SUNY Cortland Shares Diversity Training Model with New Paltz, Oneonta Campuses

SUNY Cortland Shares Diversity Training Model with New Paltz, Oneonta Campuses

07/09/2009 

With the goal of preparing college students for an increasingly multiracial, multiethnic and multilingual world, three State University of New York colleges recently began a three-year program to train faculty leaders, update academic curricula and plan to create an intercultural institute on each campus.

SUNY Cortland’s Center for Gender and Intercultural Studies (CGIS) has spearheaded the Diversity Leadership Train the Trainer Institute (DLTI) project, which was launched on July 8 with a three-day intensive workshop in Cortland to set leadership goals.

The DLTI project is supported by grants totaling a little more than $40,000 from both the New York State/United University Professions (UUP) Joint Labor-Management Campus Grants Committee and the SUNY Office of Diversity and Educational Equity (ODEE). UUP is supporting about 60 percent of the project cost while SUNY ODEE is underwriting the remainder.

Sixteen faculty members from SUNY Cortland, SUNY New Paltz and SUNY Oneonta are participating in the first set of workshops. On Wednesday, attendees were addressed by representatives from the SUNY Office of Diversity and Educational Equity, assistant provost Carlos Medina ’78 and vice provost Pedro Caban; SUNY Cortland President Erik J. Bitterbaum; SUNY Cortland Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs Mark Prus; and UUP Cortland Chapter President and Associate Professor of Sociology Jamie Dangler.

The DLTI is co-directed by Mechthild Nagel, a SUNY Cortland professor of philosophy and chair of the CGIS, and Seth Asumah, a SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor of political science who chairs SUNY Cortland Africana Studies Department. Since 2004, Nagel and Asumah have delivered five well-attended and well-received summer seminars on effectively teaching diversity and multiculturalism to SUNY Cortland faculty.

“Race, class, gender, religion and other variables continue to shape our experiences and social structures in this country,” Asumah commented. “Many social scientists have studied the effects of domination on different groups. Yet, formal curriculum and pedagogical professional development opportunities for faculty to infuse diversity and social justice in their teaching are very limited.”

The July 8-10 workshops at the Lynne Parks ’68 SUNY Cortland Alumni House and the Sperry Center will prepare faculty, staff and librarians at the two other four-year SUNY institutions to move away from the “one professor at a time” training model for campus diversity, Nagel said. Future workshops will move to the other campuses

She explained the need for such institutes to be conducted on college campuses.

“Most faculty are not taught techniques of infusing diversity in their terminal degrees even though the modern world demands it,” she said. “The ‘train the trainer’ model has been proven to be an efficient model, whereas the ‘one professor at a time’ model limits the number and reach of faculty able to teach diversity topics.”

‘Train the trainer’ techniques include lectures, informal talks and discussions, demonstrations, role-playing, simulations, focus groups and learning centers. The latter features a series of stations where a small group all learn or teach parts of the same subject.

The DLTI’s broader objectives are to:

• train three supervisory SUNY UUP faculty members to create a diversity institute on their respective campuses to develop a curriculum with 45 UUP faculty;

• yield 183 trained UUP faculty by 2011;

• increase diversity and multicultural education on three SUNY campuses;

• develop diversity and multicultural education curriculum development and pedagogy training;

• enrich undergraduate student critical thinking and learning; and,

• create a model that can be replicated elsewhere in the SUNY system.

Trainers will initially return to their campuses to offer their own diversity training workshops.

“These trained UUP members are likely to share their knowledge with one to two of their departmental peers through informal mentoring, advising of syllabus construction, best teaching practices and, importantly, visiting non-trained faculty’s classrooms,” Asumah noted. “Faculty members often receive coaching when ‘difficult dialogues’ occur and a faculty member is at a loss as to how to respond and intervene in such dialogues.”

For more information, contact Nagel at (607) 753-2013 or mecke.nagel@cortland.edu or Asumah at (607) 753-2064 or seth.asumah@cortland.edu.


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