“Foster My Skill Set as a Faculty Member of Color: Faculty Representation at Community College”

By Dr. Elizabeth Benton, Acting Dean of English and Reading, Dr. Rodney Redmond, Interim Provost, College of Southern Maryland, Professor Jarvis Slacks, Program Manager, Professor Ellwood Johnson, McMFI Intern, Professor Jermaine Jones, McMFI Intern, and Professor William Martin, McMFI Intern

In 2018, the Montgomery College English and Reading Area established an internship to increase the representation of faculty from diverse racial, ethnic, and/or gender populations at one of the nation’s most diverse community colleges (“Colleges,” 2018).   Empirical and theoretical literature guided our work, providing the foundation for our program (Bystydzienski, Thomas, Howe, & Desai, 2017; Hrabowski, 2015; Levin, Walker, Haberler, & Jackson-Boothby, 2013; Reybold, 2014; Stewart & Valian, 2018; Steele, 2010).  Specifically, Stewart and Valian (2018) suggest that greater diversity among faculty members improves the institution as a whole: “Diversity yields intellectual and creative benefits not because people reason differently as a function of their sex or race, but because their somewhat different interests and experiences give rise to different perspectives and ideas” (p. 44).  Simultaneously, we reviewed College data that indicated persistent achievement differences between racial and ethnic groups.  Black and Latinx student populations realized less student success than their peers (Montgomery College Student Success Score Card 2015, 2016, 2017).  With the support of Montgomery College administrative leadership, the Montgomery College Minority Faculty Internship (McMFI) took shape, launching in fall 2018.  This reflective article explores steps, missteps, and next steps as we develop an internship that cultivates the teaching skills of aspiring educators and builds an inclusive community within our area and across the College.  During this time of society’s reckoning with persistent inequality and exclusion, we are encouraged by the vision of the intern program at Montgomery College for faculty members from diverse racial, ethnic and/or gender populations.

Administered by the dean of English and Reading, a program director, and a faculty mentor, the internship continues to recruit applicants from area graduate schools who meet the internship criteria and are in their final year of a Master of Arts program or any stage of a doctoral program in English composition or a closely related field. The one-year program has three key areas of focus: professional development and mentorship, scholarship, and teaching English composition.

Professional Development and Mentorship

An inclusive institutional climate derives from departments and structures that promote a culture of faculty and student success (Bystydzienski, Thomas, Howe, & Desai, 2017; Stewart & Valian, 2018). Stewart and Valian (2018) insist that adhering to the following practices will increase participation and retention of faculty from diverse racial, ethnic, and/or gender populations: “maximize supportive, helpful resources; be fair; be transparent; enhance the warmth and respectfulness of the faculty community; and meet faculty members’ human needs” (p. 278).  These actions can engender a commitment to the institution and its excellence (p. 280).  At Montgomery College, in particular, the internship can provide a community of peers from whom the intern can learn new pedagogies and can feel supported by the positive ethos that is possible at an institution committed to inclusive “actionable” (Condon & Young, p. 27, 2016) practices.  Simultaneously, the College can benefit from the lived experience of an aspiring faculty of color.  Our student population benefits from an expansion of representation in the classroom (Steward & Valian, 2018).

Designing a supportive internship over the past three years has included assembling a professional peer community. The dean holds monthly meetings with the faculty intern that focus on professional topics, such as building an effective curriculum vitae and strategies for teaching today’s undergraduates. The program director holds semi-monthly check-ins, leads professional development, and coordinates teaching and scholarship. The mentor invites biweekly conversations that serve as a sounding board for classroom practice. The mentor also introduces the intern to faculty members who can generate positive rapport based on shared interests. Finally, the program engages six faculty members whom the intern observes in face-to-face (now structured remote) and distance learning courses.

