Affirmative action program university of Massachusetts Amherst Amherst, Massachusetts

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  In 2013-14, the Department of Economics hired three faculty: a South Asian male, an Asian-American woman, and an African American woman in a joint appointment with the Department of African-American Studies.
  
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  In 2013 the Social Thought and Political Economy Program (STPEC) hired two people of color: a faculty member who is serving as the Associate Director for STPEC and a Teaching Associate who is teaching one of the core seminars. Additionally, in 2014-2015, two of the four seminar instructors for STPEC will be faculty of color from SBS departments.
  
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  The Journalism Department hired two new faculty, a female associate professor and department chair, whose current research is focused on African-American history, and an African-American male instructor.
  
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  The Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies hired a Latina staff member.
  
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  The Department of Sociology hired two Asian American faculty.
  
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  The Department of Communication made two new tenure-system faculty hires to begin in Fall 2014; both faculty engage the issue of diversity in their research and teaching.
  

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  During 2012-13, the SBS Dean’s Office co-hosted two “Telling Your Story” events designed to introduce students, particularly students of color and also those who are the first in their family to attend college, to faculty and staff who may have followed a less traditional path to reach success. Additionally, the College partnered with CMASS on a student/alumni networking night held in the Boston area, the ALANA Career Fair, and a student success course geared towards helping first year students from underrepresented groups acclimate to campus and succeed.
  
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  The CSBS Advising Center has played a critical role in the recruitment and retention of students, with a focus on the retention of at-risk students. The College has an active peer-advising program. As part of this program, new peer advisors take a course that helps them to be effective in guiding their peers to become successful university students, and develop an appreciation of, and respect for, the diverse UMass community.
  
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  The College houses the UMass Alliance for Community Transformation (UACT). This is a unique partnership of UMass students, faculty and members of grassroots community organizations. Students and community members work together to design programs that build community, promote social and economic justice, advance cross-cultural understanding and serve the educational and civic objectives of our Land Grant University. Along with UACT, the College places a strong emphasis on Community Service Learning and civic engagement as part of our student experience.
  
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  Our commitment to recruiting and retaining a diverse faculty has lead us to develop a strong faculty mentoring and research grant program. These programs are designed to create an environment of equality and equal opportunity for all faculty. Relatedly, the Director of Diversity Advancement also revised the search committee guidelines in order to strengthen the diversity language of faculty position announcements as well as the search process.
  
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  An Economics faculty member and graduate student received a Women For UMass (WFUM) grant to study ways to increase female enrollment in the major.  Another Economics faculty member is now one of the leading scholars of the economics of affirmative action and held a prestigious Wertheim Fellowship at Harvard Law School.
  
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  The Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies (CLACLS) will be sponsoring a year-long lecture-workshop series focused on the challenges of teaching more effectively about Latinas/os, Latin America(ns), North-South inequalities, difference and discrimination, race and racism in the Latin American and Latino Studies classroom.
  
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  In close consultation with CLACLS core, affiliated and participating faculty, especially those who specialize in transnational Latina/o Studies, CLACLS will organize four workshops, led by prominent pedagogues in our field and focused on the dynamics of the Latino/a and Latin American Studies classroom and the shared challenges we face as teachers. 
  
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  The CLACLS annual Research Colloquium Series helps introduce new faculty to the Latin American, Caribbean and Latino Studies UMass/Five College community.
  
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  The Communication Department committee/administrative structure includes a Community, Diversity, and Social Justice committee, whose members helped organize a session on graduate-level teaching and learning in a diverse environment this past year. The department also organized a number of public talks and screenings in which our women faculty and faculty of color had a central role.
  
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  The Center for Research on Families (CRF) entire cohort of Family Research Scholars for the 2013-14 class were from underrepresented groups; five women and one Hispanic man. Their Student Research grant and award winners were also entirely from underrepresented groups.
  
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  The CRF Tay Gavin Erickson Lecture Series has brought nationally renowned and leading family researchers to campus each year to provide a public lecture and consult with scholars about issues that appeal to diverse communities.
  

