While colleges and universities have made substantial progress in attracting a diverse mix of students, there are still substantial equity gaps in student outcomes. In this episode, Roberta Hurtado joins us to discuss approaches that can be used to reduce these gaps. Roberta is an associate professor in the English and Creative Writing Department here at SUNY Oswego, where she also serves as Director of Latino and Latin American Studies, and has been a fellow in the Triandiflou Institute for Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Transformative Practice. She also has served as a 2023 Fellow in the SUNY Hispanic Leadership Institute.
Show Notes
- Hurtado, R. (Ed.) (2025). Not Token Gestures: Practical DEI Strategies in 21st-Century Higher Education. Bloomsbury Publishing.
- Roberta Hurtado
- Christophe Jackson
- Espada, Martin (1998). Zapada’s Disciples. South End Press. p. 67.
- Kajonius, Petri J. (2026). Longitudinal associations between cognitive ability and socioeconomic status are partially genetic in nature. Nature: Scientific Reports.
- Bernard-Carreño, R. (2010). Nuyorganics: Organic intellectualism, the search for racial identity, and Nuyorican thought (Vol. 366). Peter Lang.
- Haggard, H. R. (1885). King Solomon’s mines.
- Gloria Anzaldúa
- Brenda Marie Osbey
- Castillo-Garsow, Melissa (2026, forthcoming). ¿Y Yo También? Rutgers University Press.
- National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Ed (NADOHE)
- Denise Chávez
- Melissa Rivero
Transcript
John: While colleges and universities have made substantial progress in attracting a diverse mix of students, there are still substantial equity gaps in student outcomes. In this episode, we explore approaches that can be used to reduce these gaps.
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John: Thanks for joining us for Tea for Teaching, an informal discussion of innovative and effective practices in teaching and learning.
Rebecca: This podcast series is hosted by John Kane, an economist…
John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…
Rebecca: …and features guests doing important research and advocacy work to make higher education more inclusive and supportive of all learners.
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John: Our guest today is Roberta Hurtado. Roberta is an associate professor in the English and Creative Writing Department here at SUNY Oswego, where she also serves as Director of Latino and Latin American Studies, and has been a fellow in the Triandiflou Institute for Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Transformative Practice. She also has served as a 2023 Fellow in the SUNY Hispanic Leadership Institute. Welcome Roberta.
Roberta: Hi, thank you for having me.
Rebecca: Today’s teas are… Roberta, are you having tea with us today?
Roberta: I am. It is Bigelow Cozy Chamomile,.
Rebecca: Nice. Sounds nice and relaxing, something that maybe a continuation of spring break?
Roberta: A little bit. Yeah. [LAUGHTER]
John: We’re just coming off of spring break here, and it is still below freezing here today in Oswego.
Rebecca: How about you, John?
John: I am having a nice, warm Lapsang Souchong today.
Rebecca: Nice. I have a Scottish Breakfast tea today.
John: We’ve invited you here today to discuss your new book, Not Token Gestures: Practical DEI strategies in 21st Century Higher Education. Can you tell us the origin story of this book project?
Roberta: Absolutely. So I was a SUNY HLI fellow in spring of 2023 and part of that institute is a requirement for you to do a capstone project, something that’s going to serve your university, something that’s going to help if there’s a gap or there’s an area where you can lend your expertise to. And at the time, I was working on the Triandiflou Institute fellowship as well. So I was doing them simultaneously, and we were looking at the importance of representation among faculty, and so one of the ways that you can intervene is to directly attend to the hiring practice. Where do you send job ads? What kind of language do you have in job ads? One of the things about the hiring process for faculty is that you might do really great workshops at the very beginning, everybody’s enthusiastic, you’ve got energy, it’s the summer. And then three months later, you’re still [LAUGHTER] in those very first preliminary steps, because the process itself goes over about a year from start to finish, from drafting the job ad, to sending it out, to getting people to come through, to getting them into the first- round interviews, first-round interviews, to second-round interviews. It’s just a lot that goes into it. And so what were really great workshops at the beginning are distant memories where you remember sitting and looking at a screen or being in a room, and sometimes these workshops also have aspects to them that need a lot of clarification. So, b instead of saying, “Well, send your job ads out to different types of arenas,” well, why would you do that? Normally, when we send out a job ad, let’s say in English, we would send it to the Modern Language Association job call list. But who are the people who actually look at that job call list? If you look at the demographics for who’s actually MLA members, paying members, who’s going to be accessing that, you might actually find that you have people from maybe elite institutions making up the majority of the membership, or you have people from very specific geographic backgrounds, people from very specific socioeconomic backgrounds, and so without meaning to, you’re limiting the pool of people. You’re being very selective without even realizing it. So, if you want to be more expansive in who’s getting the job calls, you need to know the history behind why it ends up being that it’s so selective, and