At the end of the first year, we were appropriately awakened by then-intern Professor Jones’s final program reflection. Professor Jones, a Black male and co-author of this commentary, felt welcomed into the department, yet invisible. He noted that being a Black professor within a predominately White department yielded a dissonance that inhibited casual conversation between him and his faculty peers. As a Black professor, he felt that his experiences as a Black male were not valued and therefore deemed unhelpful to the student population served by the department. Professor Jones explained in his program reflection, “The culture within the English department, although professionally welcoming, did not foster my skill set as a professor of color.” Professor Jones was not given the opportunity to enlighten his colleagues on the implicit bias and plights he faced as a Black professor.   The burden of not being visible tarnished his view of the program as a whole—his classroom, his peer community, and his experience as a Black male teacher.

It wasn’t until Professor Jones penned his final reflection that we recognized a gaping hole in our program: we did not want to “other” the faculty intern by spotlighting his status as Black, as a Black male, as a graduate student, and as a new faculty member. Our tepid, unsuccessful dance around each of these characteristics, however, was an ill-conceived attempt at protecting him. Although we had invited Professor Jones to the table, we had failed to include him more robustly in the conversation, to allow him to determine the depth of what and how much he had to contribute to the internship experience. Spending all of our time and energy making his transition to the department seamless, we had not listened to him, a form of “benign neglect” (Espino & Zambrana, 2019, p. 470) that denied his identity (Espino & Zambrana, 2019; Hoffman & Mitchell, 2016; Hsieh & Nguyen, 2019; Jones, 2012; Levin, Walker, Haberler, & Jackson-Boothby, 2013; Parker & Trolian, 2019; Rideau, 2019; Steele, 2011).   Had we been bold– asked him to speak about race with our colleagues; asked him to lead antiracist conversations with students—we could have witnessed visible, actionable, and crucial conversations on race within our classrooms and between our peers, strengthening the student experience of belonging at the College (Genheimer, 2016).

A bit more aware of our shortcomings, we followed the lead of our second-year intern, Professor Martin, listening more to him than to the echo chamber of our own ideas. We listened rather than lectured and fostered an intentional “network of scholars” (Espino & Zambrana, 2019, p. 47) who engaged personally and professionally with Professor Martin. In our closing conversation with Professor Martin, we probed his feeling of belonging and let him guide our reflection and the future of the program.  He was enthusiastic about the shared text; therefore, we continued the conversations with current intern Professor Ellwood Johnson, focusing on the text Performing Antiracist Pedagogy in Rhetoric, Writing, and Communication (Condon & Ashanti Young, 2017).  Because Professor Martin is a scholar-teacher, we decided to collaborate with him and all McMFI interns on this reflective article of our shared experiences.   Finally, at his urging, we completed the hiring and onboarding process much earlier in the summer so the third intern Professor Johnson would feel confident and prepared well before the start of the semester.

Scholarship

According to Stewart and Valian (2018), diverse teams of authors and researchers “make better judgments in part because homogenous groups are more likely to trust each other even when they should not” (p. 46). Because research shows that people working together, collaboratively, “expect people who are demographically different from them to have different perspectives” (p. 59), they tend to engage in more “complex thinking” (p. 60) that yields better solutions than those proposed by homogenous teams.

In this area of the internship, we continue to experience success. The first-year intern Professor Jones was “extremely nervous” prior to our conference presentation at Bowie State University. He described his presentation to us later as “one of the most rewarding” activities we had engaged in. It pushed him to share his expertise and gain confidence in doing so.  When Dr. Benton had to depart early from the conference, Professor Jones remained at the conference, enjoying networking with fellow Mid-Atlantic English faculty members.  Similarly, despite COVID-19 cancellations of Professor Martin’s spring 2020 presentation, he was able to present his experiences in the program fall 2020.  Approximately 40 faculty, staff, students, and administrators zoomed in for our presentation, a collaboration between Dr. Redmond, Dr. Benton, Professors Slacks and Martin.

