NLC Community Conversation with Prof. Jose Moreno, Professional Learning as a Multi-Vitamin for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion

NLC Community Conversation with Prof. Jose Moreno, Professional Learning as a Multi-Vitamin for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion: Video automatically transcribed by Sonix

NLC Community Conversation with Prof. Jose Moreno, Professional Learning as a Multi-Vitamin for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion: this mp4 video file was automatically transcribed by Sonix with the best speech-to-text algorithms. This transcript may contain errors.

Bret Eynon:
Thank you so much for joining us. I'm really happy to be here with you today. This is the third of our four part Community Conversation series. Hi, Lucy. Nice to see you... We have one more after this one, which is with Peter Felton, who will be talking about engaging students as partners in the professional learning process, and I think that that is something that if you possibly can make it, I think you'll want to. It's on Tuesday, April twenty seventh at three o'clock. And it really is one of those kind of developments that's happening in the professional learning field that is very exciting and offers all sorts of possibilities. And Peter is a great person to talk about. It has really been at the forefront of engaging in that process. So I encourage you to put that will send out the invites right after this session. So and you'll get incessant emails from me, as you know. So today, while I'm really happy to see you all and very much in mind, we're also talking about something that is kind of, you know, some somber, so somber elements to it in the sense that we're, you know, as a country wrestling with the ongoing pain and wounds caused by racism and white supremacy in this country and the difficulty our country has had in embracing and taking advantage of our rich diversity. And that's evident all the time. But it's particularly evident again this week.

Bret Eynon:
So I know that I'm feeling that and I'm sure other people are as well. And we as educators are both part of the problem and part of the solution. We know that education has not lived up to its promise of offering opportunity to all, and there's things built into education that have contributed to the problem. At the same time, we know that as educators we have an opportunity. To address and engage our colleagues and our students in thinking about solutions and working towards solutions. So this is part of our work every day. And today, we have a chance in particular to think about how do we do that and do that effectively and with our colleagues in community. And so that's to some extent the backdrop. For our conversation today and couldn't be better positioned than to have a chance to talk to and talk with José Moreno, who is a colleague and friend who has been engaged in the work in front of us for years and years. So José, as you know from my notes, is a professor at Cal State Long Beach in the Chicano studies area and has really worked across, has been chair there, but has worked college wide, university wide and nationally for years around these issues. And as you saw in my note, he's been active on the Harvard Education Review, the National Action Council for Minorities in Engineering with a CMU, the Western Association of Schools and Colleges.

Bret Eynon:
It is a thoughtful, engaged and someone who brings a tremendous amount to this conversation. So what we'll do today is, as we've done in every conversation, we're building on the resource that José Generals' generously shared with us. I'll start off with a question or two. But we know this is much more effective if it's questions coming from you. That's you know, I think in our first two sessions, we've gotten stronger and stronger in the dialogic aspect of this, and José is eagerly awaiting your questions. I promised him promised him that you would have questions for him. Right. And so think. Excellent, good. And so you can put your questions in the chat, as we have before. Laura will be monitoring the chat and pulling some questions to the surface. So while you're thinking about and writing up your questions, I'm going to welcome José and say, you know, invite him to make any welcoming remarks he wants to make and start him off with a question. So and that question is very straight up to say so. And I'll start with the basics. In your recorded presentation, you argue for the power of inclusive and culturally relevant pedagogy. And you give a very concise and helpful definition of what that what you mean by that. So I wondered if you could start us off by reminding folks of that definition and why that? Approach to teaching and learning is so important. So welcome, José.

Jose Moreno:
Thank you. Thank you, Brett. For context of closing the conversation, a good and good. Learning spaces, it's never, never should be in a vacuum and a void of what is happening in the moment and the historical process that creates the moment. And so. So I'm quite edgy today. I got to tell you. And I and I hope that I can sustain that edge and we have to keep having these moments, but in many ways, your introduction today probably reflects what I certainly think in practice and in theory about what culture and pedagogy is, is. Is that we our classrooms are not in a vacuum, be it preschool or the program or an auditorium of two hundred students or a seminar 15. So I the work that I engage with and that we're doing at Long Beach and working on the campuses around how we think of culturally relevant pedagogy is up because of the work of Gloria Landsing Billlings in the mid 1990s, who herself would say she was providing a language to what many effective educators know is the best way to engage and effectively bring students to an intellectual space and to be in space with them? She's provided just a very powerful is what good theory does a good descriptor to be able to articulate things that we know intrinsically are the right way to engage in teaching and learning.