then being able to move forward. Well, where are the other places where you can send the job ads? I don’t think people are intentionally ignoring the variety of places you can put them, but sometimes it’s just a matter of knowing where to go. So, all of this is to say I created this capstone, and while I was doing it, like the good English professor [LAUGHTER] that I am, I wrote an article. And when I wrote the article, it was a mix of different types of theories and historical background and information, and I sent it to a journal. I didn’t think it was going to inherently be a knockout of the park, but I thought I would get feedback, and the feedback that I got was that it was too narrowly tailored, that creating a process to increase representation of different types of faculty in Higher Ed was too narrowly tailored of a [LAUGHTER] focus, which, it is what it is. Maybe whoever was reading it, that’s the way they thought about it. And I channeled Michelle Obama [LAUGHTER] in that moment. I was like, “Well, I don’t think that this should end here. So what do we do?” And I pitched it to what was then Lexington Books, to say, “I’m not the only one who’s thinking about these things. How do we do work that makes higher ed fulfill its promise of academic excellence for all?” And so I went to Lexington Press. They picked up a contract to create an edited collection that was going to have voices from all different fields of academia, and from there, it moved forward to the call for papers and then a wonderful collection.
Rebecca: Can you talk a little bit about how you selected contributors for your project?
Roberta: Absolutely. So I was very fortunate to, in my time at HLI, get to meet a wonderful array of academics and administrators, people who genuinely care about their campuses and the people that they serve. So one person was running the pediatrics residency for one of the SUNY campuses. Another person who runs camp programs, AOP, for one campus, and their projects were speaking to the very things that my project was speaking to. So when I got the contract, I was able to solicit submissions from people who I knew were already doing this work, and I was also able to reach out to faculty from around the campus and from Oswego, who I knew that were doing work that was very similar, and nationwide. So I reached out to administrators who I knew, who are doing this work, and doctors, people who are practicing and working in education and artists as well, and asked people if they would be willing to share. And I think I was very fortunate with the timing, because where I sent the call for papers, I got a number of people responding as well. So for instance, from Virginia Tech, there’s a center there where people who were working there created a chapter, sent it to me, and then faculty had come together as well to create a chapter and send it in. So in some cases, it was a matter of the people who I knew doing this work and also getting them to sit down. Nobody has spare time. [LAUGHTER] So being able to find people who would be able to carve time out of their schedules to sit and write and create transcripts, work on artwork, there are testimonials, and there’s also personal narratives, there’s letters. So knowing people who had some things that they would like to submit, and then being able to find other people who were also in it. And one thing that was interesting about it was that the chapters are also varied. So there’s three different sections for the book. The first one is about personal responses to what’s going on with DEI in Higher Ed in the country. The second is about pedagogy, and how do you teach? How do you even create a syllabi? And then the third is about administrative tactics and techniques that can be implemented. All of the chapters were very different, and even though one might focus on, for instance, there’s a chapter on how to create a course for Introduction to Criminal Justice. Some of the techniques that are being proffered in that chapter might seem on the surface like they’re very specific to that department, but they’re not. How do you create a syllabus that has readings that students can access if they can’t afford them? In another chapter, how do you have students introduce themselves in ways that don’t put them in front of their peers and having to say things that might be a little personal, but at the same time, ensuring that the classroom is a space where they know they will be honored and respected for their differences and that their differences won’t be treated as deficiencies. How do you go about doing that? Well, these chapters offer suggestions, and again, with the idea that we all go through training to become members of higher ed, but sometimes there are things that we just don’t know or maybe weren’t made available to us when we were working to become faculty members or administrators and so these are those opportunities to also sit back and question, “what were the thought processes behind why I did that?” [LAUGHTER] You know, “why did I go about choosing these things?” So when the chapters all came in and the artwork was coming in, I was able to sit down and really see a lot of richness in each one beyond even just kind of like that surface level read, which was really exciting actually.
John: For several decades, educational institutions at all levels have put quite a bit of emphasis on DEI initiatives. But in the last year or so, a little over a year here, we’ve seen that under very heavy attack in the federal level, and also we’ve seen quite a few attacks at the level of various states. You address this a bit in your introductory chapter, which is entitled,”It’s Not a Death Knell, It’s a Call to Arms.” Can you give us an overview of the arguments in this chapter?
