Throughout this academic year, I will be using this Initiatives column to share parts of the college’s strategic plan. My goal is to help you understand the goals and how we aim to reach them, and to help you see yourself in the plan as someone who can not only help to implement it, but also can benefit from it.

This week’s initiatives column will focus on the two action items of goal 3 (research addressing social issues), objective 1 (innovative research contributions) in our strategic plan for 2021-25. You can read the full plan on our website.

This objective calls on us to build on existing areas of high-quality scholarship and expand our research portfolio to include a research agenda on education for societal change.

The first action item calls on us to establish our college as a leader in the field of education for the study of our own efforts to prepare educators for societal change.

There are three implementation tasks associated with this action item:

• Conduct a self-study on leadership in transformative education for social justice.
• Leverage the newly established Faculty Fellows program (a task from the Inclusivity, Belongingness and Participation Objective in the Community Enhancement and Development Goal) as a space for conducting research on leadership in the areas of teaching, curricular development, engagement, diversity and other areas as needed.
• Identify new hires that can expand capacity in this area.

The second action item calls on us to build research programs focused on teaching, learning and policy, with a focus on essential literacies, social justice, anti-racism efforts, inclusivity, and mental health and well-being.

There are five implementation tasks associated with this action item:

• Design, develop and study instructional interventions for teaching and learning that target systemic inequities.
• Explore innovative uses of technology to advance the study of essential literacies beyond the medium of print and with use of other representations.
• Infuse existing research goals on science, technology, art, engineering and mathematics (STEAM) in the study of essential literacies and to promote social justice.
• Promote mixed-methods research as a primary mechanism to facilitate systemic research initiatives addressing inequities and academic and professional development in research areas, including essential literacies, STEAM, mental health and well-being, policy development and implementation, English Language Learner instruction and other areas.
• Study and develop interventions examining the role of mental health and well-being on the lives and outcomes of educators and students.

This section of our strategic plan seeks to build on our college’s strong history of self-examination and improvement. We have an academic community that has continually flexed and stretched to meet the changing needs of our field, and the recent additions to our faculty have accelerated that process, in line with our goals. I firmly believe that’s why we’ve seen a slight but steady uptick in undergraduate enrollment in the last five years, even as overall undergraduate enrollments in education have dropped at institutions nationwide.

The quality of our programs and our ability to transform ourselves and address societal issues through our teaching and research have worked in tandem to establish our college as a leader in the field. I am looking forward to continuing that work with all of you.

Coming up

The next Initiatives column will include a look at goal 3, objective 2.