Jose Moreno:
So I'll just work off of her work and then how we try to try to operationalize it to the conversation, to the the asynchronous recording and learning the lexicon of the covid-ogogy. And that's not that culturally relevant. Pedagogy is an approach that empowers its fundamental core and distinguished from multicultural education is it's an approach that seeks to empower our students intellectually through their lived experience, through their social experience, to their emotional intelligence and through the political context and subjectivity in which they come from and which they find themselves in, in a power dynamic with their teacher. So it is an approach that brings that all explicit into a classroom. So where the teacher is a learner and the learner is a teacher. And that holds nowhere more relevant to me, of course, than for me in teacher education, where we're teaching teachers how to teach, but professors who are presumably doing research and then conveying that research to students of whose communities they often do research in and about.

Jose Moreno:
So that's for me what culturally relevant pedagogy is. And I'll say to that, and I may have to like they've gone deeper into this and the talk, but that work is actually been moving towards culturally sustaining pedagogy. So it's not just about being relevant. It's about how we sustain that pedagogy and sustain the intellectual, personal and political work with students and taking that from a classroom space to. As I pointed out in the talk from a micro space with the student. And relevant to us in this talk today, in this conversation is is to the message that if you're a high school teacher, junior high teacher to your department with other teachers and other students that are part of your work at the university, literally the departments, and then from there to the macro, the institutional, which is why for me, the. The NLC framework moving from or least understanding the framework and how it has to be integrated of going from individual being and understanding that to institutional to community to the ecosystem, is why this framework is so important for me to bridge equity into that work. So sorry to be long-winded, but that's for me, culturally relevant pedagogy.

Bret Eynon:
Not long winded at all, Jose. I think that's so important, that connection with students lives. And their lived experiences and bringing that in, as you know, making the connection. Between that and almost any topic of value, valuing their lives and experiences is key to that empowerment, and it seems so. Simple in some ways, but, you know, it's not and it's challenging, and one of the things I thought was really interesting in the data you shared. In your resource, was that something like 80 percent of faculty say they really want to do this, they want to be inclusive with their students, they want to engage their students lives, but only 20 percent of those faculty surveyed that you cited are actually using resources that help guide. Their work around culturally relevant pedagogy, and to me that was so striking. And just calls out for why professional development or professional learning? Is so critical then to make that connection between the people who want to do this work, need to do this work and the resources and the guidance that we are thinking of ourselves as guiding professional learning can offer. So I wonder if you can talk about that and the role of professional learning and professional development in supporting faculty.

Jose Moreno:
Yeah, you know of the. I guess as I listened to your question and thinking about that datapoint. I guess what it says to me is faculty are quintessentially American. We say one thing and do another. Again, I'm living in the moment we're in and living at the moment we're in that you survey Americans about how they feel about. Voting rights about, you know, about the Constitution and who should apply to and everybody gets a fair just society, and I would I wouldn't mind if my daughter brought a Mexican kid home and that Mexican shows I but I was so, so sorry. I had to kind of just get that out. But, you know, but but when I think of it in that context, that's my culture. A of pedagogies important to me, to our understanding of this in this overall work of faculty learning. Professional living environment is. That. When when we think about it, we said about empowering students culture, whether pedagogy is also about disempowering and authorizing the professor, the teacher did not feel like the weight of the entire responsibility. That classroom is on them. Right, and especially for faculty of color or I'll just say critical faculty, right. Generally speaking. That they didn't carry the weight of the institution's diversity equity initiatives because their colleagues aren't. And so the students in your class that may cover right critical race theory and they cover queer feminist theory.

Jose Moreno:
It may cover just basic structural theory that you want to teach, but, you know. As the data suggests that if you don't cover it, your students aren't going to get it somewhere else. And that puts a tremendous responsibility on that one faculty as an individual to carry the community, institutional, and often self-congratulatory behavior of an ecosystem approach that is often rhetorical and not in practice. So that's where CRP is so important for me in the hiring context because when you do have faculty if they value diversity, they say absolutely. And you ask them and this was my initial foray into full research work is the educational benefits of racial-ethnic diversity as a way to defend affirmative action, because the country the Supreme Court said the reparations framework of our policy is no longer relevant. Racism is not here. It has it been here for generations structurally legal. And so we shouldn't think of affirmative action anymore to give someone a leg up to create an equitable. An equitable landscape, what the Supreme Court said through its Bakke Case in 1978 is what you can consider race, gender if it's to enhance the educational environment. And that's how we were able to continue with affirmative action admissions, the use of race, ethnicity, and gender in employment in the university setting. So fast forward 20 years later, that now becomes questioned. If diversity actually does it really enhance there's no data.

Jose Moreno:
It's just so intrinsic! That we were basically asking, does God exist? And the Supreme Court said prove it, prove that God exists? So we began to develop a lot of research to prove. And so what we found in the research and the surveys of faculty that ninety-eight percent of the faculty value diversity. I think it's important, but it's the same faculty who are the ones in their academic standards, faculty Senate, who are also saying we have to have stricter admissions and increase our SAT scores and our GPA. So bringing it back to the question is, I think about then what role to faculty have? Well, I should say faculty learning designers have been confronted at data point. Faculty say they evaluate faculty say they want it, but they don't do it. So you could come to one or two conclusions. They're. At the end of Boys in the Hood (movie) when Ice Cube says "they either don't know or they don't want to know," right? And so you have to go one of two ways. And so I think this opportunity with faculty learning design and faculty learning communities is we could at least say, you can't say you didn't know how to do it. And that's why equity has to be so centered on this. So if they're saying they value it, but they don't do it, and we have to assume disagree with our students, they have been exposed to it.

