ReImagine PSU is an intentional effort to provide spaces to create transformational possibilities at a larger scale. ReImagine PSU allows us to craft the university of the future while meeting our current needs for a sustainable budget and forms a critical component of Academic Affair's Closing the Gap strategy for addressing our budget challenges. Please see the ReImagine projects below developed to design mechanisms to address the challenges and opportunities we face. Review the ReImagine Projects by scrolling down this page or by using the links below. You will find projects that were approved for academic year 2022 below and projects conducted during the Summer Term 2021 are linked here and can be found further down the page.
Academic Year 2022 ReImagine PSU Projects
Racial Equity Assessment for PSU Advising and Career Services
Submitted by Advising and Career Services
Applicants: Shayna Snyder
Project Summary: In response to the anti-racism reckoning that occurred in the Summer of 2020, several staff members of Advising and Career Services (ACS) at Portland State University came together to call attention to deficiencies in our unit and formed the Anti-Racism Task Force. The initial goal for this Task Force was to create a more welcoming and inclusive space for students, prospective students, and alumni that ACS serves as well as to create a supportive and anti-racist working environment for our colleagues of color. In service of this goal, the Anti-Racism Task Force identified several areas for improvement within our division, demanded change from our leadership team on 29 specific areas of operation, and set to work, often in partnership with the ACS leadership team, to address these demands in kind. This project will implement a DEI and racial equity assessment of our entire ACS unit during winter term of 2022 to determine areas for improvement and inform strategy in calling our unit in for accountability, and create a regular practice of anti-racism in ACS. The Anti-Racism Task Force has already identified the Tool for Organizational Self-Assessment Related to Racial Equity. This tool was recommended by PSU School of Social Work’s Equity, Partnership, & Inclusion Council, which conducted a similar assessment in the School of Social Work in 2016. The final report will be used by the ACS leadership team and ACS Professional Development Committee to inform investment in division training and development in service of creating a student experience that will meet student needs and expectations and create a safe and supportive environment for employees of color in ACS.
Link to Final Project Report
Reimagine Creative Industries at PSU
Submitted by the College of Liberal Arts
Applicants: Kathi Inman Berens, Susan Kirtley, Rachel Noorda
Project Summary: We will build a freestanding, interdisciplinary Creative Industries Program housed within CLAS, on the model of Emergency Management and Community Resilience (EMCR) in CUPA. The degree programs Creative Industries (CI) offers will emerge from listening sessions with faculty, industry advisors, and students. Our method is inductive: listening sessions will involve faculty, industry advisors, and students. Program planning during spring term will be based on needs identified in listening sessions and developed iteratively with feedback from stakeholders. The CI program will be largely budget-neutral since it harnesses classes taught by existing PSU faculty. Faculty will be incentivized to participate in the AY 2021-22 Reimagine process with honoraria. In the long term, faculty will be incentivized by CI’s success rate in getting students jobs in creative industries. Book Publishing, for example, has a 95% placement rate within six months. Such high placement leads to strong enrollment (Publishing and Comics are both enrolled to capacity.) Industry advisors will be consulted throughout the listening sessions. Guest visit and lecture opportunities will be identified.
Link to Final Project Report
Visualizing Comics Studies at PSU
Submitted by the College of Liberal Arts
Applicants: Dr. Susan Kirtley, Dr. Kacy McKinney, J.J. Vazquez
Project Summary: The Comics Studies program at PSU is one of the few of its kind in the world, with the opportunity to be the best. The program boasts interdisciplinary coursework that focuses on comics scholarship and creation and features giants of the comics world as instructors, as well as tremendous opportunities for professional development with local comics companies. The landscape of opportunities in the Portland area means that our students get excellent access to jobs in the industry, and they are using those positions to expand the industry. This project will develop the PSU Comics Studies program as a center of comics scholarship and education in the United States, defining and creating a project for a new interdisciplinary, community-based, and possibly hybrid Comics Studies degree at PSU. The plan includes faculty/student working groups and focus groups along with outreach to community partners to define an appropriate new degree program, culminating in a project for HECC.
Link to Final Project Report
Antiracist Writing Assessment in General Education
Submitted by the College of Liberal Arts
Applicants: Keri Behre, Kate Comer, Tracy Dillon, Susan Kirtley, Marie Lo, Susan Reese.
