By Laurel White
Two new research projects helmed by a School of Education faculty member aim to promote understanding of equity-based change initiatives in higher education.
Aireale J. Rodgers, an assistant professor in the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Analysis, is leading or helping lead the efforts, both of which recently received external grant funding. One study will help geosciences departments across higher education institutions promote awareness and change related to the field’s racialized foundations. The second project will examine the efficacy of faculty cluster hiring to promote racial and ethnic diversity across higher education faculty.
The first project, funded by the National Science Foundation, will examine the racialized foundations of the study of geosciences and create resources for geosciences departments as they attempt to reckon with that foundation and change how they facilitate teaching and learning.
Rodgers says the project will build upon previous efforts to shift organizational culture within the geosciences field, as well as make a much-needed contribution to literature in education and the geosciences about equity-minded pedagogical change.
The effort will culminate in the development and implementation of an eight-hour course and two-day, in-person workshop. The course, similar to others that have been previously developed and implemented on the UW–Madison campus, will seek to help participants learn about and identify how racial exploitation and settler colonialism have shaped not only the history of the geosciences, but also its current pedagogical practices and disciplinary culture. In the workshop, researchers will provide participants with tools to identify and work through a problem of practice related to implementing pedagogical change in their department.
“With this approach, the project will advance knowledge and practice for cultural change in a formative portion of the learning and training ecosystem for geoscientists,” Rodgers says.
Rodgers is leading the three-year effort in partnership with two other UW–Madison faculty members: Erika Marin-Spiotta, a professor in the Department of Geography, and Elizabeth Hennessy, an associate professor in the Department of History. This new work stems from collaborations developed during Marin-Spiotta and Hennessy’s previous work on the Humanities Education for Anti-racism Literacy (HEAL) in the Sciences and Medicine project, which was funded as part of the Mellon Foundation’s Just Futures Initiative.
Rodgers’ second new project, funded by the Sloan Foundation, will examine the purposes and outcomes of faculty cluster hiring initiatives at six historically white, research-intensive universities in three states.
Faculty cluster hiring, which originated as the practice of hiring a team of interdisciplinary scholars across fields, has been adapted at many universities to grow expertise on campus in racial equity or issues of race, ethnicity, and racialization. According to Rodgers, some studies have shown the practice can promote the recruitment and retention of faculty of color — though it is not without faults.
“Undoubtedly, cluster hiring can be an important mechanism to support areas of research and researchers who have, for unjust reasons, been historically marginalized in the academy,” Rodgers says. “Yet these same initiatives, as we are learning, can ironically reproduce racialized dynamics that perpetuate inequity rather than disrupt it.”
Ultimately, the researchers aim to use their findings to create resources that support university administrators’ design or redesign of cluster hiring processes.
The two-year, multi-method study is led by Heather McCambly, an assistant professor at the University of Pittsburgh School of Education. Rodgers is a co-principal investigator, along with Roman Liera, an assistant professor at Montclair State University.
Broadly, Rodgers’ research seeks to illuminate how people’s everyday understandings and misunderstandings of race and racism shape learning across various higher education ecologies. She is also a steering committee member and co-principal investigator on the new Wisconsin Sloan Center for Systemic Change, or WiSC², an initiative aimed at removing barriers and improving equity in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) doctoral programs across the country.