One of the basic tenets of our educator preparation conceptual framework (Reflective Practice; Multiple Ways of Knowing; Collaboration; Access, Equity and Fairness; and Evidence Based Practice) is that “We believe in the power of education to contribute to righting political, economic and educational injustices and intolerance. Therefore, we seek to prepare educators who reflect upon and participate in educational institutions as agents of change and who strive to understand and transform these systems such that they become true avenues of access, equity and fairness.” Under this framework our faculty and students develop and adhere to the habits of mind that allow educators to shed light on the intricacies of teaching and learning while moving forward toward a more just and equitable world. We recognize the imperative to attend to issues of diversity throughout our curriculum, scholarship and outreach and at every level: faculty, students, P-16 students and the communities within which we work.

Each of the College’s three academic departments, Educational Policy, Research and Administration (EPRA), Student Development (SD) and Teacher Education and Curriculum Studies (TECS), has implemented and/or been involved with a wide range of teaching, scholarship, and outreach partnerships, projects and initiatives that involve and/or address the issues of educators and learners from diverse backgrounds.

Below is a report of College of Education initiatives that support diversity, equity and excellence in education:

With recruitment and retention of women faculty and faculty from underrepresented groups a priority and the addition of two new faculty members in AY 2012-13, the College’s current 60 tenured/tenure track faculty comprise 65% women and 25% identified as members of underrepresented racial/ethnic groups. The College has had success in increasing faculty diversity in recent years: six out of our most recently hired thirteen tenure-track faculty (46 %) self-identify as members of under-represented racial/ethnic categories.

Our undergraduate Minor in Education has four components: foundations, social justice, human development and pedagogy.

The Higher Education academic concentration (master’s and doctoral programs) is designed for individuals interested in pursuing careers in academic affairs and student affairs as administrators, faculty, researchers, and policy analysts in colleges, universities, and state and federal agencies. Faculty are well-known experts on the issues of access and equity in postsecondary settings, which are integral to the research, scholarship and curriculum.

Faculty associated with our Psychometric Methods, Educational Statistics and Research Methods concentration and our Center for Educational Assessment (CEA) are called on by national and international organizations and agencies to design and interpret assessment and evaluation systems that affect education practice and policy. CEA sets the standard in evaluating and measuring the validity and fairness of tests such as the National Assessment of Educational Progress, often called “The Nation’s Report Card.”

The Language, Literacy and Culture concentration focuses on the areas of first and second language acquisition, ESL, bilingual and world language education, children’s literature, multicultural education, multiliteracies, media literacy, multimodality, global awareness, cultural competency, and leadership. Faculty strive to create a dynamic synergy among these areas in order to better address the needs of all learners in a diverse society. The annual Language, Literacy and Culture conference, in which the student community presents and celebrates student research and their contributions to education to meet the needs of diverse learners, was expanded this year to include students and faculty across the Department of Teacher Education and Curriculum Studies. The theme of the conference was “Learning Beyond Boundaries: (Re)visioning the Education of Diverse Learners,” and it focused on research that considers breaking traditional boundaries to include the diverse needs and experiences of teachers and learners.

The ACCELA (Access to Critical Content and English Language Acquisition) Alliance, originally developed with federal and state funds, is a professional development partnership between the University of Massachusetts Amherst, three local school districts, and several community organizations in western Massachusetts, to support the academic literacy development of linguistically and culturally diverse students attending public schools in the region by providing sustained, data-driven professional development to local teachers, administrators, community leaders, teacher educators, researchers, and policymakers. Last year, ACCELA received the American Educational Research Association’s (AERA) DIVISION K award for “Innovations in Research on Diversity in Teacher Education”.

Social Justice Education, the only freestanding doctoral concentration of its kind in the U.S., is an interdisciplinary program of study (Masters, CAGS, doctoral) that provides graduate courses and opportunities for reflective practice for students concerned with issues of equity, social justice, and the development of a liberated consciousness.

In fall 2014, the College’s Diversity, Recruitment and Retention Committee will begin to meet to establish their agenda and plan for the next three years. The charge of this committee will be to conduct a needs assessment (i.e., gain an understanding of the present recruitment and retention efforts in the college and across the university), review the college and university’s data on diversity of candidate population, and review college enrollment data. Based on the review of the needs assessment, the committee will develop a three year plan for increasing candidate diversity and expanding the college’s recruitment and retention efforts starting with the undergraduate majors and master’s candidates. The committee will establish benchmarks to guide their efforts.

