Center for the Advancement of Faculty Excellence (CAFE)

CAFE Summer Institute

Summer Institute 2024: Equity in Practice: Scholarship of Practice in Your Discipline

May 28 to June 30; remote

Scholarship of practice (SoP) focuses on our relationships and activities with students as worthy of serious, systematic, publishable study (Boyer, 1990). Like all scholarship, SoP projects have clear goals, adequate preparation, appropriate methods, significant results, effective presentation, and reflective critique. One important aspect of SoP is deep familiarity with data that is available to us as practitioners.

Funded by a partnership of the CSU Chancellor’s Office and the Lumina Foundation, and following up on the Spring 2024 Equity in Practice Symposium, the Summer Institute 2024: Equity in Practice: Scholarship of Practice in Your Discipline invites faculty and staff to delve deeply into the data dashboards and other data sources that the CSU and Cal Poly Pomona make available to us.

The ultimate goal was to plan achievable projects that contribute to increasing pass rates and improving equity outcomes, and/or build on previous work in anti-racist teaching, learning, and practice.

Summer Institute Results

We covered:

  • Fostering community
  • Raising awareness of the variety of data available to us
  • Delving into the statistics of data dashboards
  • Discussing how to interpret and use dashboard data

Faculty of any discipline and at any career stage are welcomed and encouraged to participate. Funding was available for a maximum of 25 faculty participants with completion stipends of $500.

Staff in any office were welcomed and encouraged to participate. Staff were not paid extra but received certificates of completion.

Completion required attendance for at least 3 of 5 scheduled synchronous meetings, contribution to discussion boards if meetings were missed, and submission of deliverables described below.

For deliverables, participants chose one (or both) of the following:

  • Formulate a SoP project plan (note that implementing the project is not required for completion of the Summer Institute)
  • Completed a report of individual investigation into various data dashboards and what was learned about student success based on the investigation

Format and Schedule

This was a 5-week fully remote Institute with both synchronous sessions on Zoom and asynchronous work they did on their own. Synchronous Zoom sessions took place on the following dates, 10am-12pm Pacific time: Tuesday May 28, Tuesday June 4, Tuesday June 11, Tuesday June 18, and Tuesday June 25. Summer Institute 2024 ended on June 30 with submission of all deliverables. Feedback was provided by July 12.