Hostos Faculty Diversity

An ongoing effort from the Center for Teaching and Learning to embrace a Myriad of Professional Perspectives.

The Hostos Center for Teaching and Learning aims to embrace the plethora of pedagogical, research and social backgrounds that our faculty body brings to the institution. This intellectual diversity represents an asset to imagine multiple initiatives that simultaneously strengthen our faculty development and build an enriching intellectual climate in our institution.

The CTL collaborated with the 2016-2018 Office of Academic Affairs Diversity Fellow Prof. Nelson Nunez Rodriguez to build a series of initiatives embodying our faculty needs and expectations. A series of four workshops developed each Spring has clarified faculty reappointment, tenure and promotion processes. These conversations bring together departmental and college-wide P&B members, faculty members who recently secured tenure or promotion, and faculty members seeking to secure tenure and promotion in upcoming years.

This initiative was indeed developed considering our faculty body feedback documented by 2014 COACHE. Moving forward, this series should create a framework that allows faculty to imagine service and scholarship development opportunities considering their expertise and teaching workload required in a community college institution. Simultaneously, outcomes from these conversations also pointed out possibilities of framing teaching strategies as a research approach. The promising Scholarship of Teaching and Learning field opens a venue for community college faculty to develop their research, teaching and assessment skills simultaneously. The CTL also aims at exploring further mechanisms to support faculty satisfaction beyond tenure and promotion periods. The institution faculty cohort is an intellectual asset that should be nurtured on an ongoing base. Thus, the CTL plans future conversation about faculty satisfaction and well-being. This Spring 2019, the CTL already devised a Day-Zero initiative intended to share teaching tactics for the first day of classes and strategies that allow faculty members to understand the semester rhythm and the need to plan their scholarly development considering unforeseen events along the semester.

Other future diversity approaches should also tackle on the development of faculty cultural competencies and other facets such as ethnicity, gender and sexual orientation. The CTL recently developed a series of conversations to celebrate the 50^th anniversary of Stonewall Riots as a way to illuminate our LGTBQI+ faculty and staff members’ journey on campus. Looking into the future, the Hostos CTL continues opening its doors to all faculty initiatives, ideas and efforts to enhance our campus intellectual life while creating a stimulating arena for our faculty body professional and human satisfactions.