The College of Education’s journal, Equity and Excellence in Education (EEE), established in 1963, celebrated its 50^th year of publication. It publishes scholarly articles related to equity, equality and social justice in K12 or postsecondary schooling. These articles focus upon social justice issues in school systems, individual schools, classrooms, and/or the social justice factors that contribute to inequality in learning for students from diverse social group backgrounds.

For more than four decades the College’s Center for International Education (CIE), and the closely aligned international education concentration, have offered graduate level professional training, service and research opportunities in the areas of international development education, education policy and leadership, non-formal/popular adult education, and internationalizing U.S. education. Students and graduates have originated from more than 70 nations, bringing an international perspective that enriches the educational experience for students from the U.S. in the College of Education and across the UMass Amherst campus.

The pioneering work of a faculty member in social justice education formed the basis of the interactive curriculum of the first and ongoing Five Colleges Intergroup Dialog Committee’s Days of Dialogue held again this year on all Five College campuses, to foster understanding among groups by exploring attitudes, feelings, and perceptions through discussion of race, class, rank, gender and religion. The dialogs have taken place each year since they began in 2010.

The College created a new senior faculty position to direct its urban education program. The new director of urban education will lead collaborative partnerships with urban schools to prepare uniquely qualified educators and to provide professional development opportunities to established teachers. High priority areas of the director’s work include expanding programs to recruit, mentor and retain skilled urban educators in high-needs districts.

The College of Education was lead sponsor of the 2013 Gay Lesbian Straight Education Network (GLSEN) Western Massachusetts Conference held at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, October 2013. The conference was an opportunity for more than 150 students, teachers, parents, and school staff to spend a day building community and sharing resources for creating safer, more affirming schools for LGBTQ youth, educators, and their allies.

The College of Education hosted Pat Griffin ’80 Ed.D., a National LGBTQ and athletics educator, activist, UMass Amherst professor emerita and alumna, for a talk on The Changing Sports Climate for LGBTQ Athletes and Coaches: Successes and Challenges followed by a public reception on October 19. Griffin, author of Strong Women, Deep Closets: Lesbians and Homophobia in Sport, is the acknowledged “grandmother” of the LGBTQ social justice in athletics movement. Drawing on her experiences as a social justice educator and university swimming and diving coach, she regularly provides counsel to the NCAA, college and high school athletics programs as they work toward greater LGBTQ inclusion in sports. She is also the co-organizer of the first ever Nike-sponsored National LGBT Sports Summit.

Faculty in the Department of Teacher Education and Curriculum Studies are working with students in the Holyoke and Springfield area studying the role of community service learning in enhancing community, school, and university partnerships, and designing a way to expand pathways to higher education for residents from the underserved Holyoke-Springfield area.
Selected grant-funded initiatives:
Educational Leadership

The College’s Center for International Education has managed more than $63 million in grants and contracts including, this year’s $23 million sub-contract that is part of a five-year contract to a consortium that includes Family Health International, Purdue University, the Afghan Holding Group and Altai Consulting. The new project, “Afghanistan University Support and Workforce Development Program,” builds on the College’s work with the Afghanistan Higher Education Project over the past eight years and involves working with the Ministry of Higher Education and 10 Afghan universities to improve their capacity to deliver higher quality education that is more directly relevant to the needs of the current and future Afghan economy. Additionally, the Center for International Education has managed a project that builds capacity of education faculty at universities in Palestine.

Faculty were awarded support from the National Science Foundation to develop adaptive tutoring technologies to help increase the participation in mathematics of underrepresented populations that often avoid STEM careers. Their research will examine the impact of affective interventions on the performance, learning, affect and attitudes of 800 high school students nationwide, and the value of tailoring different types of interventions for individual students and specific groups.

The College of Education partnered with the University of Missouri and Universidad de Los Andes, Colombia, in a one-year, planning grant from the Ford Foundation to develop an implementation strategy for La Red Inter-Americana para la Integración, Investigación y Desarrollo en Educación Superior (RIIDES), the first inter-American organization that will work to improve quality, access, equity and development of education above the high school level in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) region.