Roberta: So I don’t know how everybody responded to hearing about that Supreme Court case where they decided that race could not be used as part of the decision making process for admittance to higher education. I think one of the elements of it that’s been very confusing for me has been that the Supreme Court requires that questions be and decisions being narrowly tailored and limited in scope. And the verdict that came out, that was read, the decision was very clear that this was about how race as a category is used in admissions processes. The expansion of it since then to apply to things like scholarships and to apply to programs have been, if we’ve noticed, like on the state level in most cases. So we’re seeing in like Texas, and this is not a knock on Texas, I used to live in Texas, Road Runner all the way.[LAUGHTER] But we’re seeing state level and regional level now taking up the impetus and saying, “Well, we can’t talk about things that are going to make people uncomfortable,” and that’s kind of been the language of it. And we saw it during the first administration, right? There was that executive order that you couldn’t teach things that are going to make people uncomfortable, and it’s such an interesting concept that some people are not allowed to be made to feel uncomfortable, and some people are. And the question is, “why are some allowed and some are not?” And that introductory chapter, it did recognize that we do need to grieve, because it’s a dream, right? Our ideals are wonderful things. They’re goals that we are always striving to and even if we think that we’re achieving them, we always have more that we can do, and so to have made so many strides, to have been pushing and pushing for something as basic as recognition of infrastructural inequity and inequality, and then to have it be brought up as something that is the thing that’s going to be attacked… it hurts. It genuinely hurts. And for all the people who would go to college and can see themselves as deserving of an education, and then the idea that they would be turned around to and told “No, you’re not worthy of learning.” That hurts. And so we do need to grieve, but we don’t give up. We’ve been seeing this since the ‘60s. We’ve been seeing this since the ‘20s. We’ve been seeing this since the 1880s, the 1860s, we’ve been seeing this for centuries in the United States… that we don’t give up, we just change strategy. One thing that was happening around this decision, and then that came and, as you noted, especially in the most recent months, just the constant barrage of it, but we’ve also been seeing the mechanisms of this country coming forward and saying “No, you are allowed [LAUGHTER] to have opinions, you are allowed to teach content, you are allowed to have policies to make campuses spaces of learning.” I think one thing about it has been, though, that we’ve had to also take stock of what we’ve done in the past and if DEI has been treated as a side piece or as a token gesture, yeah, some of those do end up having problems within them. So if we say, “We’re going to create scholarships for a particular community.” Well, why? What was the thought process behind that? And I think sometimes, when we lose sight of what the reasoning is behind things, then things can become token gestures, and we need to reevaluate those too. Every time we’re doing something new, that’s part of the process of being in higher education too. We need to constantly be reflecting on what we’re doing, what’s working, what’s not working. And so that first chapter, it acknowledges the pain that many no doubt feel and continue to feel about what’s going on, but also a reminder, now is the time to keep going. Now is the time to regroup, think through, self critique, self analyze, come together as community and look at what we can do to move forward, because we don’t give up on our students, we don’t give up on our programs, and that’s why [LAUGHTER] we got into these fields, I would hope, or I think, because we do believe in education as just being something that should be available to all.
Rebecca: So your chapter kind of sets the stage for the first section of the book, which contains a number of essays responding to these attacks, policy attacks. What are some of the other suggestions that are raised in this section, or those actions that you’re kind of pointing to?
Roberta: So the first section of the edited collection is very personal. And I think one of the things that gets lost in the debates about DEI in Higher Ed, is that it is very personal. It is people’s very lives. It is their futures. It is people trying to figure out who they’re going to become, and especially if you’re from communities that have historically been told, “You don’t have a future,” it’s personal. You feel it in your very flesh. It’s not abstract, it’s not a concept, it’s reality. And so if we’re going to really do the work of ensuring that Higher Ed serves everyone, we need to be very cognizant of the very human toll of getting into college and being on a campus and graduating and becoming whatever we’re gonna be in the future. So that these first entries in the book are really about setting that stage, about centering the different types of ways of knowing that people have, the different types of experiences that inform who they are when they set foot on a campus or in a classroom or in an office, and then also thinking about, what are our different responsibilities to each other? Is it just that we’re going to say, “Well, we’re all different,” or is it “We’re all different and difference isn’t deficiency. Difference means an opportunity to learn and grow and be together and shift and transform and make new places and ways of knowing and ways of thinking.” It includes lots of different contributors. So there’s artists, there’s photography, there’s poetry, there’s letters to people, there’s personal statements, and these were all designed to very much center the human experience of being in higher ed.
