We are a communication-across-the-curriculum program with a wide variety of engagements across the College’s three Schools. In all we do, we understand teaching and learning as active processes in which educators facilitate strategic opportunities for intellectual growth, guiding learners to develop skills that will support them now and in the future.
Our Guiding Values
We believe all learners are agents, and that our role as teachers is to design learning environments that are active (so that learning is enduring), responsive (so that individual needs are met), challenging (so that growth is facilitated), and safe (so that risks may be taken). Critical to this role is our responsibility to promote equity among learners and to actively bring all students into the process of knowledge creation.
Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in the Classroom
A strong commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusivity threads through all of our work, from faculty development and curriculum design, to the professional development we run for our Fellows. We believe that Baruch College is enriched by the great diversity of our identities and community ties, all of which we seek to represent, engage with, and learn from in the classroom. And we know that deep, transformational learning is made possible when students are supported with structures and tools for challenging dominant narratives and interrogating the inequalities that condition our world.
To these ends, our Seminar on Inclusive Pedagogy trains ever-growing numbers of faculty across all disciplines in strategies for inclusive teaching, strategies that are also constant components of our own staff’s professional development. Recent internal projects such as the creation of our Multilingual Pedagogy Handbook and ongoing inquiry into intersections of Writing Across the Curriculum and antiracist pedagogies exemplify our commitment to leading by example through our own self-reflective pedagogical praxis.
Our Work
Our work takes many forms; the following are the most common:
Faculty Development
From semester-long seminars to one-to-one consultations, we create professional and pedagogical development opportunities for faculty teaching in communication-intensive modes. Learn more about our faculty development programming here.
Course Support
Our course partnerships embed Fellows within a class in order to support communication skills and practice by, for example, facilitating in-class workshops, providing supplemental instruction, and consulting individually with faculty to enrich their communication-intensive classrooms. When we support a course, we contextualize our communication expertise within the disciplinary expertise already in the room—so that rather than supplanting content with communication, all communication is about the content at the heart of the class.
Want to see what that looks like in action? Watch two of our faculty partners, Ken Guest of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology and Jared Peifer of the Department of Management, in conversation with Fellows:
Embedded Curriculum Development and Curricular Advisement
We sometimes develop more significant communication curricula to be integrated strategically into an existing program across several courses. In these cases, we collaborate with program directors and faculty to create a tailored body of instructional materials and activities to meet specific needs, which they either implement independently or we deliver in context. Most recently, we’ve provided this support extensively to the Marxe School of Public and International Affairs through a special partnership.
We also support broad curricular initiatives at the College to ensure that all students benefit from purposeful opportunities to develop as communicators within their majors, most recently through our ongoing work with the Zicklin School of Business toward a new business communications curriculum embedded within and across the BBA majors.
Undergraduate Research and Creative Inquiry
We believe not only that the health of universities depends on pipelines of apprenticeship, but that an undergraduate education should provide training in posing and seeking answers to one’s own questions. We therefore magnify and support the work of likeminded colleagues, including those leading the Honors Thesis program, the International Conference of Undergraduate Research, and lab-based research opportunities such as the NSF-funded REU. Together with the Honors Program, we also co-sponsor Creative Inquiry Day, the College’s largest presentation of undergraduate research.
