Discipline-Specific Faculty Learning Community: Summer 2023

May 30 – August 19

Dates vary by discipline

Discipline-Specific Faculty Learning Communities

REGISTRATION DEADLINE: May 17, 2023

Description

Minnesota State received funding through the Governor’s Emergency Education Relief Fund managed by Minnesota’s Office of Higher Education to support faculty members within disciplines to come together to explore culturally responsive teaching practices.

This is a great chance for colleagues to re-engage with others in their discipline or those they met at last year’s Teach Together Minnesota! conference, and to explore evidence-based strategies that could reduce equity gaps that exist within our programs.

Our chancellor has given us the challenge of eliminating our equity gaps by 2030. How can we, as instructors, shift our teaching practices to meet this goal? One promising path is to ground those practices in Culturally Responsive Pedagogy. In this course, we’ll have the opportunity to examine how well our current practices align with the central tenets of Culturally Responsive Pedagogy. CRP advocates that good teaching draws on the knowledge and skill our students bring to the classroom, creates supportive relationships that allow students to take learning risks, and prepares students to challenge barriers to their full flourishing. In this course we will give and get support for deepening our CRP practices.

All participants will receive the e-book for Zaretta Hammond’s Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain, which will be an optional reading for the short course. Details for acquiring a free version of this e-book will be sent to participants.

Audience

This Summer 2023 opportunity is open to any Minnesota State faculty teaching courses within the participating disciplines and associated subjects associated with

• STEM
• Cross-Discipline (FULL)

Additionally, high school teachers who teach college-level courses in these disciplines through concurrent enrollment at participating Minnesota State institutions are welcome.

Dates 

STEM

• Regular live sessions via Zoom
• Wednesdays, 5/31, 6/7, 6/21, 7/12, 7/26, 8/9
  • 1:00 – 2:30 p.m.
• Action Plan due August 19

Cross-Discipline (Cross-Discipline group is FULL)

• Regular live sessions via Zoom
  • Thursdays, 6/1, 6/8, 6/22, 7/13, 7/27, 8/10
  • 10:00 – 11:30 a.m.
• Action Plan due August 19

Community Expectations

• Engage with supporting materials (articles, videos, websites)
• Attend 5 – 6, 90-minute Zoom sessions, occurring every other week
• Contribute to 5 asynchronous discussions
• Submit a final Action Plan

Participant Learning Outcomes

Through engaging in the work of the training, faculty will be able to:

• explain to others the central tenets of Culturally Responsive Pedagogy,
• incorporate those central tenets into course outcomes, materials, assessments, activities, syllabi, and relationships,
• identify interconnections between implicit bias, microaggressions, trauma, structural racism, stereotype threat, and course success,
• use our increased skills at CRP to share with, support, and encourage other faculty learners to increase everyone’s skills at CRP,
• trace how our values have changed and/or deepened through engaging in course, and
• create a professional development plan for making next steps on the journey of culturally responsive teaching.

Goals

Increase student success and decrease equity gaps by supporting our work to:

• draw on the knowledge and skill our students bring into the classroom,
• create supportive relationships that allow students to take learning risks,
• investigate how our own biases and assumptions show up in our teaching practice, and
• create more equitable classrooms

Financial Compensation

Participants will receive financial compensation in the form of release credit equivalency (RCE) of $1750 in combined salary and fringe. In order to receive compensation, Minnesota State system office will hire each faculty participant as a “temporary shared employee” for the purposes of completing this program.

Registration Required

*Limit of 30 participants per discipline

Register by May 17, 2023 using the following form.

Location 

In addition to synchronous meetings hosted via Zoom, this learning community is hosted and facilitated using the shared D2L Brightspace instance of Minnesota State called, MnSite.

Questions?  

Accommodations: If you require accommodations (live captioning, etc.) to participate in this event, please send an email to the person at the bottom of this page. 

Contact the Educational Development and Technology unit.