John: The second section, as you already mentioned, focuses on strategic curriculum. Could you share with our listeners some of the suggestions that are provided by the authors in this section?
Roberta: Yeah, and actually, I’m going to give the title of one of the chapters because it was just good, “You Can’t Heal Us if You Don’t Even Know Us: Music, Medicine, and Rethinking Pre-Med Curriculum Adaptation to Community Needs.” This particular entry was a transcript with Dr. Christophe Jackson and myself, and I was asking him… he had been working on a Fulbright, which is actually now underway. And he looks at Music and Medicine. He’s done a lot of work with the jazz musicians clinic in New Orleans. The man is brilliant, or like, when you think about brilliance embodied, that’s him. But he’s very humble, and he’s very passionate about music. He’s also very passionate about medicine, and especially for his own community, but for everybody. And while we were talking, he was sharing with me, if you were going to create a music medicine class, but fundamental to this chapter is actually thinking through the values that educators bring with them when they teach. I think all of the chapters in this section really ask faculty to take a pause and think about “what are the values that you’re bringing with you that are informing who you are and how you put together a syllabus?” And it’s not because we don’t have values or don’t know them in theory when we’re walking into class, but sometimes we get so wrapped up into making a syllabus that we don’t actually pause and think, “What do I know about the people who are coming into my classroom? What do I know about the communities that I’m actually seeking to serve?” If you don’t genuinely know, and this is to create music medicine syllabi for pre-med students… if you don’t know anything about the communities you want to serve, how are you going to serve them? Medicine is not one and done. It needs to be adjusted. It needs to be organized so that the community that’s at hand can be worked with, so that it’s not just them being told, “Oh, you have to do this, this and this,” but instead, “Do you want to be healthy? What kind of things help to be healthy in your community?” From that, we see with other chapters… so for instance, there’s one about a Master’s class for people who want to go into clinical work with mental health, again, thinking through, how do we hold ourselves accountable when we’re creating syllabi, but also in ways that allow students to engage in those practices of self reflection, so that when they leave college, if they already have a profession in mind, they can consider those or use those skills to help them along their own career paths and that is something that many of us are thinking about. You come to college, you learn all of this information, but you’re also figuring out who you want to be in the next phases of your life. And so these, I don’t know what they would be called, like, not soft skills, I’m trying to think of like those kind of invisible elements of the class where you figure out, who are you going to be, how are you going to deliver information to people? When you hear critique, how do you respond? Those are elements that are fundamental to a class but often don’t get talked about. And so when you have a chapter that asks you to consider about using self in relationship to understand another, about cultural humility and empathy through storytelling and counselor training curriculum, you’re being shown those kind of tools that you can bring into your class, even if you’re not teaching a mental health practitioner class. There are other ones that are a bit more specific in terms of field and going into what’s typically called Ethnic Studies, but it’s a pan area, right? So there’s one critically teaching Asian American Studies at an Asian American Studies-less University. So Asian American Studies covers a wide range. It’s very interdisciplinary. If you don’t have an actual department, though, that’s dedicated to that learning. So for instance, Urbana Champaign has an Asian-American studies program. If you don’t have faculty who are directly dedicated to that because you don’t have a department, how do you go about teaching it? So they actually offer a syllabi that they’ve crafted, engaging students, engaging faculty, getting workshops together, doing learning activities. So there’s one for Angel Island, where you get to learn about people’s experiences traveling to the United States and what sort of scenarios they would have encountered. These are very real learning opportunities, very tangible learning opportunities that can have major impacts on students and again, helping them see who they are in the learning process. So even if you’re not teaching Asian-American Studies, this is an assignment that you can then adapt to your own models, to model in your own classes that maybe you hadn’t thought about before or even known that that was a resource available to you. So section two tries to offer different strategies. They might look field-specific on the surface, but when you actually get to look into the chapter more deeply, you find all of these different techniques that are fun in many cases, and really thoughtful and engaging.
Rebecca: I love the wide variety of offerings that you’ve described in these sections. Now we’re fortunate to be working at a public institution in a state system that’s actively working to provide more equitable Higher Ed outcomes, but historically marginalized populations are still experiencing lower rates of persistence to graduation. What are some of the sources of these inequities?