Jose Moreno:
They were trained for it. They haven't had the opportunity for it. They're what in the old days we might call remedial. Ironic? They're remedial. And so we have to develop a developmental. But because of the work that the team is doing in this work, we know that that's a deficit approach to college, remedial, to call it developmental. And we want to say we want to be through culturally relevenat pedagogy, humanistic. We want to recognize that human beings, not just Americans, human beings, we value things, but we don't know. Whether we're doing it or not, and that's called assessment. Somebody has to say it, somebody has to do it and somebody that has to design it, and so I'll skip that. I said that's why I have to be constructive, which is what CERP talks about is called construction. So faculty want to do it. They don't do it, but the one is doing it. Half of thirty-three percent of the faculty did say that they do incorporate something, but half of black and Latino faculty said they do. I'm kind of worried by the other half, don't, but half do, but a third of the general faculty do not. Which means because you incorporate black faculty to that data, that means for white faculty, much less. Right. So then that is where the opportunity lies when I think of this work as the multivitamin is, if you ask faculty to go to a faculty, to a equity and diversity learning development workshop, you're going to get a faculty of color.

Jose Moreno:
If you say we're going to do a session on faculty learning and syllabi development, that's the multivitamin, you're getting your vitamin C through your zinc pill. So so people want to take zinc. So people want to take vitamin E, so this is the multivitamin. And so that's why the framework and why I love what what's happening with this framework is that it is right in there. It's it's integrated. It's intrinsic, it's named. But unnamed. It's it's it's practiced. And we know that if you don't do it, then you are leaving out a tremendous opportunity to fulfill what is a policy framework, the institutional community of the ecosystem. And then you say individuated and then you wonder why faculty of color don't come to your sessions. Then you wonder why faculty of color leave the campus and you say, well, wait a minute, we're hiring them, but you're not adding to their professional learning. You're not validating their experience. And as a result, white faculty remain segregated or male faculty remain segregated depending on the discipline. And as a result, you built up your vitamin C, but your bones aren't getting any stronger. So you build up your system, but your bones are brittle.

Bret Eynon:
Yeah, I think I understand better now what you mean by the multivitamin integrating in the equity work. Into the whole picture and making sure that it's pervasive as opposed to, you know, splitting it off and only talking about it in limited settings, that makes a lot of sense to me. The other thing, though, that I think makes sense and I want you to talk a little more, but before I ask that question, I'm going to say, where's my questions in the chat? Whereas my questions in the chat? I promised you people would make embarrass me in front of my friends. So do you have questions? I'll get one more. I'll give you one more question to pose for me. And then I'm really hoping we have some questions from the group. So and that is if you can talk a bit about the co-constructed aspect, because I think that resonance between I hear you shared, I hear the gears turning in your head. The. You know, the core of. The relevant pedagogy is a constructive model. And part of what you're arguing for then is applying that same insight to the design. Of professional learning programs and the ways in which then that kind of transforms. The professional learning, so I wonder if you can talk a little more about what you mean in applying that co-constructed model to professional learning.

Jose Moreno:
Yeah, I am I apologize, I'm using a lot of metaphors, and maybe that's where maybe I'm not being really clear. And again, I'm feeling kind of edgy. So but. So the construction all just basic, what we know folks who study pedagogy and read the research well, it is that we know that the most effective teaching environment and learning environment are when there is a sense, a sense of co-construction, a sense of ownership, a sense of rhyme and reason. And as faculty, we're not. Where we're where acculturated into a system that says we're the experts. If you're a high school teacher, you're told if you don't, if your knowledge, your authority to control your classroom and classroom management is proportional to how much the kids know that, you know what you're talking about. Right. So if they don't think you know what you're talking about, the kids will go crazy on you. At the university level, I don't know if we're as concerned about that. But instead, we are intrinsically told we know much more than what our students know. And we're the experts where the world's experts and, you know, they're just as Paolo Friere says, they're just this banking method of education system that we tend to have. They're just depositories that we're depositing knowledge into it. And that's it. Right. And you fulfilled your contract. I'm off to do my research or I'm off to teach other classes or whatnot, so. So co-construction is based and predicated on the most effective pedagogy, but frankly, even the most effective pedagogical research is built on and I believe strongly takes from the most effective social movements we've seen that the most effective social movements or community organizing are when organizers work through and with the people they're seeking to organize or comes from the people that are organizing.

