opportunities for students to explore, analyze, and challenge the tangled relationships between language, literacy, and identity in their lives and experiences. I believe that helping students equip themselves with tools for critical analysis and communicating complex ideas empowers them to become more aware of their own positionality and engaged in the world around them.
What specific teaching strategies, beliefs, or resources do you draw on to create a learning environment that is inclusive, diverse, and accessible to all students?
One of the most important resources in the classroom is the students themselves. As often as possible, I encourage students to share their own stories, experiences, and opinions with each other as we work through our course content. I believe it is important for students to encounter perspectives that support, complicate, or challenge their own. Hearing and sharing personal perspectives is one way to build community in the classroom.
What is one quick action step we can take to challenge racism, implicit bias, and systemic barriers in our teaching, research, and service to embrace difference (e.g., racial, linguistic, cultural, gendered, sexual orientation, ability) as integral to learning, knowledge-making, and all students' academic achievement?
I encourage instructors to select one policy on their syllabus and examine it carefully. Peeling away the layers of exclusion will take time and attention, but the reward is a classroom that is designed to provide equal access and opportunities for all students. Ask yourself the following questions and repeat this process for as long as it is helpful:
- Who benefits from this policy? In the motivations behind and the language of the policy, who is being empowered or celebrated? Why?
- Who deals with the consequences of this policy? In the motivations behind and the language of the policy, who is being penalized or excluded from the benefits of the policy? Why?
- What changes can I make to this policy to ensure that all students have equal access to and opportunity for success in my course?
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Dr. Dagoberto Eli Ramirez Lecturer II University College
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Describe your teaching values and research interests. How do these already relate to or how can they relate to diverse, inclusive, culturally-relevant practices in higher education?
The teaching and learning process is a mutual, symbiotic relationship between teacher and learner, and it’s at its best when both view themselves as equal partners. I believe that learning is always a construction of newly created knowledge and is not a mere reception of previously developed knowledge that is captured, packaged, and placed into the learner’s brain to then be engaged, consumed, and processed. Teaching and learning is not a stagnant event for single individuals, but rather, an exciting and dynamic process that has the potential to create and bring communities of teacher-learners and learner-teachers together. These equal-partners-in-education values on teaching and learning create an open dialogue atmosphere in my UNIV 1301 Learning Framework first-year experience classes where respect for inclusion, diversity, and equity thrives, and leads to classroom practices that embrace anti-racist and culturally-relevant higher education practices. I strive to ensure that every single course discussion, activity, assignment, and project promotes a needs-fulfilling opportunity for every single individual student, specifically because of who he or she is, and not in spite of it. Additionally, my research agenda focuses on these very things that I promote in my UNIV 1301 classroom, having studied in-depth, published, and presented on the culturally-relevant practices that I and my colleagues employ, analyzing the positive yield differences they make for our first-year students. I also am currently studying the role that early life experiences play in the development of leadership skills and leadership styles in Mexican American superintendents that attended a Hispanic-Serving Institution (HSI) in the lower Rio Grande Valley in deep south Texas. As can be noted from the topics, both of these research foci are very related to diverse, inclusive, anti-racist, culturally-relevant practices in higher education.
What specific teaching strategies, beliefs, or resources do you draw on to create a learning environment that is inclusive, diverse, and accessible to all students?
I create a safe space in my UNIV 1301 Learning Framework classroom (in-person and now synchronous-online as well) where students can experience the challenges of learning to learn in a nurturing environment that pushes them to grow into the scholarly rigor required at this post-secondary level, while being supported in their inevitable moments of pitfalls and slips. Allowing students to stall, falter, and, yes, maybe even not succeed at some initial first steps can be the beginning of finding a better, new, different trajectory that can then lead them to success, and I make my classroom that place of experimentation, imagination, and attempts at being new again and again. To facilitate promoting a learning environment that is inclusive, diverse, and accessible to all students, I use structured cooperative learning as my anchor teaching strategy, as it fosters both in-depth student learning as well as relationship-building opportunities for my students. Our cooperative learning motto is: “We learn it together so that we can each later perform it alone.” Cooperative learning has the potential to teach students that the world is a collaborative, cooperative life laboratory where all participants can both teach each other and learn from each other as they navigate the worlds of academia and careers, dispelling the Western myth that the world is a purely competitive dog-eat-dog place where one can only succeed and advance at the expense of others failing.
What is one quick action step we can take to challenge racism, implicit bias, and systemic barriers in our teaching, research, and service to embrace difference (e.g., racial, linguistic, cultural, gendered, sexual orientation, ability) as integral to learning, knowledge-making, and all students' academic achievement?