Roberta: There was an article that just came out, and it’s these scientists trying to explain why there is intergenerational poverty. And since we have all of these things, like social programs that are in theory, designed to, quote, unquote, “get people out of it,” then it must be genetic. The article just came out in like 2026. So in 2026 we are still hearing iterations of eugenics propaganda coming out as science. Because what would make sense if we have all of these social programs that people just don’t seem to be rising and fundamental to this study was a refusal to acknowledge that intergenerational poverty is not a matter of genes. That even if there are social programs that are available, are they inherently designed to help people get out of intergenerational poverty? Or are they meant to, and I’m going to quote Martin Espada here, “teach you to shuffle forward for charity.” If they are designed to help you to live a life that you are proud of, to cultivate the skills that you wake up in the morning and are thrilled to have, my guess would be that you would then be able to engage the world around you in a way that is meaningful to you. If we’re thinking about then how education links to that, then you would be attending college, and you would be dedicated to an education that would allow you to actuate those very things. But if we’re not in that system, if we’re not in that world, if we’re in a world that’s designed to teach you to shuffle forward, then you’re not being taught to cultivate those best parts of yourself. And even if you are able to attain some of those aspects, there’s a lot behind it that just isn’t there for you. When we talk about in introductory classes, for instance, for students who are coming in, if you are from a school that… and we’re seeing this more now, and I’m not trying to throw shade on people who are all about technology… I am not… but science is still showing that children learn better with direct, one-on-one contact with a human being. But if you’re from schools that highly emphasize, or heavily emphasize the use of technology, rather than that direct one-on-one attention because of class size or whatever, those children are going to be learning differently than children who go to affluent schools where they do have lower child-to-teacher ratios. And so you start to see from very, very early ages, disparities in what children are learning. And so then you get students coming to college who genuinely want to learn, genuinely want to finish their degree. But what support mechanisms do you have there that are, one, going to actually help them get through the program in a way that’s responsible? And the next thing is, how are you going to do so in a way where the student is able to cultivate an identity that is meaningful to them? Where they’re not just a number, where they’re not just a tuition payment or whatever it is. And we’re starting to hear that economic descriptions more and more about education, and when we do that, then these students who are really struggling to try and make it through, ‘Do you see yourself as part of the campus?” There’s these discussions about belonging. We’re in campuses from an educational model that was designed centuries ago with very specific people in mind about who was going to attend them. What we’re trying to do now is retrofit them to meet these needs and that very real question that I think this book takes up is, “What are the things that we can retrofit, and what are the things that we can just imagine as new and run with those new things too?” I think when we talk about social inequalities, too, it becomes a space where people can start to feel very defensive, and that breaks down conversations, because it’s like, “Well, you know, this money is going over here, and it should be doing all of these things that make differences,” but it’s about how everyone’s involved in it. Everyone from children from rural communities where the school year is dependent on harvest season, to children whose families move because of harvest season, to people who are veterans, to people who are single parents and trying to get degrees so that they can get jobs that will hopefully pay so that they can send their kids to a better school, and that kind of process. So when we talk about these social inequalities and how they show up in college settings, we’re talking about this large, interconnected, intertwined ball of threads and strings, and pulling at one or the other might not be the thing that helps a student get through maybe all of them are. But I think this book offers some insights. When you have students who need more assistance, what sort of things can we do to offer that help in the classroom, and then also administratively?
John: So students come in with different backgrounds because of the quality of the schools and differences in parents’ education and other things which affect where students start at when they enter the school system, and we have a lot of systemic inequality. But, when we have the students coming into our classes, what can faculty do to help reduce some of these equity gaps in outcomes, to create more of a sense of belonging and to help all students be more successful?