Jose Moreno:
Right. So when scholars have studied various social movements, they find that there is this sense of cool construction that people have to understand and name the live condition. They have to understand the roots of that, if not intellectually. They understand it personally. And so that they're not just being manipulated or whatnot, they're marching. And the movement sustain themselves through threat of violence to death because they intrinsically believe they help but build that movement together, bits about them. And so that's good pedagogy. Right. So when I think of the co-construction, I'll give an example of that I'm intimately familiar with, which is what I talked about in the presentation is at Long Beach, we really were nervous because we have this grant to NHS that grant and the grants focuses to prepare and increase the number of Latinx teachers through our credential system. But we thought about that and said, OK, that that's great, we need that. But we're never going to produce enough Latinx teachers to do right by and understand how to use pedagogical methods when in that context. So we have to make sure every graduate understands culturally relevant pedagogy. We're teaching a Latinx class context, but it's the framework overall. So we said we need to then teach the teachers of the teachers, our faculty.

Jose Moreno:
And that's a scary proposition, because not only the faculty, it's the faculty who are the teachers, the teachers. These are the experts. So it's quite daunting. And so we said, well, you know, that we can't just design something and just tell them this is we're going to do so. We said, here's a framework we'll use. We'll introduce it to them the first day. We'll show them the data and the context of why this matters to do. And then we're going to spend the first session constructing that with that. What would that look like for us to get here? And so that's what we did. And they laid out the template. We said this is our theory, an understanding of culture about the pedagogy. Here's the tenants, as the research suggests strongly as well as practitioners. What do you think? Does that does that jibe with you? Do you think something's missing? Do you think we should add something? And so we did that and then we came back and said, OK, this is what you are. You know, we'll take the workload to go kind of piece it all together based on what you said. And we'll present a framework to see if it reflects you and and what we're looking to do. And it worked really, really well. At least I thought we saw was the quote unquote curmudgeon faculty, because that's the other part. Designers do what we're designing for an audience we already know in our institutions as community who the curmudgeon's are going to be.

Jose Moreno:
We know who are going to be the resisters. We know who's who's really going to try to throw it all, right, undermind it. So we said, you know what, they're part of the design, they're part of the design to explore with them. Why do you curmudge? What part of this will make you want to curmudge? Right. And what part of this might help us understand how you became a curmudgeon and just engage in dialogue as he said. So, so it's subscribe to this radian that's in Billing's framework of our co-construction of a dialogical process and we find it extremely helpful. So what's happened now is faculty who volunteering and begging other faculty in that with about 90 faculty to come into their classroom to say, hey, can you come in? Just observe, not just review my syllabus to see if it captures what we're all trying to do here, but come and observe to the little parts I am doing that fit the framework. Am I really doing it so built because it was constructed a trust to build a community and now it's in our opinion and we're documenting it, it's creating a movement of faculty saying it's not scary. It's not scary to have a black neighbor. Right. I keep going back to it's good. It's that's scary that my child goes to school with a Puerto Rican child. It's not scary, right. That at any rate, I keep bringing it..

Bret Eynon:
And that's really helpful. José, I think that's really helpful because it you know. Thinking about how do we, you know, treat our faculty? With the same kind of respect that we want to treat our students and engage with the kind of respect that's right. To engage with our students, if it's both at one level, it's a kind of you can see the connection to the framework. The first principle, the framework is respect the knowledge that people are the faculty and educators are bringing into the classroom. And it connects directly to that building a supportive community. But it's also a way of experientially helping everybody experience. What is that like? Which is such a key issue for changing the way we teach. That we were all taught in ways that don't resonate with what we want, so creating models that exemplify. The prefigure, let's say, what we're trying to do in the classroom right now, we've got we've got some great questions

Jose Moreno:
If they get thrown out. Let me add one caution, one caution of how construction might often get. What a colleague calls into a malicious compliance is construction is not the dean or associate being the principal investigator, the director of the Professional Learning Center deciding on what the faculty need, designing a workshop off of a survey that faculty took, designing a workshop and then doing it right. That's not cool. Construction that's imposition. That's colonial. So construction is when you decide we want our faculty to understand how we're going to implement this new GE program. And we want to understand what's the best design to engage in that, work with them, just give an example of a program. So that's where you bring the faculty to say, here's our goal now. How do you all think we can get there? The work of the PI, the director, the associate dean, is to gather that information with them. Feed it back, right, and to provide the support that way, because faculty don't have the time, right, to to constantly be working to every session of the co-construction, but that the framework, the model, the intentionality, the ethos is is up front in the design and then someone puts it together. So I want to be clear about that, because oftentimes we do see where campuses of benevolent, I'll say not necessarily out of spite or manipulative work. I assume that's not the intent, but out of a benevolent effort to make sure the faculty don't feel like they're going to do more work. It is worth asking faculty. So at least a little bit of that work at the beginning on the design front, and then we're going to take care of making sure that we that we implement what you're envisioning. And you can keep checking in with us on that. That's I wanted to clarify that. But,

Bret Eynon:
Laura, do you want to help us surface questions out of the chat?