Project Summary: White language supremacy permeates academic discourse. Despite calls for antiracist
innovation, conventional methods of evaluating students’ academic writing remain dominant and under-examined across the curriculum. With this initiative, Portland State University has an opportunity to join leading institutions in the Pacific Northwest in advancing alternatives to conventional assessment methods based on oppressive standards. This pilot develops and implements antiracist writing pedagogy through faculty and curricular development for PSU’s largest General Education writing course, WR 323: Writing as Critical Inquiry. WR 323 fulfills the University Writing Requirement for all majors, is specifically required by four majors, and serves over 700 students a year from across campus. Troubling enough, marginalized student populations tend to disproportionately receive grades of D, F, or W in WR 323, and also show lower persistence rates compared with their more privileged counterparts. By studying and altering the assessment practices in the course, we hope to improve completion rates and progress toward graduation through disciplinary best practices. Current research in composition pedagogy promotes labor-based grading as one practical method to enact linguistic justice in academic writing courses. In this initiative, PSU’s Composition faculty will create a curriculum and lead a learning community of WR 323 instructors to foster the practical implementation of antiracist writing assessment. Given its reach, this pilot project is a high-impact opportunity to promote equity in the many classrooms shared by PSU’s diverse undergraduate students completing their university writing requirements. It also sets the foundation for future program assessment and potential application around campus.
Link to Final Project Report
The Vernier Science Center’s STEM Equity Career Hub: Developing a Distinctive Strategy for Growing the Climate Workforce of the Future
Submitted by the College of Liberal Arts
Applicants: Melissa Appleyard, Juan Barraza, Fletcher Beaudoin, Judy BlueHorse Skelton, Carlos Crespo, Suzanne Estes, Toeutu Faaleava, Greg Flores, Gabriel Hernandez, Thomas Keller, Ame Lambert, Linda Liu, Joyce Pieretti, Lindsay Romasanta, Melissa Yates, Theodore Van Alst
Project Summary: The second floor of the Vernier Science Center (VSC) will be home to multiple student-facing equity programs that all support Black, Brown, Indigenous, Asian (BBIA) students and aim to close the racial equity gap in STEM and health (Figure 1). These include EXITO/URISE, LSAMP, and McNair Scholars Programs. Additionally, the TRiO-STEM and IGNITE Scholarship & Mentorship Programs will have access to shared spaces, and the Indigenous Nations Studies Department will have classroom, gathering, and office space on the same level to support Indigenous Traditional Ecological & Cultural Knowledge (ITECK) curriculum and activities. The physical location will also catalyze the creation of a new STEM Equity Career Hub, which will work across all of these programs to directly support external partnerships that can lead to internships, mentorships, and employment for BBIA students, and inclusive mentor training and support for externship providers from white-dominated sectors. The VSC project in general (and the creation of the STEM Equity Career Hub, specifically) offers a tremendous opportunity for joint programming, communication, strategy development, and philanthropy across programs. These efforts must recognize Native American peoples as the climate leaders they are, and the critical importance of indigenous knowledge and instructions to climate futures and efforts to achieve environmental and health equity.
Project to be completed in Fall 2022
An Initiative to enhance earth, environment, and climate adaptation education and research at PSU
Submitted by the College of Liberal Arts
Applicants: Max Nielsen-Pincus, Martin Lafrenz, Martin Streck, Jonathan Fink.
Project Summary: This project presents an initiative designed to identify scenarios for collaboration and investment in earth, environmental, and climate adaptation-related pedagogy and research among the departments of Environmental Science & Management (ESM), Geography, and Geology, and faculty in other units at PSU. The project highlights the need for reImagining earth, environment, and climate adaptation education and research at PSU, existing relationships and among the department, and a process for identifying a long term vision and short term steps to implement changes that streamline and strengthen earth, environment, and climate science curriculum that in turn will attract a more diverse student body, reduce curricular redundancy, leverage student interests, and career opportunities, and improve administrative support.