Roberta: So read Section two of this book. [LAUGHTER] I mean, some of the things are about very technical pieces, So like, how are things laid out, what types of resources are available with the syllabus and so on. But then there are sometimes things that are less obvious, and they come from the things that we were taught when we were getting our educations that we replicate. When we have a professor we like, we replicate what they did, because it obviously worked. But I think there is some privileging. For instance, reading. Something as basic as that, but also that students are bringing with them different types of knowledge, different types of critical ways of knowing, and that many times, those aren’t being represented in the content of the classes, in the curriculum, because we’ve been taught to focus on one particular thing or one particular way of knowing. And here I’m thinking, this isn’t in the book, but just if I’m a student and I’m not used to having math classes where I see any of the things I care about represented, and all of a sudden I’m being shown how math is actually important in all of these different realms of my life taught from a way that my community speaks, then I’m going to learn it differently than if I’m shown something on the board and then somebody steps away. The ways that I’m going to engage the space, the sort of questions, and this is from section two, now, how do you just even set out the room so that when students come in, they have space to sit down? How do you go about offering assignments? What sort of options do you have for them? So if you offer, let’s say if you have a reading list, and you are requiring students to purchase books and they have to have physical books, when do the grants that help them purchase books come out? If you’re setting them a text that they need to buy and they need to be reading before that grant comes out, they can’t afford the book, that’s why they’re getting the grant. So maybe adjusting when you’re going to start assigning texts that they need to purchase and front loading things like articles that maybe you can give online or things that you can print and give out to them. Simple adjustment, doesn’t call anyone out, but takes into account that some of the students in the class might very well only be able to buy books as soon as that grant comes through on the first Friday of the semester. In other cases, things like having policies that allow students to step out of the class in the event that something becomes triggering for them, not knowing if students have certain types of traumatic experiences in their histories. So saying, “If you need to leave for 15 minutes, step out of the room for 15 minutes, come back in, we have resources available to you.” Things like having, on the campus itself… so this isn’t so much controlled by faculty, but administratively… food kitchens where students who might be experiencing difficulties being able to purchase food, where they can go and get items that they need. Things like professional development workshops on campus. So students who are the first in their families to be graduating college might be the first in their families to be going for these professional level careers. Do they know how to choose a suit that fits? That might sound real simple to some people, like, “Yeah, you don’t want gapping around the pockets, and the shirt has to fall in a certain way.” But if this isn’t your family, you have no idea, and it can be very intimidating to ask for help. So does the campus offer those kinds of services? If they offer professional level clothing, do they offer the other part of it that maybe shows students these other skills that we take for granted as everybody having, but that a lot of students might not have, and so being able to access that, and in a way that doesn’t call them out, that doesn’t act as if it’s charity, but instead, this is part of the experience, and everyone should have it.
Rebecca: Really appreciate, as a designer, you talking about the difference between designing for equity in the s tart versus retrofitting something that was definitely not designed with equity in mind at the back end, right? Those experiences are different, our ability to create equitable experiences are actually quite different under those different circumstances. One of the things that you were just talking about points to the need that faculty have to understand some of the other systems that exist that are outside of the curriculum or outside of their subject matter, like the timing of when grants might be available, or how financial aid works,[LAUGHTER] because those actually have significant impact on the experiences of students at our institutions, and we can make design choices that think about some of those things that are in place, that maybe aren’t as easy to change, or they certainly aren’t going to change at the same speed [LAUGHTER] that we can adapt or adjust a class. I really appreciate that thought. Can you talk a little bit more about, maybe the responsibility faculty might want to take for better understanding some of these other systems, so that they can account for things like this?
Roberta: So it’s a hard balance, right? Because, on the one hand, and this is something I’m very cognizant of, I have curriculum that I have to teach, and I have to make sure that I deliver it accurately and responsibly. It’s easy to get lost in that and we have all of these other pressures. Because teaching alone isn’t it. There’s teaching, there’s service, there’s scholarship, and there’s conferences, and sometimes you get to the end of the day and spend 13 hours, and you know that there’s more [LAUGHTER] for the next day. So I think part of this is not so much adding to the plate, but instead shifting. And I’ve been hearing about the use of the language of shifting. How are we just going to shift over rather than asking faculty to have these extra heavy loads when there’s already so much on the plate? And I think that part of that can be done using mechanisms that we already have. So things like academic affairs retreats, professional development workshops that our campuses offer, even when we go to conferences or things like that. But having people, instead of saying, “Here’s a list of things you have to put on your syllabus,” and then moving on, having opportunities for, for instance, financial aid to come in and meet with faculty, and maybe it’s more of there’s a lot of us, [LAUGHTER] there’s few of them, there’s more of us. So having them come to like department meetings and actually walking us through when certain things will hit and when they don’t. I know about, for instance, a grant for books, because my first semester on campus, students told me about it. Before that, and I know we’re not supposed to do this, but I would just say, “You need a copy of the reading? Here’s my book. Do what you need to do. Just give me the book back before class, so that I have time to prepare.” And you know, they’d be photocopying or taking photos with their phones. But then they told me about