Laura Gambino:
I can certainly do that, so everybody was thinking and now there's been this flood, so bear with us and I'm going to I'm going to start with Denise. But Denise, I'm going to ask you if you feel like your questions been answered, because I feel like in some ways they talked about it and you were welcome to unmuted. And she was saying, you know, faculty don't learn to do teach as part of their graduate program, let alone learn to teach culture sustaining ways. So this can be intimidating. So how do we lessen that kind of sense of intimidation around this? And how do we create learning opportunities that, you know, that meet faculty where they are? And so we talked a little bit about the kind of respecting what they bring. I don't know if you want to add a little to that, Jose or Denise, you can clarify or push Jose further in talking about that.

Denise Douglas:
Laura, I do believe that they gave us some great points on that. And I do think it certainly starts with respect and making sure that you understand where people what people are bringing to that as part of construction. You have to understand what each person is bringing to that conversation. So I thought that was great. But I still think maybe we have to still ask the question, though, and I would like Jose's maybe thought on how do we make sure that that's happening in a way that really gets people interested in doing this work. I still think there's something to it that Jose probably could contribute more to.

Laura Gambino:
Good. I thought you were going to let him off easy there. Thank you for pushing him on this.

Jose Moreno:
The other part about the questions that this is embedded in our graduate programs. We're individualised, right? It just it's like you're on your own. Yeah, you have a committee to support you, but you're on your own. You're supposed to approve you know method. You're supposed to know, you know, how to do methods. You're supposed to know that you're supposed to be the expert of that particular topic to get your doctorate in the efforts in front of three people and ask you questions about something you've been working on them for a year. So you're reminded you're on your own at the end of the day. And then we go to University environment and we're told to be more community. So that's also part of I think the intimidating component of it is, is that we're, again, socialized to be experts. And and we feel, as the literature and ethnic studies has shown us, we all in that regard, we start to feel this imposter syndrome. Right, that we feel an imposter syndrome at its core. So I guess that's the question for me. I think you already did. I think I kind of did. I guess you did. I said I don't know. So it.

Jose Moreno:
That's where that the framework again, the framework of community rights to your department, your department chairs, the former department chairs, a senior faculty say, hey, we know that you weren't trained. We know that we weren't either. So if you want to come sit in our classes, but that's professional learning. But it's not systematized, right? It's not systemic, but it does create a culture. And so in that regard, if the senior faculty at the department chair are saying to new faculty, like many universities are not doing, they're saying, you come in with a course with this so that you can acculturate yourself to the culture of teaching and, of course, the environment of our campus. But I would urge them, which we're trying to do at Long Beach to use that course with these. For us not to be thinking about your book, but to be thinking about how to acculturate to the teaching environment of our students with our students and how we as a faculty try to do it. So take that time to visit classrooms, sit with us, and then hopefully it's now institutional with a professional learning environment, connect them to to that process. So that's one is reminding people they're not alone.

Jose Moreno:
And that and that, and for, frankly, a senior faculty or those of us who've been on campus to remind them that. That we also to share in the vulnerability, I think that's something that we struggle with as we know society does, being vulnerable and saying, hey, man, I was vulnerable, too. I still am. I'm still nervous in my classrooms. I'm actually intimidated by you when I read your CV coming in here that you're like this incredible magnetic teacher committed to community practice. I'm scared by you. So I don't know the answer to the question, but I think it's just a culture. Right. How do we assess the culture? I think the the most basic way is if your faculty are not saying it or if they're struggling and isolating, it may be they just want to do their work. But it also could be that they're not finding a place to connect, just like a student who ends up studying in their cars that have in the library faculty who join us sometimes just end up not spending much time on campus because the culture is not allowing them to be vulnerable. I hope that answers the question kind of, sort of.

Laura Gambino:
Yeah, I think that was helpful, and I see Danny smiling and nodding, so and she's not unmuting, so she's not going to push you any further, but it's OK because now it's going to get real. So, Michelle. Who is a Westchester community college in Westchester, New York, posed this question, how do you respond to the defensiveness and sometimes anger when faculty are confronted with the realization that their classrooms aren't as real and aren't as inclusive or respectful as they thought or claimed they were? This is hard stuff, Jose, right, and we know that, and so sometimes that natural reaction, anger or defensive, like I'm doing everything I can. So so what can what can professional development leaders do in those types of situations?