College of Education faculty in collaboration with faculty from the Department of Computer Science, received support from the National Science Foundation to develop and use a new research method in their work that focuses on the development of computational thinking among underrepresented students, particularly girls, as they interact in a robotics learning environment, with the goal of increasing the diversity of individuals who enter the field of computing.

The College of Engineering continued to make every effort to recruit more women and minority staff members in their FY14 hiring. In FY14, 5 new staff have been hired with 80% female (4 of 5 hires) and 40% minority (2 of 5 hires); 6 new tenure track faculty were hired, including one Asian male.

At the present time, 13% of the total engineering faculty is female and the ethnic diversity of the College’s faculty stands as follows: 22% minority (19 as Asian, 2 as Hispanic, and one identified as two or more races). 79% of staff in the College of Engineering at the present time is either female or minority.

For FY 15, the College plans to hire 8 to 9 more tenure track faculty and we will continue to make every effort to recruit and hire members of underrepresented groups. We will continue to work to insure the diversity of search committees, the diversity of the search pools, and we will continue to advertise in publications that are geared to underrepresented groups.

In fall 2013, the College of Engineering had 1,833 undergraduates, of which 15.9% were female students; there were 532 graduate students, of which 30% were female. Of the undergraduates who reported race/ethnicity, 20.8% were minority students: 133 students identified as under-represented minority (8.6%) and 189 students identified as “Other ALANA” (12.2%). For graduate students who reported race/ethnicity, 16.8% were minority students. Fifteen students identified as under-represented minority (8.4%) and 15 students identified as “Other ALANA” (8.4%). Student data is from the UMass Amherst Office of Institutional Research.

Because diversity is a high priority for the College of Engineering, it supports a professionally-staffed office, the Diversity Programs Office (DPO). The Diversity Programs Office directs two long-term programs concerned with the recruitment and retention of minority and female students: the Multicultural Engineering Program (MEP) and the Women in Engineering Program (WEP). The DPO is funded primarily with College funds with additional support raised from corporate and private gifts. Several of their outreach initiatives are mentioned next.

At the high school level, the DPO organizes an annual Women in Engineering Career Day, held each fall, which brings high school women from across that state to UMass Amherst to participate in hands-on engineering activities, meet engineering students and faculty, hear from leaders in industry about careers in engineering, see demonstrations of state-of-the-art technology, and visit engineering research labs. The aim of this program is to excite, inspire, and encourage young women to pursue engineering as an academic track and career path, particularly here at UMass Amherst. The Diversity Programs Office, through grants, provides fellowship and transportation to encourage students from Springfield and Holyoke, with large populations of minority students, to attend.

With respect to community activities and promotion of a diverse and multicultural environment, the DPO is bringing engineering to elementary and middle school students through several programs. Girl Scouts Day brings together elementary aged girls from across the region to interact with members of our Society of Women Engineers student chapter on a Saturday while earning their Product Designer Badge. As part of the day, the girls worked in small teams to design, build, and test solar cars, which they then race.

Each year, our student chapter of the Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers brings a group of students from Holyoke or Springfield to campus for one day during the week to participate in hands-on engineering activities, see our research labs, hear from our undergraduates about why they chose to study engineering, and to visit our campus. This year thirty students from Peck Middle School in Holyoke participated in Engineering Students Reaching Out, as this event is called. Throughout the day they completed a variety of hands-on activities, including testing water to determine its quality, making silly putty, and participating in an egg drop contest.

The Diversity Programs Office also brought engineering to an afterschool program in Springfield through our College of Engineering Outreach Leaders program. College of Engineering undergraduates helped the students design and build small bridges out of paper, straws, string, and tape, and then tested them to see how much weight they could hold before collapsing. In another activity, the undergraduates and middle school students built Rube Goldberg machines, with a prize for the group that had the most links. We also helped host a 3-day Makerspace event for Amherst middle school youth – a community workspace where Do-It-Yourself (DYI) creation, collaboration, innovation and entrepreneurship can occur – focused on Arduino and LilyPad wearable electronic technology.