Project completed in Spring of 2022
Exploring Shared Services in PSU's Largest Multidisciplinary College
Submitted by the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences
Applicants: Todd Rosenstiel, Matt Carlson, John Hawley, and Melissa Scholl
Project Summary: Over the summer term of 2021, relevant stakeholders engaged in a community conversation about a reImagined staffing model in CLAS. Models explored different ways to implement shared services to create more flexibility in staffing, make the staff experience more positive, and improve student success outcomes. The goal of the working group was to survey current shared service models, particularly those implemented at a College level, create surveys and communications to the CLAS community, support efforts to directly involve staff in College-wide reimagine efforts, identify college-wide needs, gaps, and redundancies in staffing, and propose a pilot for shared services in CLAS. The ReImagine funds were used to compensate working group members, support several part-day staff working retreats, and develop new shared support materials to enable CLAS staff to more directly engage and “own” campus-wide student success initiatives.
Link to Final Project Report
The Artist as Citizen Initiative Project Support
Submitted by the College of the Arts
Applicants: Suzanne Savaria & Darrell Grant
Project Summary: Started in 2016 by PSU College of the Arts (COTA) faculty Darrell Grant & Suzanne Savaria, the Artist as Citizen Initiative (AasC) is an interdisciplinary initiative that encompasses innovative curriculum, educational outreach, and community-building. Open to students university-wide, AasC was expressly designed to sit at the intersection of artistic and civic engagement and to create pathways for students to discover their agency, creativity, and potential to affect social change as members of local and global communities. In the wake of the Black Lives Matter and #MeToo movements, massive climate change, and a surging pandemic, AasC provides students tools to learn, adapt and respond to the issues that impact the shifting landscape of their lives, through a broad roster of classes, community engagement activities, and external partnerships. AasC’s work aligns with PSU’s mission to center social justice and anti-racism, amplify narratives of underrepresented communities, increase civic identity and identify pathways to impact for students. Outcomes of our work include: a) models of artistic engagement that highlight intersectionality, reframe narratives, and create a sense of belonging; b) knowledge of the issues that inhibit the safety of marginalized communities across our state; c) opportunities for dialogue that lead to social, cultural and policy change; d) channels through which PSU arts graduates can develop professional connections to our region’s cultural organizations. The AasC Initiative is entering the fifth year of a six-year effort to establish the first fully interdisciplinary Arts and Social Justice undergraduate degree in the country, which we hope can serve as a centerpiece for a future center for Arts and Social Justice at Portland State University. Professors Grant & Savaria currently deliver a total of 24 credits of curriculum, including six credits of undergraduate COTA Artist As Citizen courses, and three UNST Senior Capstone courses in Performing Arts Advocacy. As well as developing and delivering social justice-centered arts outreach to K-12 Education. This fall AasC will work with external partners to launch a new “Arts Serve the City” Internship Program.
Link to Final Project Report
Creative Resilience Through Enhanced Hybrid Learning
Submitted by the College of the Arts
Applicants: Alison Heryer, Julie Perini, Eleanor Erskine, and Tabitha Nikolai
Project Summary: The Art Practice program will develop course material and enhance facilities to be able to offer remote and hybrid course curricular offerings. The funding support would immediately help a sizable subset of our current students who have for a variety of reasons fin fully in-person learning a challenge. It would also expand our capacity to develop new offerings that reach new audiences, including pre-college programs, professional development coursework, certificate programs, and community education.
Link to Final Project Report
ReImagine the Mark O. Hatfield School of Government
Submitted by the College of Urban and Public Affairs
Applicants: Professor Birol Yeşilada, Susan Tardif
Project Summary: This project focuses on reorganization of the Mark O. Hatfield School's academic and research units for a more efficient and productive structure that would enhance student learning, expand community service, increase research and contracts, and achieve financial stability. A committee of faculty, staff, and the chair of the Hatfield School Advisory Board will work with a Graduate Research Assistant to compare and contrast the current framework of the Hatfield School to similar Schools of Public Affairs and present an alternative structure for the School's faculty and staff to consider adopting. The project aims to meet the current reImagine goals of PSU's administration in the spirit of shared governance.
Link to Final Project Report
ReImagining a Community Centered Climate Change and Sustainability Graduate Education at PSU
Submitted by the College of Urban and Public Affairs
Applicants: Fletcher Beaudoin, Sahan Dissanayake, Sybil Kelley, Hal Nelson, Jennifer Allen, Heejun Chan, Rossitza Wooster.
