Culturally Relevant Voices: First-Year Writing and Speaking Across the Curriculum

FAIN: AC-284432-22

Dominican University (River Forest, IL 60305-1099)
Gema Ortega (Project Director: May 2021 to present)
Sheila C. Bauer-Gatsos (Co Project Director: January 2022 to present)

Faculty development to optimize the implementation of a required first-year Critical Reading, Writing, and Speaking (CRWS) course sequence with a stronger grounding in culturally relevant pedagogy.

This project provides training to 23 faculty members and facilitators at a Hispanic Serving Institution that will improve their ability to teach reading, writing, and speaking to students from diverse backgrounds. Three "academies" will increase faculty capacity to utilize Culturally Relevant Pedagogy in order to facilitate student engagement with humanities texts. The academies—Teaching in Culturally Interactive Zones; Teaching Reading, Writing, and Speaking to Translingual and Transcultural Students, and Reimagine, Empower, and Embrace Diverse Student Voices—will address the project's goals: (1) to enhance the instructors' ability to effectively incorporate culturally relevant humanities texts in first-year writing and speaking courses; (2) to improve instructors’ knowledge of multilingual learning processes that improve students’ written and oral skills, and (3) to increase student proficiency in oral and written communication in the 1st-year reading, writing, and speaking program.