We welcome to the Fall 2016 semester!  Dr. Keisha Thomspon and Dr. Kevicha Echols still continue to facilitate the group and are responsible for organizing the meetings, planning the agenda, selecting reading materials, and updating the blog page. We scheduled three meetings for the Fall 2016 semester: 9/28, 11/21, and 12/5.

There is no selected book for this semester.  Readings from online and other sources will be announced prior to our upcoming meetings.

September 29, 2016 

The reading for the first meeting of the semester is Uncomfortable Conversations: Talking about Race in the Classroom by Elissa Nadworny. After a being approached by some faculty for advice on how to have conversations about race and culture in our classrooms, we decided that this article which focuses on an interview with the author of Rac(e)ing to Class: Confronting Poverty and Race in Schools and Classrooms could provide some meaningful insight for opening up such dialogue in our classes.

November 21, 2016 

The reading selected for this month is Subjectively Objective: Tenure and the Underrepresented Minority Faculty by Erin Lynch-Alexander. Group members still raise questions about the requirements as well as the right time to go up for promotions. This article sheds light and similar sentiments that faculty from underrepresented groups face in the process to obtain promotions and tenure. The lack of mentorship, uncertainty of the steps outlining the tenure process, and the pressure to perform better than other colleagues are points raised in the article.

December 5, 2016

The reading selected for this month is What is Faculty Diversity Worth to a University? by Patricia A. Matthew. This article highlights the “invisible labor” carried out by faculty to promote and ensure diversity efforts on campuses. Often times, minority faculty are placed with the task to diversify committees, run with diversity programs, and even fight to keep programs on campus. Meanwhile this work is not often rewarded with promotion or tenure. The article also raises the point that while campuses are open and often use “diversity” as recruitment tool, support for a diverse faculty is often lacking.

This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.