Project Summary: Portland State University was one of the earliest universities nationally to offer a focused graduate curriculum on sustainability. The curriculum, which included degrees through the IGERT grant and three graduate certificates, was supported by the Institute for Sustainable Solutions and built on core classes from departments across PSU. During the last decade, the field of sustainability has grown, climate change and resilience are becoming a key focus of sustainability, and PSU, and the region and the country is engaged in a deep look at racial injustice and distributional impacts of policies. These are also areas of expertise for PSU, for example, over 100 faculty have research interests that overlap with climate change. We are proposing a systematic process to ReImagine how PSU can redesign our interdisciplinary graduate curriculum in sustainability and climate change to make it (1) distinctive from programs offered by other regional institutions, (2) include environmental justice as a core focus, (3) be focused on addressing community needs with direct connections with local and regional partners (4) be welcoming to students, especially students underrepresented in climate work and students at various life and career stages, and (5) better use existing and new resources to better support and guide students. We plan to engage in a review of current courses and programs, conduct focus groups with faculty, staff, and administrators, and get input from potential local and regional partners through direct and online outreach. At the end of this project, we envision a model for a Community Centered Sustainability and Climate Change Graduate Education program that highlights flexible and stackable certificates and degrees that link to our current degree programs, caters to a diversity of learners and is linked to community, industry, and public partners seeking answers to important policy-relevant and practical questions. The work will be conducted by a team of faculty, staff, and administrators across colleges with the help of graduate students and/or hourly undergraduate students.
Project to be completed in December 2022
Making Streaming Media Sustainable
Submitted by Miller Library
Applicants: Elsa Loftis, Carly Lamphere.
Project Summary: Elsa Loftis and Carly Lamphere, librarians at the PSU Millar Library will participate in a nationwide study investigating how to make streaming media sustainable in academic libraries. It involves creating a survey that will be distributed to academic libraries in the United States and will include a series of interviews with 10-15 faculty members on our campus to better understand the needs, uses, and pedagogical implications of teaching and learning with streaming media at PSU and beyond. Our hope is to get a clearer picture of the state of streaming acquisitions models, and how we can shape a more intentional landscape in terms of streaming media. For instance, currently, the Library subscribes to several subscription database services that provide streaming media on vendor platforms. They are inconsistent in how the films are discoverable, in terms of robust metadata, and of greater concern, they are inconsistent in terms of their accessibility. Outside of these subscriptions, the library often has to seek out and license media on a film-by-film basis with widely varying ways to provide access. Often, captions and transcripts are not provided, the variance in cost and term limits of licensing are all over the map, and we frequently host the content utilizing our Media Space rather than paying hosting fees. The budgetary reality and amount of staff time it takes to manage this form of media are significant. However, this format is important to provide, as it is otherwise a cost burden to our students, many of whom are more adversely impacted by additional course costs than others. It is our desire to provide pedagogically crucial content to students and faculty at their point of need that moves us to examine these issues. Streaming media is more than just a convenience, in many cases, it is the only avenue of access to certain content, and libraries should have a more collaborative and holistic approach to negotiating and providing these resources.
Link to Final Project Report
Cybersecurity for All at Portland State
Submitted by the Maseeh College of Engineering and Computer Science
Applicants: Wu-chang Feng, Charles Wright, Ellie Harmon, Mark Jones.
Project Summary: For the last 20 years, Portland State University's cybersecurity offerings have mainly focused on a Masters level cybersecurity certificate whose goal is to produce Computer Science graduates that can be employed directly in advanced research and development positions in the technology industry. While our programs have served such students well, there is a clear acknowledgment that solving the cybersecurity issues facing our country today is going to require broader participation and that there is enormous gap between the number of cybersecurity positions the state needs and the number of people who can fulfill them. As a result, there is growing recognition that our university must increase access to cybersecurity education by creating offerings that 1) bring students in from different disciplines such as public policy and the arts; 2) deliver content at different education levels such as K-12 and undergraduate students; and 3) target different career paths in cybersecurity such as less technical positions in IT operations and management. Doing so effectively requires investment in both curricula and faculty. This project will focus on the curricular aspect of expanding the cybersecurity offerings of the university.