Jose Moreno:
I don't think that can be just I don't know if this is helpful, but that's not in the control of professional learning leaders. It's not that's where the framework for that is, because I love this language. That's where the institution has to say that, that it has to commit to not just the resources of truly an asset based faculty learning system and culture, not just resource it, but they themselves have to do it. They have to do it. So. In our hiring processes, in our evaluation processes. Defensiveness isn't unique to faculty when it's know, how does how does a mom respond or a dad respond when when their kids tell them that they're not good parents? I don't know if I would want to contextualize, but but generally defensiveness, as we know, comes out of feeling like you're losing something or like you're not like somehow you're incompetent. And so then you project it. And that's and that's again, where I think at least the culture, what an asset based faculty learning process is through this. Copac is humanizing, humanizing the institution. And and actually, this film is really critical for me, I think is. I'm tired of students success, I'm good, I'm tired of students success, if one more minister tells me, say this is the path to success, I'm going to throw a shoe at him and I'm going to be that curmudgeon because I didn't just become a professor to just be a teacher as much as I love teaching.

Jose Moreno:
It's also an intellectual space, whether it be community college, a state system or research one. It's an intellectual space where people have spent there a good part of their lives examining a subject matter, exploring it intellectually, and so to simply treat faculty as only teachers, which is also disrespectful to teachers, by the way, it means that your only reason for being is to serve those 30 students. And that's just not right. It's just not right. Right. What the institution is supposed to be about is creating this for me, creating a space A where a human being can come together some further along than others in the knowledge base. That come together to explore a knowledge together, to prepare for a society for utilitarian reasons or theoretical development, going to grad programs to change the world in whatever world they want to be. And so I think faculty increasingly what I'm noticing is and it gets interpreted as racial resistance, often it gets projected is. That faculty that we keep telling them that there are only for students and faculty are beginning to say, well, who's here for me? This is a vacation for me, it's not just this isn't a vocational education, a vocational school, but even a vocational school is about people who love doing that work and want to teach people about it. So I would say for me a at least a way to think through it, because really the answers are often in the question is in the analysis is to think through.

Jose Moreno:
Do faculty on your campus currently feel humanised? And if they don't, no matter what you put in place, they're going to get defensive about their work because they feel they're doing good work, as they were told to do. And when students are being successful, they're going to projected onto them saying it's the students fault and they're the ones that don't want to study. That was a don't want to prioritize. And that's more often how the defensiveness comes out. Deficit blaming. Right. But we have to be very careful that just as students, when we know deficit oriented approach in our classrooms and in our systems, they do create student resistance or at least nurturant. Because we put all the blame on them, we have to be very mindful that maybe for a few years now we've been putting the blame on faculty. Something's wrong with them, and and again, a professional learning process is about seeking the assets. And in the community and bringing that together to help one another so that they may recognize their own deficit, but they don't have to necessarily tell the world it's deficit, but then they can maybe, maybe at that point, understandable inability of areas that they have not grown in. And therefore, the other people with the assets can help build that with them. Does that help?

Bret Eynon:
May I add a quick comment?

Jose Moreno:
Yes.

Bret Eynon:
I think that, you know, that asset based approach is really important, and I guess in my experience. One of the things for any difficult learning process with I think we're all learners, we're all bringing something really important, we all experts and we're all learners and that we're know it's important to recognize the assets the people are bringing in and also to recognize that everybody has something to learn. And that part of what we're going to do is learn from each other and from our students in that process. And that that combination is part of the trick of powerful leadership. Not just saying that at the beginning. Of a professional learning process, but living that, embodying that in the designs, in the way we respond when people are defensive. In the ways we respond when conversations get tough. Is keeping everybody coming back to that notion, we've all got something to learn here. There's not easy answers. We're all working on this together and we're trying to help each other. And that is just a fundamental ethos. Makes a huge difference.

Jose Moreno:
So I don't want to suggest that this is all kumbaya right? It's super hard work. And at the end of the day, there's just some personalities who just aren't they just not going to go. They just not. So also, a lot of energy shouldn't be lost on trying to convince folks that they just don't want to be there. And if they don't want to be there, then that's how the community has to move. The community has to move. And that's where institutional leadership is really important. And that's where the hiring process is important. And the evaluation process of what do we incentivize faculty to to do and be like through the evaluation process. Right. So if we say that we value a balanced teaching and research, but if you're a moderate, a mediocre teacher and your student evaluations or other assessments for you, but you published two books and you get tenure, you sent quite a signal. If you have a phenomenal teacher with outstanding Teacher of the Year awards, but maybe published an article or two and they're not they don't get tenured, you've sent a really strong signal. So that goes back to the institutional leadership about what you really value. And I'll give an example that's not directly related, but on the equity front, with faculty hiring and diversity, maybe this might help in some of the questions of seen in the chat is, you know, students as faculty, as human beings.