Teaching and Learning

The literature review unfolded the power of diverse faculty representation from the student perspective.  According to Parker and Trolian (2019), “evidence has shown that Non-White students, particularly Black students, hold negative views of the collegiate environment when compared to their White peers” (p. 9). Parker and Trolian urge college leaders to “foster an environment where students have positive perceptions of the campus climate” (p. 9) by implementing programs and supporting teaching practices that build toward an inclusive campus environment.  Similarly, Stewart and Valian (2018) claim, “Being taken seriously and being constructively challenged by a diverse group of faculty makes it clear to students that the field as a whole wants them to be successful” (Stewart & Valian, 2018, p. 52). Faculty diversity “suggests that there is room for the aspirant (student): where there is a lot of variety it is plausible to think that there is room for more” (p. 53).  According to our current intern Professor Ellwood Johnson, “At my day job, a high school, when I was hired, I was one of two Black teachers in the school.  We have more faculty of color now, but we have a lot of work to do considering the majority of students are Black and Latinx.  What I appreciate about MC is seeing professors and writing center tutors who look like me: it’s a symbol that I can do that, too.  If this kind of representation affects me in a positive way, I’m sure it goes a long way for students as well.”

Professor Jones, a twice-published author and doctoral candidate, had extensive part-time teaching experience when he began his internship. He needed little in terms of student-centered classroom techniques, developing early on a positive rapport with students. The second intern, Professor Martin, was new to teaching altogether. We focused on more granular components of the classroom, such as meeting the differing and often-competing learning needs of students, creating mini-lectures and successful small group discussions, and applying one-on-one conferencing techniques.  Current intern Professor Johnson brings extensive secondary English teaching, digital pedagogies, and leadership in equity and inclusion practices in the secondary school setting.  The varied experiences each intern brings encourages us as program leaders to be nimble in shaping that year’s program.

At one point, the internship allowed us to share with each other mistakes in our teaching practice.  One intern explained his use of sports analogies because he loved sports and assumed the analogies would further understanding of things like practicing the writing process the way an athlete prepares before a big game. He realized, however, that while some students perked up at the infusion of popular team names and varied athletic skills into the classroom, many students had no frame of reference. Program leaders also shared our missteps in our classrooms, when we, too, had been naïve about our students. Dr. Benton, for example, shared a grave mistake from several years ago: she sent a rather blunt email to a student about the student’s less than perfect grade on a quiz and subsequent behavior in class.  Unbeknownst to Dr. Benton, the student’s family (who read all of the student’s school email) came close to disowning her, ashamed of her behavior.  After consoling the distraught student, Dr. Benton wrote a follow-up email praising the student’s writing efforts and respectful engagement in the next class session.  In other academic settings, Professor Johnson has witnessed individuals in positions of authority questioning a student’s projected post-secondary aspirations into a prestigious college, saying things such as, “Are you sure you are capable of that?”  By discussing our mistakes and observations, we continue to be reminded of the weight of words and actions in the classroom and with students.   Doing the work of understanding diversity, equity, and inclusion is critical to our classroom.

Conclusion

The literature and reflections that contribute to this article have led each of us to better paths forward. As we experience the third year of the internship, we have sought advice from a wide array of stakeholders and have made strides to improve the faculty intern’s personal and professional experience. We have expanded the number of faculty members and college leaders who will engage with the intern early on, fostering a sense of personal and professional belonging. As program leaders, we represent different genders and races, but seeking expertise—not just leaning on our personal experience—gives us a foundation for meaningful conversation and deliberate community building.

Each step of McMFI involves building an internship that will better serve our students. Each step involves reflection and introspection, questioning our practices that reify systemic and unconscious bias instead of creating an inclusive, equitable, and welcoming institution. Each faculty intern has effectively highlighted our program’s strengths and weaknesses. As we plan future internships, we will continue to remain cautiously, humbly optimistic that we are doing good work toward building another’s future and creating the inclusive college community we want to be.

References

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