Link to Final Project Report
A Framework for Future-Ready Credentials
Submitted by the Office of Academic Innovation
Applicants: Michelle Giovannozzi, Scott Robison, Kevin Berg, Cindy Baccar
Project Summary: This project proposes the development of a strategy, framework, and process for implementing non-credit micro-credentials at Portland State University. Sometimes called a “badge,” a credential is defined as “A documented award by a responsible and authorized body that attests that an individual has achieved specific learning outcomes or attained a defined level of knowledge or skill relative to a given standard.” A micro-credential endorses the achievement of specific learning outcomes relative to a given standard, while the badge is the digital display that confirms the credential has been awarded. This project would lay the groundwork, identify a pilot use case, and develop online modules for at least one non-credit micro-credential. The pilot credential would be linked to defined career value and recognition by employers in the workplace, ensuring it meets students' future career needs while solving employer-expressed challenges for recruiting qualified workers. Developing the framework and proof of concept with the pilot use case will also facilitate identifying key stakeholders and champions for further expanding micro-credentials at PSU in the next phase of this work. The project will enhance the return on investment of an undergraduate degree from Portland State while increasing the University’s ability to compete with emerging non-traditional programs such as private boot camps and employer-sponsored certificates. It will also expand PSU’s flexibility and prepare students to be lifelong learners who can adapt and develop as the Future of Work evolves and create a framework for offering market-recognized micro-credentials that bolster students’ career readiness and are affordable and accessible to all.
Link to Final Project Report
Racial Justice in Website Communications 2.0
Submitted by the School of Business
Applicants: Erin Merz, Julie Smith, Emily Offerdahl, Ashley Nilson.
Project Summary: During Spring 2021, PSU’s Racial Justice in Website Communications Committee 1.0 engaged a Portland-based agency called better. that is focused on creative impact. better. was hired to develop a racial justice framework and best practices for PSU website content managers to use in content creation/curation decision-making. This project will ensure that 1) this work is sustained and enhanced and 2) tools are put into practice and continue to evolve. Sustaining and expanding this work will empower content managers and marcom professionals to position, market, and communicate about PSU in the most authentic and culturally responsive way possible.
Project to be completed at the end of FY 2023
Integrating career-readiness into UNST/Honors and departmental curricula with a faculty-driven approach
Submitted by University Studies
Applicants: Linda George.
Project Summary: Currently, PSU employs a Career Center approach to career coaching that is not only underfunded but is oriented toward an older model of career preparation as an add-on activity to the bachelor's degree. Several universities have advanced a more integrated approach that engages faculty, departments, and academic and career advising professionals in identifying career-building skills and high-impact educational practices that can be incorporated into degree programs. We propose to explore a faculty-driven career readiness approach that advances intentional preparation for careers throughout our curriculum, from the time students enter PSU to the time they graduate. At the end of this year-long project, we will propose what cost-effective steps PSU can take to improve the career readiness of our students. Some of the potential low-cost solutions could include better and refined internal communication at PSU on the connections between existing curriculum and market-demand for certain skill sets, including empowering our faculty and students to clarify these connections, revisions to general education curriculum if skills such as research and writing are not being developed in freshmen and sophomore-level classes, and identification of program-specific lacunae that if addressed can produce employable graduates for the 21st-century workforce.
Project to be completed in Fall 2022
Reimagine PSU's Civic Identity
Submitted by collaborative groups
Submitted by the President's Office
Project Summary: This project will convene a small group to continue to move forward with our work on PSU’s Civic Identity. This will be done through a review of existing work and materials and by creating a relevant, authentic, and comprehensible definition of civic engagement. An approach or model (or some possible array of choices) about how PSU might move to implement a pilot and then perhaps a more complete civic identity program at PSU will be developed and partnerships with relevant campus programs and offices that might participate in the pilot and more will be explored. Ideas will be presented to the President (and other relevant academic groups and stakeholders as seen as appropriate) for a pilot program that can be tested as a pathway to a more comprehensive approach and will include the relevant governance and stakeholder groups who should be consulted further to move things forward.
Linguistic diversity and discrimination awareness project: Raising awareness and addressing systemic language bias at Portland State University
Submitted by the College of Liberal Arts
Applicants: Lynn Santelmann, John Hellermann, Jenny Mittelstaedt, Steve Thorne, Kate Comer, Janet Cowal, Eowyn Ferey, Julie Haun, Teresa Roberts, Regina Weaver.