this grant, and I was like, “Well, that’s essential to know.” [LAUGHTER] If you can’t buy the book, you can’t buy the book. So then looking at library resources, showing them how to get access to books from interlibrary loan if they’re like, “I genuinely cannot afford this book.” What can you get through Interlibrary Loan? What sort of resources do we have? So having workshops like that with faculty can be very helpful, but it has to be timed. So, you know, we have due dates as well. So having syllabi available by a certain date means that we have to be thinking about spring semester like the year before. So it’s about finding those timings that work with faculty schedules and requirements from the campus itself, and offering those and also, I think the importance of professional development time for faculty, I think across the nation, is kind of hard to find time for right now, but it’s a necessity. If we can sit down and say, “Okay, here are the actual skills that I want them to have? What are the variety of fun things that go along with those?” If I want them to be considering how to find an argument in a poem, I am not a technology person, so bear with me, can I have them distill it down to a meme? (I just learned about memes not too long ago.) And then, “How do I get them to work with that?” So this is using their own sensibilities, drawing from their own cultural knowledges, their own backgrounds, thinking through what sort of resources they have available to them. They’re still going to know how to be able to distill an argument. They’re still going to be able to identify and articulate what is it this person wants me to get and how are they trying to persuade me, but doing so in a manner that allows them to cultivate their own knowledges and not saying, “Well, this is the only way to do it. This is the only option that we have.” But instead offering these varieties. Now, as an English professor, I am always going to end up coming back to the written word, and that’s okay, there’s nothing wrong with that. But what are the flexibilities that are available around that? That students can engage? What different angles can we offer for students to come into the conversation from, while still holding standards and working with students to find that they are very capable of achieving these things? I’m thinking of the book, Nuyorganics, and it’s this brilliant book… it came out a few years back… but about having students cultivate their cultural knowledges and organic intellectualism, combining that to create different types of assignments in the classroom that then move forward. But we need time to be able to do this. And so, in a perfect world, we would have time to do it. So maybe this is something then, that individual departments can start thinking through. If this matters to us, if it’s not a token gesture that we want academic excellence for all, let’s create times and some of the stuff that’s mandatory, like meetings or whatever the case may be, where everybody gets together and actually have somebody come in as a guest and speak to us about some of the things that they’re doing that work, or maybe some processes for finding things that might work for them. I think key to this all too, though, is that it’s not about not making standards or things for students, but instead helping them cultivate the very real skills that they need for success. And that’s part of the conversation too and I think going back to the question about students finding ways to make it through college versus some who are not, this is part of that whole complex system. What resources do they have, and do they know how to, from their own lens and from their own styles, engage these? That there isn’t just one way of going about things or one way of doing it that’s correct, but all these varieties that are available to them.
John: As Rebecca noted, we’re lucky to live in a state where there is still support for diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives and attempts to try to make things work better for all students, but we do see a number of states that are imposing some really serious restrictions on what people are allowed to teach. They’re redefining our history, redefining science, and limiting what can be talked about in terms of many issues. What advice would you give to faculty who are trying to help students in that environment?
Roberta: I think the first thing would be, know the law and not the law as you’re being told it’s the law, but what is the actual letter of the law. If you know the letter of the law, if you know what it actually says, and you have a cohort of people that similarly know what it actually says, you can make decisions about your response rather than being caught in the moment and having to react. And I think that one struggle people are having is that they’re being put into situations where they’re having to react on the spot. And it’s not that their reactions are bad. They’re human, and what they’re responding to [LAUGHTER] in many cases just doesn’t make sense. I will give them that. But we also have to acknowledge that the paradigm has shifted, and we cannot respond the way that we thought it worked when it’s already shifted. We have to know what’s happening now and what is our relationship to that. I heard a statistic recently about people’s desire for their children to go to college and get degrees, and, you know, it’s lower than it was 20 years ago. That’s about faith in education and faith in the learning process, and in states where people seem to be vilified for wanting to give education books, being thrown away, it’s hard to maintain faith in the very things that we know in our core are right, which is that you don’t discriminate against people because of their race, their ethnicity, their socioeconomic backgrounds, their gender, their sexuality, and disability. And we’re thinking about different ways of knowing. We know this. And I think sometimes the small group of people that are shouting the loudest seem to be the ones that make up the majority, and they don’t. We’re seeing pushes against restriction of political thought. We’re seeing pushes that are being successful, against the attempt to restrict access of education to certain communities. The momentum has to maintain though, we can’t back down from it, and we have to also remember that we need to remind people we are supporting them, that we are here for them, that we will do what we can to support them, that we have not given up the fight, right? It’s not a death knell. It is a call to arms, and we are ready. We might need breaks. [LAUGHTER] Some of us might need to rest every now and again, and that’s totally fine, but we don’t give up. We keep going, and we will continue to be supportive.
John: In line with what you’ve just suggested, back in 1853, Theodore Parker said that “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” And this is a quote that was frequently repeated by both Martin Luther King and by President Obama. Do you think we’re going to get back on a better path in the near future?