One first action step I focus on in my teaching and service as a lecturer to directly challenge racism, implicit bias, and systemic barriers is that I constantly remind myself who my audience members are: young, emerging scholars who recently graduated from high school, many coming from low-socioeconomic, first-generation, and second-language backgrounds. I want to be a pro-active catalyst that helps make the difference in their bridging successfully into this new post-secondary arena, where they subsequently return successfully for their sophomore year; the only other option for them, which I do not accept, is that they fail miserably for lack of support, and then not return. To next aid in that effort, I then purposely use professional peer-reviewed scholarly articles that promote and discuss anti-racism, identifying and addressing implicit biases, and breaking barriers (whether they be racial, linguistic, cultural, gendered, sexual orientation, ability, etc.), as we seek to become better scholars, improving on learning how we learn. Students quickly sense that ours is that safe space where we embrace, and not simply tolerate, the themes that drive our relationship-centered classroom: inclusion, diversity and equity. As students work and live in cooperative learning base groups that meet weekly for academic and affective support, they inevitably quickly realize that celebrating both our similarities and our differences (in our perspectives, our geographic backgrounds, our gender/sexual identities and preferences, our ethnic/racial backgrounds, our life experiences growing up, our academic skills, and our socioeconomic realities) makes for a potentially great class experience; as I remind them, they simply need to allow it to be.
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Dr. Jose L. Saldivar Senior Lecturer University College |
Describe your teaching values and research interests. How do these already relate to or how can they relate to diverse, inclusive, culturally-relevant practices in higher education?
The first day of my very first class as an instructor, I arranged the chairs in a circle. The students all walked in and cautiously took a seat. I asked what they hoped to learn in the class and they all said, one right after another, “whatever you tell us we need to learn,” or some variation of that statement. It was telling and disappointing. I didn’t know what to expect but I didn’t expect that response. I share this story because I have always tried to create a class and an environment where my students felt empowered. A space where they were encouraged to ask questions and even challenge me a little. I’ve never set out to be an instructor who reinforced the status quo. I have found, from my own experiences, the best classes were those where the professor challenged the class, but also encouraged the class to engage in discussion and ask tough questions. What this looks like in my class is a space where I hope everyone feels empowered and eager to question everything. This is consistent with my own education and experience as a Chicana/o Studies major. It is also consistent with my research interests. I am most interested in exploring culturally-relevant pedagogies and deconstructing deficit theories of education.
What specific teaching strategies, beliefs, or resources do you draw on to create a learning environment that is inclusive, diverse, and accessible to all students?
I rely on platicas to support intra-class communication and often disrupt the physical space by moving tables and chairs around in order to make use of the center of the class. I find this helps students feel more comfortable asking questions and engaging in dialogue
What is one quick action step we can take to challenge racism, implicit bias, and systemic barriers in our teaching, research, and service to embrace difference (e.g., racial, linguistic, cultural, gendered, sexual orientation, ability) as integral to learning, knowledge-making, and all students' academic achievement?
One quick action step is to reflect on one’s teaching. Even if we believe we are challenging norms and stereotypes, we need to be in constant conversation with ourselves.
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Ms. Priscilla Flores Part-Time Lecturer Department of Communication |
Describe your teaching values and research interests. How do these already relate to or how can they relate to diverse, inclusive, culturally-relevant practices in higher education?
Whether I am teaching online or in person, I am intentional about creating an environment where all students feel supported intellectually and academically, and are extended a sense of belonging regardless of identity or learning preference through collaborative models of learning that acknowledge student’s personal experiences. I also include a diversity statement in my syllabus offering support to my students by welcoming identities into the classroom, making visible disability, student support, academic strategies, services on campus, and inviting students to share concerns and feedback throughout the semester.
What specific teaching strategies, beliefs, or resources do you draw on to create a learning environment that is inclusive, diverse, and accessible to all students?
We need to make sure that we are not sending coded messages to students that they are somehow inherently deficient in that they need to change to be great. It is about tapping into that greatness that is within them, which is why I believe that it is essential that we get to know our students, where they are from, their communities so that we can start to leverage what is there instead of trying to put something else on them that they might not be interested in at all.
What is one quick action step we can take to challenge racism, implicit bias, and systemic barriers in our teaching, research, and service to embrace difference (e.g., racial, linguistic, cultural, gendered, sexual orientation, ability) as integral to learning, knowledge-making, and all students' academic achievement?
One quick action step is to perform a Self-Assessment where Instructors can explore their own implicit bias, classroom culture, teaching practices, syllabus content, instructional strategies, and finally review the language we use. For communication to be effective, it needs to address all audiences for which it is intended appropriately. Inclusive language acknowledges diversity, conveys respect to all people, is sensitive to differences, and promotes equitable opportunities. This refers to the language used in the classroom, in emails, with colleagues, on or off-campus, on or off social media, and other forms of communication. All work should be free from words, phrases, or tones that demean, insult, or exclude people based on their membership with a specific group or because of a particular attribute. Language is fluid. The meaning and connotations of words change. Therefore, it is more important to apply inclusive language principles rather than learn specific phrases, as these may change meaning over time.