Jose Moreno:
We abhor contradictions and hypocrisy, when we see it, even though we may be playing it out ourselves. But when we see it, we don't like it. So it's really tough in the faculty diversity, hiring, retention equity conversation when institutionally you're told that's a huge value. And and then when the institution is held responsible and accountable for not doing it, they say that's the faculty job, right? That's the faculty domain. I don't have any power over the faculty, faculty hire each other. Right. And so that what happens is what Paolo Freire calls horizontal violence is then faculty of color turn to their white colleagues to be like, it's on you or the women colleagues, turn to the male times it's on you. Right. And all the white. So that becomes a community conflict. That is structured in my opinion, in a really cynical way, because the administrative executive leadership forgets to tell faculty and faculty, oh, by the way, we get to decide which departments get faculty lines. Oh, by the way, the job descriptions that you submit have to be approved by us. And we're the ones that decide which curricular gaps will be filled when there's open faculty. So there's a direct role that administrators do play. On what faculty hiring looks like, in addition, and this is the part that really gets me, is that even if it were true that faculty are often maybe the largest barrier in hiring colleagues, I mean, I look for a study about things that don't reflect them, is that administrators will say that.

Jose Moreno:
And then you look at administrative hiring and it's worse than the faculty hiring. In fact, I've argued on many campuses by looking at their data when sitting with the CEO and the vice provost and the provost and they say we're into the team that we're with, we're committed to this know, we put it in our documents and and put the faculty. You know, that's a hard one. You know, that's you know how that is. Your faculty member said, yeah, well, we look at your administrative hiring for the past five years as well. We asked for the data and we have found that out of seven hires, all seven have been white man. And when we look at the deans of your schools, they're all white, including the College of... That's a specific campus, if I name it, you will know. How are you developing academic leadership? How are you mentoring? So, again, hypocrisy and in this place. So I say that because it's the same thing, that's what makes some people defensive, too, and gives them a right to be defensive. So it's.

Bret Eynon:
All right. I think we have time for at least one more question.

Laura Gambino:
Ok, and sorry, I was listening intently. I lost my questions, OK, so I'm going back. I think this one is from from Stephanie, who loved the example. And thank you for the example, the multivitamin. How do we help individuals see it's more powerful to discuss pedagogy in this integrated fashion? We're going to lose the question. I'm going to order here. Sorry. Many, many folks she works with feels if it's integrated, it's getting lost. So this is how do you find this balance between, like, just focusing on culturally responsive pedagogy? Because then you can really focus on it versus integrating it in into everything you do and make sure that it's not getting diluted. And just so you know, Randy Bass, seconded this question. So we're hoping you have a really good answer because you know, Randy.

Jose Moreno:
Yeah, well, I would argue and certainly, you know, it is an argument to be had. Is that. Culture responsive pedagogy is not a type of pedagogy, it should be our pedagogy. That is the Pedagogy... So it's not that you're integrating, it's that that's the center. We often talk about in cultural studies that there's a norm, there's a center right. And and folks who do critical race theory or chemistry, they talk about whiteness is the norm at the center. And so even at like Cal State Long Beach where I'm at or the county system where only 20 percent of the students are white, it's still a predominantly white institution and people can't wrap their minds around it because it was established as a norm. The center of the institution is still normed around that that cultural space, how we value faculty, how we think about student assessment, how we even think about admissions and and how proud we are about our demography is a function of basically saying we're no longer as white as we used to be. That's the center of white folks. So when I think about this pedagogical question, culturally relevant pedagogy. I just don't know what be, and it wouldn't be your center. I can't think of a field. Where could it be or should it be your center? Because it's about fundamentally being in tune with your students.

Jose Moreno:
And being in tune with yourself as a human being. And how do you together as a collectivity in that space with a goal of learning and teaching about a particular subject matter, how will us people integrate your lived experience, your contextual knowledge and its application regardless of the field, regardless of the field? So so I think for me, maybe I'm maybe I'm using the wrong language for this and saying we need to integrate CRP into professional learning and professional learning has to be CERP. Learning has to be CRP. It's I think it's it's universal in that regard. It's not just about this is how you teach black students if you really want to make sure and improve your outcomes for Latino immigrant students, you use culturally relevant pedagogy. Know if you want to engage white kids, you've got to use culturally relevant pedagogy, because that's what we've been doing for decades. Right. Centered around their experience. So I'm just saying that cultural pedagogy allows us to name that and to say whatever your classroom looks like, you got to shift. It can't always be the same way. So if one semester I have predominantly white students in my class and in another class that same semester at predominantly African-American students.

Jose Moreno:
The pedagogy may look a little different. It may look a little different because it depends on where the students lived experiences are. And it's my job, and that's what professional learning is so important. How do we help faculty figure out how to be fluid and being able to articulate the content that they want the students to get, but they're not going to get it the same way potentially. That's what's different. So every class becomes a fluid space, every session, and professors are going to become the fluid space. And so that's why I, I argue that the multivitamin of a professional learning is that if you're not thinking about using that kind of pedagogy in the professional learning, then you're losing a tremendous opportunity to get those three black faculty you might have on your campus to participate or to stay with you or those two women and all of them to participate with you or the white male faculty that's left. And sociology to participate with you. So that's why it always has to be a constant fluid, constant analysis and reflection, and that's what CRP is. And again, that's why it's co-constructed, right?

Bret Eynon:
We have time for one more question. Laura.

Laura Gambino:
Well, there is one more question. Have you written a book on all of this?

