Equity-Minded Teaching and Learning Institute

Cuyamaca College serves over 9,000 students each semester, of which over 50% are from historically racially marginalized communities in the United States. Despite such a high level of diversity in the students it serves, the same cannot be said about the classroom faculty, as the dominant demographic group remains White, with 74% in full-time faculty and 69% in part-time faculty. Unfortunately, if these numbers were disaggregated between student services (counselors & specialist) and instructional faculty, the classroom demographic percentages for White instructional faculty would actually be much higher with both part-time and full-time ranks. Aside from the lack of diversity in both instructional ranks, the majority of instructors have not been adequately prepared by their graduate programs to teach such a racially diverse student population (Bensimon & Gray, 2020).

More specifically, CCC faculty generally received graduate training through the same academy, which Paris (2012) points out has been focused on creating a monocultural and monolingual society centered on White middle-class norms and traditional Eurocentric instruction based on meritocracy, and power. Therefore, when they begin teaching, faculty will instinctively tend to replicate the color-blind, race-neutral, meritocratic learning environment they experienced themselves regardless of their own racial background (Yosso, Parker, Solórzano, & Lynn, 2004). This replication of traditional curriculum, structures, and discourses, continues the ongoing distortion, omittance, and stereotype the experiences of students from historically racially marginalized communities, which serve to rationalize discriminatory curricular processes that maintain structures of racial, gender, and class inequality in schools (Yosso, 2002).

To help address this lack of instructional training, the Office of Institutional Effectiveness, Success and Equity at Cuyamaca College has developed year-long programs (14 sessions: 8 in fall and 6 in spring) of professional development grounded in critical race theory (CRT), the Equity-Minded Teaching and Learning Institutes (EMTLI). Three basic goals drive the work of the year-long institutes with each yearly cohort of multi-discipline faculty, but each goal is layered and has a broad focus. Each was also developed and selected as the standardized EMTLI goal in efforts to ensure effective use of individual faculty racially disaggregated course level data, and an alignment with critical race theory-based approaches: culturally relevant pedagogy (Ladson-Billings, 1995), culturally responsive teaching (Gay, 2000), and the community cultural wealth model (Yosso, 2006).

The EMTLI goals are the following:

1. Assist participating faculty in the use of their racially disaggregated course level data to identify strengths and weaknesses in their teaching practice, better understand their equity data stories, and also set goals to achieve more equitable outcomes in their classes.

2. Facilitate an understanding of the national and local history of race and racism, Whiteness in institutions, racial oppression, and the system of meritocracy, specifically their impact on Higher Education and classroom culture.

3. Support implementation of classroom and curricular changes based on CRT approaches: culturally relevant, culturally responsive, and community cultural wealth approaches, plus assess interventions to engage in a cycle of continuous improvement.

During the first semester of the EMTLI, faculty receive their disaggregated classroom data and analyze it in order to self-identify strengths and weaknesses in their current practices and develop goals to address areas of concern. Faculty then participate in a series of meetings, which introduce the varied topics of equity-mindedness and how to apply those principles to teaching and learning. In the second semester, faculty participants make curricular and/or pedagogical changes intended to close equity gaps, and assess their interventions to promote a culture of continuous improvement.