Faculty Development Research Projects
Supporting educators innovating toward equity
Our various faculty development research programs, including communities of practice and pedagogies that advance teaching and learning in higher education.
Equity-Minded Inquiry & Transformative Teaching (EMITT) Project
The goal of the EMITT program is to develop scalable faculty instructional and professional development to advance learning outcomes for Black, Latine, Indigenous, and low income first-generation college students in foundational college mathematics courses.
Developing STEM Communities of Practice for Institutional Transformation in Two-Year Hispanic Serving Institutions
The STEM KickStarter 2.0 (KS2) program was developed to build cross-functional, cross-disciplinary communities of practice of faculty, administrators, staff, and students focused on improving STEM teaching and learning for Latinx students at two-year Hispanic Serving Institutions (HSIs). The framework underlying the program comprises community of practice literature and a STEM Evidence-based Student Serving (STEM-ESS) Assessment and evidence-based practices. The goal of KS2 is to improve Latinx student outcomes in STEM and signal intentionality for institutional transformation. Institutions move through the KS2 program as cohorts over 18-months.
This program is supported by a collaborative NSF-IUSE Award with Arizona State University (Award #2142516 and #2142734).
Hispanic-Serving Pedagogy
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The Transformative Teaching and Learning Collaborative
The Transformative Teaching and Learning Collaborative (TTLC) was a year-long, interdisciplinary networked improvement community (NIC) to improve teaching. The TTLC topics aligned with the teaching through diversity framework (Castillo-Montoya, 2019). The program finished in 2018 with a one-year follow-up on participants. We found instructors’ conceptions of minoritized students’ prior knowledge advanced further than their practices and the nature and extent of this shift differed by various factors including academic discipline; instructor social identity, particularly gender; teaching improvement goals; and instructor perceived or real teaching agency (Castillo-Montoya & Ives, 2021).
This work was supported by the Neag School of Education Dean’s Research Incentive Award, the University of Connecticut College of Liberal Arts & Sciences Funds for Interdisciplinary Research Endeavors, NASA Connecticut Space Grant Consortium (Grant Number: NNX15AI2H), College Student Educators International (ACPA) Emerging Scholars Program, and University of Connecticut Scholarship Facilitation Fund.
Presentations and Publications
Castillo-Montoya, M., & Ives, J. (2021). Instructors’ conceptions of minoritized college
students’ prior knowledge and their related teaching practices. The Journal of Higher Education, 92(5), 735–759. https://doi.org/10.1080/00221546.2020.1870850
Presented “Transforming Teaching Together: The Benefits of a Professional Learning
Community on Equity-based Teaching” at the International Consortium of Educational
Development 2024 in Nairobi, Kenya.