Our Unique Approach to Serving HSI Practitioners
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All of our course developers, facilitators and coaches are experienced HSI practitioners. This ensures that the examples we use and the topics we pick for our courses are relevant to HSIs and emerging HSIs. In addition, we carefully craft our course exercises to create “brave spaces” where HSI practitioners can engage where they are at and dialogue with other HSI practitioners about the complex cultural issues that occur frequently in HSIs. 

Our Unique Approach features:

REFLECTION ON PERSONAL PRACTICE. Practitioners need to reflect on their own culture, norms, and ways of showing up in the work before transforming their institutional culture. The key to ESCALA's approach is to give faculty agency in their work to improve, by giving them tools such as video observation protocols, cross-cultural inventories, and data disaggregation exercises. These culturally humble conversations spur faculty at any level to interrogate and change the ways they are unintentionally complicit in higher education's systemic racism towards Latinx students.

PRACTICES OF EQUITABLE COMMUNICATION. We teach HSI practitioners how to use speaking and listening protocols to build trust and relationships with Latinx and marginalized colleagues at their HSIs. They learn to pay attention to how they use space in discussions, and be more mindful of how to create spaces in their courses and work with students. We believe this communication equity is key to moving HSIs towards building culturally responsive community for Latinx students . 

SMALL ACTIONS TO GROW LEADERS. All of our courses feature equity-based exercises that ask faculty and staff to make small but concrete changes in their actions with Latinx students. Participants receive supportive feedback on their work from facilitators and coaches which bolsters their confidence to continue reflecting on and changing their practice. Our scaffolded approach and insistence on change, however small, builds autonomy and capacity in faculty and staff to sustain the changes beyond our courses. This supportive community that we create through collective action is why many of our alumni want to continue their work with us, and become trained as facilitators and coaches.

We invite participants to reflect on the current state of Latinx student experiences and outcomes-at the national, institutional, and individual levels, and consider how their training in higher education perpetuates myths of culture free teaching & learning.
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After our courses, HSI faculty and staff are empowered to use this reflection process continuously in their careers to continue to act as agents of change in their HSIs. 

​Video Credit: Humboldt State University Center for Teaching and Learning

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