Project Summary: This interdisciplinary project aims to raise awareness of language bias within the PSU community and begin to develop institutional capacity to address language bias and discrimination campus-wide. We propose a multi-component project that will (1) document and raise awareness of the diversity of languages, varieties of English, and accents on campus, (2) record experiences students, faculty, and staff have with language use and language bias, and (3) develop, together with speakers from different language backgrounds, models of educational materials for different audiences that could be used for faculty/staff development, in student orientations or inquiry classes, and by the Office of Global Diversity and Inclusion (OGDI) as part of their ongoing training. Raising awareness of linguistic diversity and taking steps to reduce language bias and discrimination will support students by explicitly naming and addressing language issues which often lead students to feel insecure about their spoken and written language use. Educating faculty across a range of disciplines to better understand and address non-standard language use in their classes will also enhance student success by helping faculty use culturally responsive pedagogy, especially for written feedback. Furthermore, this project can help students from all backgrounds gain the skills necessary to adapt to the needs of increasingly diverse domestic and international work practices in contexts such as business, education, and technology-mediated communication.
Project to be completed in Winter 2023
The Global Scholar Pathway
Submitted by the Honors College
Applicants: Brenda Glascott, Yasmeen Hanoosh, William York.
Project Summary: The Department of World Languages and Literatures (WLL) and the University Honors College (HC) at Portland State University will pilot, evaluate, and refine a new collaborative program of study and certificate option within the University Honors College. The vision behind the Global Scholar Pathway is to increase the number of undergraduate Honors students who graduate with two to three years of study of a foreign language and an intercultural/international learning experience. The humanities and foreign language/culture studies are an important part of the advanced academic literacies and future-ready curriculum that the Honors College seeks to develop, along with student research experiences. Second language and cultural competencies are increasingly valued skills across other academic disciplines and diverse career areas. Integral components of the Global Scholar Pathway are: a) the recruitment and retention of a diverse student body through targeting and prioritizing historically underserved or excluded students, b) creating a curriculum that eliminates racism and contextualizes Euro/US-centric models of learning, c) creating an accountability structure between WLL and HC instructors to infuse instruction with equity, multi-cultural awareness, and cultural responsiveness and responsibility, d) broadening the scope of student inclusion and exposure to diverse sources of knowledge, ways of thinking, and engagement with the world, and encouraging culturally-responsive scholarship and creative work, e) infusing the program curriculum with a global equity framework to remove deeply-ingrained cultural biases, microaggressions, passive racism, and links to racial trauma, and f) building a shared language around equity and inclusion work across college and department boundaries to foster collaboration around inclusive pedagogies.
This project is a three year pilot with ReImagine funding provided for the first year
Race & Social Justice Faculty Mentoring Program
Submitted by University Studies
Applicants: Sonja Taylor
Project Summary: Recently published reports on the experience of Black faculty, students, and staff pre and post-pandemic point to a high attrition rate of BIPOC faculty and specifically Black faculty and show a 10% decrease in enrollment of Black male students, after a recent uptick. Interviews with faculty, staff, and students point to lack of belonging as a primary reason for leaving PSU. At the same time, “Black student respondents had large increases in the importance of graduating from PSU (up 12 percent), intention to register next term (up 18 percent) and planning to complete their degree at PSU (up 19 percent)”. These two data points suggest that if students can find a way to belong and/or feel supported, they persist and complete their education. In this proposed faculty mentoring program, we will provide a formal mentoring structure for faculty to engage in a peer-to-peer mentoring relationship as well as an opportunity to connect with students in an adjunct role that can assist with the development of students' sense of belonging. By anchoring the Faculty Mentoring Program in our Race & Social Justice year-long seminars in both the high school classrooms and the freshman classes on campus, we situate ourselves in such a way that antiracism practices are centered and BIPOC faculty and students can feel supported and included.
