Journal of Diversity and Equity in Educational Development

Few college instructors receive pedagogical training, yet they enter the classroom with experience and knowledge that informs the way they think about their capacity to teach. The starting point of the faculty teaching journey is often a neglected aspect of the educational development literature. This case study examines where and how 10 U.S. college instructors developed their beliefs about their capacity for college-level teaching generally, and particularly their confidence in equity-based teaching. We found that college instructors generally lacked first-hand experience teaching in diverse classrooms, so drew on other types of diversity to inform their equity-based teaching. The college instructors received feedback on their general teaching from multiple sources, which was valuable. Feedback on their equity-based teaching came mostly from students but was often limited or negative. We also found variations in where and how the instructors developed their beliefs about their capacity for equity-based teaching by discipline and gender. Considering the starting points of college instructors’ beliefs about their capacity to teach, especially in equity-based ways, has implications for educational developers in reducing barriers and developing programs to increase instructors’ confidence.

This reflection article explores the formation and impact of an academic writing group composed of minoritized educational developers, members of the POD Academic Writing Scholars. In our discussions, we identified a common experience of a hidden curriculum of educational development in which scholarly publishing is an unspoken expectation yet often remains unsupported and unrecognized by our institutions. This hidden curriculum reinforces exclusionary academic norms that disproportionately disadvantage minoritized scholars. We reflect on our writing collaborative as a counterspace, a space for mutual support and solidarity, in which we could explore and resist the hidden curriculum.  By examining the barriers we encountered and the insights that emerged from our work together, we describe how writing groups can help educational developers critically examine the norms of our field, build identities as academic writers and community, and affirm diverse forms of academic writing. We share recommendations for how institutions, teaching centers, and educational developers can reveal and challenge the hidden curriculum. Our experiences demonstrate how counterspaces like our not only support individual and collective growth, but can also contribute to broader conversations about systemic inequities in educational development. 

We all understand ourselves through a collection of experiences and characteristics, through story. Far from a fanciful notion, teachers need to make themselves legible in a variety of high-stakes contexts, from grant applications to tenure portfolios. The question of “what kind of teacher you are” becomes a weighty inquisition– one that targets faculty of color. Some of the most beloved teaching practices are based on narratives of Western individualism. In this essay, we introduce a unique methodology that decenters hierarchical teaching practices in order to make the coveted banner of “good teacher” available to a diverse faculty.  

Much has changed since we published our call to interrogate educational development for racism and colonization. Since then, our team has engaged in scholarly research to critically interrogate our own field and some of its unquestioned assumptions to better align our practices with our purpose. Our methodology incorporated journey mapping, a method that centers narrative as a source of data. Our methodological choice acknowledges that as researchers, we are not neutral observers but are positioned within the professional contexts we investigate. In this piece, we describe how our maps have served as a reflective tool for our own experiences in educational development as we make sense of the results of our research during a time when those in political power aim to normalize racism and affirm settler colonialism.

How much space are we willing to sacrifice to Gen AI? Aside from the (wonderful) Keynote speakers Drs. Z Nicolazzo and Amanda Tachine, none of the POD 2024 sessions were advertised to cover indigenous pedagogies or topics. Instead, what was not rare at POD 2024, were Gen AI sessions. I explore the following questions: How much space are we (as the POD community) willing to sacrifice to Gen AI? What is getting displaced from our conversations when so much revolves around Gen AI? In this commentary, I interrogate how our commitment to DEIJ values and practices may be misaligned with the space we give to Gen AI in our yearly conference through our conversations, our commitment to student learning, and building relationships. We can write a different future where we think about what we want to take and what we want to leave from the dominant culture as called to us by our Keynote speakers. 

Sexual harassment is a prominent, entrenched problem in higher education spaces. In this reflection, the authors emphasize the importance of training academic leaders as a population that can leverage their roles toward creating institutional climates resistant to sexual harassment and other social inequities. Using an eight-hour workshop at the [R1 institution anonymized] as a case study, the authors offer four key reflections for educational developers working to develop participant capacity toward organizational and social change. 

The Louis Stokes Alliance for Minority Participation (LSAMP) program, across four different universities within a statewide university system, in the United States of America, is designed to increase the representation of underrepresented minority (URM) students in STEM fields. Accomplished through intentional undergraduate research mentoring experiences with mentors from a variety of backgrounds, research, and publications conducted across the program to learn and develop better teaching and learning practices. For URM students and faculty, there are often additional needs and challenges in STEM. In this study, we analyzed qualitative data based on 42 interviews of LSAMP participants; 13 mentors and 29 protégées. Findings illustrate how faculty development can impact the experiences of minority protégées and faculty. Self-Determination Theory (SDT), White Racial Frame, and Intersectionality Framework (IF), were used to explain mentoring findings associated with motivation, stereotypes, societal and cultural norms, and racial disparities that persist in STEM.

JDEED Title and Masthead for Issue 1