Jose Moreno:
A.j., I have to say, I'm the worst cook instructor writing. I have not. I have not. But that is something that I have to really think about of how to carve my time so that I can do that. But I'll be honest with you, and I think many of us struggle with this. That our book is is the live day. And and so. As I talked to colleagues who struggle with this question, and it's a very serious one, I think when we think about 10 year promotion, so I was extremely productive. My first I got early tenure. I edited a book or a bunch of articles and just never felt satisfied. I just I just didn't feel satisfied. It felt good being introduced like all of these people satisfied. And so to me, a book is an oral history. It's an oral process. And I think and it's why I believe so much in this is co-construction is so important. And writing a book is not co-construction, it's. I don't know, it's I guess I'm not a good journalist. I can't, I can't. So I do is if anyone has good ideas of how to deal with that. I love I love the idea. I would love any support or figure out how to do that. But, yeah, I would love to figure out how to be able to say this in the book.

Bret Eynon:
I think there's I think there's important opportunities here both to write this in our lives today in our lives, work with our institutions and legacies, change that we're trying to create and to figure out how to document that and articulate it and share it and have it be the source of exchange as we are here. That's what you've done today.

Jose Moreno:
Can I answer Paul? Paul has a question in the chat about where should schools reach out to attract more diversity?

Bret Eynon:
All right. We have we're coming up on five o'clock, so let's go ahead and answer it. And if people have to leave, they'll leave.

Jose Moreno:
Yeah, that's right. That's a cautionary note because there is no answer. It really is. It is. Schools are producing, but they're just not being hired. And so the research is pretty clear that faculty of color and women in particular disciplines are leaving for the private sector or leaving to do other things because they're being interviewed, they're being wooed and recruited, but they're just they're just being used to diversify a pool, but they're not actually being hired. The other part is that that I would give a cautionary note. When you look at your data, this is something most campuses struggle with, is some campuses have been successful in hiring more and more faculty. But then they look at their data five years later and someone critiques them on the lack of diversity that we talking about. We just hired we hired seven black faculty and you say, yeah, but you've turned them over. It's turnover is what it is. You're simply replacing black faculty who left or retired. So you're not really increasing the diversity and opportunities for students to learn from a more diverse faculty. What you've done as you replaced a little diversity you had. So there's I have written about this and would be would be happy to send Laura or read the link to post somewhere. It's called it's called the Turnover Quotient.

Jose Moreno:
We developed a formula mathematically of the qualitative experience that many faculty talked about, about turnover that they experienced. And so it's called hyper visibility. And some of the work where the campus is critiqued about hiring Latino faculty, for example, I experience myself, when they said, well, we just hired Jose and said, wait, you hired me like 15 years ago... You're still taking credit for me? Like, really? But if Jose leaves, they hire Juan. It's like, well, what happened to Jose? Oh we don't know what happened to Jose because Juan... You're supposed to have two Latino faculty. But you have one because Jose left, and the only reason you hired Juan was because Jose left and you didn't want to be caught with not having any faculty. Right? So it's called turnover quotient. And so part of your question, if you're able to hire faculty, which more campuses are doing, they're not realizing that they're actually replacement hires, even though they'll never name it that. But that's what they are because they know when they lose them, but they don't really pay attention to are we really growing? That's that's a real a cautionary point. I want to point out to folks and happy again to send a link to the article that we wrote some years ago to to pay attention to this.

Bret Eynon:
And I would also send folks back to your recorded presentation if you haven't checked it out. I think Paul's question also and your answer speaks to the importance of the retention of faculty of color. And in your presentation, you talked about the importance of this kind of co-connstructed professional learning as a factor in creating a more welcoming environment in which people's expertise and knowledge is not just celebrated, but becomes valued.

Jose Moreno:
Right, That's right. Just like in the retention literature that we know while dated, still very relevant to his work, academic and social integration, it is true for faculty. And so if there's a professional learning space that's happening and faculty of color not academically integrated into that or vice versa, then, yeah, they're going to leave just like students leave. If they don't feel like they are connected to the campus.

Bret Eynon:
Or if they are integrated, they're more likely to stay.

Jose Moreno:
That's right. That's right.

Jose Moreno:
We should wrap up it's five o'clock on a Friday for folks on the East Coast. And it's been really such a treat and such a privilege to have you and have everybody here together thinking together. It's an ongoing conversation. It's ongoing work. It's not something that one conversation we're done with. But I think this has been really valuable. And we'll look forward to people finding ways to push this work forward on our campuses and in our collective conversation. So next in on the twenty seventh. Peter's session on engaging students as partners, I think is a beautiful follow up here for thinking about co-construction and engaging our students as in the co-construction process, in our professional learning programs.

Bret Eynon:
So thank you so much, Jose. Can't thank you enough. Thank you, everybody, for being here. So have a great weekend, everybody. Our work together goes forward. Thank you.

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