Contact Dr. Antoninka
Community of Practice
The MITSI Community of Practice (CoP) seeks to empower institutional change that will provide knowledge and skills related to anti-racist and equity-oriented education to all NAU faculty to support all students as they move through their academic careers.
Faculty will engage in a year-long program to grow their understanding of systemic racism, conscious and unconscious bias, foundational equity principles, and how their own positionality relates to teaching and mentoring students. The CoP will meet monthly and will follow a curriculum developed and facilitated by Drs. Castagno and Brown. The curriculum will focus, first, on self-reflection and self-examination so that STEM faculty more fully understand their own positionality and role in campus culture and climate.
Next, the curriculum will draw on equity-oriented principles and anti-racist worldview development within the context of higher education. Finally, we will explore the applicability of these ideas to STEM teaching, mentoring, research collaborations, and administration of programs (including admissions processes) so that faculty understand how they can build individual leadership capacity to shift their own practices and role model for other faculty on how to contribute to institutional change, eliminate structural barriers, and reduce disproportionality and systemic inequities in STEM fields.