Link to Project Final Report
ReImagine Anti-Racist STEM Education: Addressing Structural Racism and Improving Outcomes for Historically Underrepresented Students via Chemistry Educator Training and Support
Submitted by College of Liberal Arts
Applicants: Nicole Javali, David Stuart, Gwen Shusterman
Project Summary: In this project, the PSU Department of Chemistry will address the impacts of systematic racism in our department community to promote more equitable teaching and assessment practices. In order to improve both current department practice and prepare graduate students for their future careers, we will provide anti-racist training to chemistry TAs, staff, and faculty and compensation to historically marginalized graduate students for their invisible labor. Specifically, these will be achieved through two key pilot programs: 1) a ten-week anti-racism workshop (conducted each term) based on the book Me and White Supremacy coupled with outreach by the participants to the students in LSAMP, and 2) an “Equity Fellows” program to recognize the additional mentoring that so often falls on BIPOC graduate students because of their intersecting identities. We envision that these activities will shift the culture of the chemistry department toward active anti-racism, equity, and inclusion. Student sense of belonging and identity are closely tied to persistence and retention in STEM fields and by changing the department culture we aim to allow more students to successfully graduate from our programs. Moreover, because these pilot programs target those instructing (TAs and faculty) and interfacing (staff) with a large number of (> 1000) undergraduate students each year, we anticipate the impact of these initiatives will permeate the broader campus community.
Speaking for Ourselves: Contingent Faculty, a SoTL (Scholarship of Teaching and Learning) Cohort Approach
Submitted by collaborative groups
Applicants: Dr. Staci B. Martin, Dr. Óscar Fernández, Dr. Dannelle D. Stevens, Dr. Janelle DeCarrico Voegele
Project Summary: The purpose of this Provost Re-Imagining Grant is to involve contingent faculty in co-creating Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) research and writing experiences that scaffold scholarly teaching and learning in a cohort setting. First, we want to increase our ability to achieve our racial equity goals by supporting more marginalized, minoritized faculty to receive professional development that enhances their teaching, as well as their career. Second, we want to increase and enhance teaching and instruction to students by having a more representative scholar/practitioner faculty reflected in who teaches, publishes, and researches. Last, we want to support our efforts to build a sustainable budget by exploring how developing tools to support contingent faculty not only will benefit students’ learning and faculty development, but also supports budgets by retaining a stronger, culturally and research-informed faculty.
Link to Final Project Report
Exploring a Distinctive Role for PSU in Community-Center Climate Action: Funding for an Implementation Team
Submitted by collaborative groups
Applicants: Fletcher Beaudoin, Jennifer Allen
Project Summary: During the Fall 2021 Convocation speech President Percy announced his desire to deeply explore how PSU could lead distinctively in the area of community-centered climate action. Since the announcement, a series of internal conversations have taken place to refine the strategy for how to approach cross-campus exploration. The Academic Leadership Team (Alt), the President, Provost, and Vice President for University Relations have provided feedback about key points of contact throughout the University that should be engaged in the design and implementation of the outreach efforts. A small steering committee will provide high-level direction and strategy for the outreach efforts, track progress, and foster connections and learning across the system of activity. Supporting this committee is an implementation team that will bring capacity to activate the outreach activities; specifically, the team will provide support to schedule, facilitate, organize and synthesize the campus outreach activities. This project is focused on the work that the implementation team will undertake and the financial support needed to build the team.
Project to completed in Spring 2022
Nuestro Futuro Éxito, Our Future Success: Describing Key Recommendations as Portland State University Becomes an Emerging, Urban Hispanic Serving/Thriving Institution
Submitted by collaborative groups
Applicants: Dr. Óscar Fernández, Dr. Melissa Patiño-Vega, Dr. Martín Alberto Gonzalez, Dr. Cristina Herrera, Joe Rivera Soto, Tania Sanchez, Rebecca Rodas, Emanuel Magaña
Project Summary: This project and report will provide insight on critical aspects of GDI and Reimagine PSU’s vision, including its commitment to addressing systemic racism within the university, prioritizing the needs and demands of students—especially students from historically marginalized backgrounds—, and fulfilling PSU’s responsibility to issues of racial equity and justice. University administrators and faculty may utilize the recommendation report’s findings to improve short-to medium-range recruitment, retention, and graduation efforts for Latina/o/x students across PSU’s Colleges and Schools. Likewise, the report’s findings may also play a role in preparing key leaders, faculty, and staff when making long-term changes (e.g., in policies, teaching practices, and inclusive programs). Finally, a report co-authored by an interdisciplinary group of Latina/o/x faculty and staff (and one centered on Latina/o/x employee, student, and parent voices) is essential to prepare the University to become a future Hispanic Serving—and more importantly, Thriving—urban Institution.
Project to be completed in Fall 2022