Roberta: There’s a quote from a book called King Solomon’s Mines, British fiction from I guess a century almost now, ago. And the book is very problematic, but there’s a line in it that goes, “Where there is life, there is hope.” And as much as the book is super messed up, and I’m not advocating anyone read it, I take great comfort in that, that we always have the ability to move forward, that if there is life anywhere, that we can always continue to cultivate the best parts of ourselves to make the world a better place and I think for a long time, we haven’t necessarily been encouraged to cultivate those best parts of ourselves, when you turn on the media, when you turn on the television, whatever it might be, seeing people screaming at each other, seeing people waving flags in each other’s faces, on both sides. And we think about like the polarization of the United States, this has gone on, you know, it’s older than me. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t those of us who really believe in education. That really believe in the ability to learn and grow and find those better parts of ourselves and be open to change. And change is not easy, change is difficult. It hurts. When we grow, we go through growth spurts and our bodies hurt. We grow teeth and our gums hurt, but it’s okay, because on the other side of that, growth is something very real. And right now, we are in a space of growth, and I turn to Gloria Anzaldúa here, because I think about the path to “conocimiento,” which means the path to coming to consciousness. And it goes up, it goes down, it goes left, it goes right, it spirals, and sometimes you think you’ve got it, and nope, you’re right at the beginning again. But if you can engage the process, you will start coming into these movements of complexity and being able to figure out new realities for yourself. I do think that things will get better. I don’t know how long it will take. I would like to say tomorrow, and maybe for some of us it will be, apparently, the planets just realigned themselves last week, and I take great hope in that. [LAUGHTER] But genuinely, I do think that there is hope for the future. When I hear some of the things that my students talk about… I just went through midterms, and seeing some of these midterms just renews your faith in everything, because you’re like, “Thank you. Thank you for believing you could do something that was different. Thank you for trusting the process and yourself enough to engage in this, even if it was new and scary and different.” It’s okay to cultivate those parts of their imaginations and creativity in combination with critical thinking. I think one of the major attacks right now is on critical thinking skills. We don’t give up on those. We hunker down with them. That might make us dangerous, but it also means that we know how to ask good questions, and it’s going to be those people who are able to ask good questions that are going to lead us into the future. I think about Brenda Marie Osbey. She was the poet laureate of Louisiana a few years back, and I got to meet her one time, and she said, “the job of the artist isn’t to answer the question. The job of the artist is to ask them and then to follow these questions through all of their different pathways and find all these nuances and things that we weren’t thinking about or things that we weren’t considering and bringing those to light.” Yeah, that’s it, that ability to think, the ability to create, the ability to continue moving. We do have a lot of pain that we haven’t dealt with, centuries in the making that we do have to deal with, and maybe that’s part of why we’re in this moment now. But that doesn’t mean we can’t come out the other side of it. We just have to have faith that there is another side of it, and I genuinely believe there is.
Rebecca: Given that John has already asked about your crystal ball. I’ll ask a follow up. We always end by asking, what’s next? It could be personally, professionally, the book, any way you want to spin it.
Roberta: So I have a book chapter coming out in a collection called ¿Y Yo También?, and it’s about Latinas and the Me Too movement. And it’s got creative pieces in it, it’s got scholarly works in it, but it’s designed so that anyone can read it, which is awesome, because sometimes we have these very jargon laden conversations about people’s very real experiences that can make it hard for everyone to join in the conversation. So I love this book. It’s coming out with Rutgers University Press this coming fall. The faculty member is in New York, her name is Melissa, and again, coming out this fall. I have a second monograph that I just finished called, But is it sexy? that looks at representation of eroticism in Puerto Rican women’s literature, which was incredible to get to research and write and I’m looking forward to that. Moving forward, I’m going to be presenting at NADOHE, which is the National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Ed at the end of March. And then next spring, I get to teach poetry, which I’m excited about. And then this semester, I have two more guest artists coming as part of a larger series. Denise Chávez will be joining us, as well as Melissa Rivero at the end of the semester. So these are all major moments of excitement, and I very much look forward to.
John: Well, thank you. It was great talking to you, and I hope your book makes an impact on people.
Roberta: Thank you. Thank you very much.
Rebecca: Yeah, thank you for all your work.
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John: If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast service. To continue the conversation, join us on our Tea for Teaching Facebook page.
Rebecca: You can find show notes, transcripts and other materials on teaforteaching.com. Music by Michael Gary Brewer.
John: Editing assistance provided by Madison Lee.
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