Graduation Initiative 2025

The Advancing Inclusive Mentoring (AIM) program is a mentor training program developed at California State University Long Beach as part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Building Infrastructure Leading to Diversity (BUILD) Initiative. The overarching goals of AIM are to provide a variety of engaging training resources for faculty and staff members at California State University campuses and beyond to promote student success through positive and inclusive mentoring. Because student involvement in high impact practices such as internships and research, scholarly, and creative activities boost student success – particularly when associated with strong mentorship, learning the best practices for mentoring is a critical component of facilitating student success. The AIM Program works towards that goal by providing an online learning experience through a self-paced enrollment on a learning management system. AIM provides videos featuring faculty and staff members from around the CSULB campus who share tips and ideas on best practices in mentoring, along with re- enactments (actors and animation scenes) of student/professor scenarios that are based on real mentoring stories collected from the CSULB campus community. Then, faculty mentors meet to discuss what they learned, share experiences and insights and develop a mentoring philosophy and mentor mentee compact.

For more information, contact Natalie Muñoz: nmunoz@csufresno.edu.

Faculty will understand the specific structural barriers for underrepresented students as well as pell eligible students. Faculty will use Human-Centered and course design principles to redesign content, assignments, assessments, support, stories, and imagery in their courses. Faculty will engage in co-creation of their course with student input. Faculty will set data-driven goals to improve inequities in their classroom and positively impact retention and graduation at Fresno State.

For more information, contact William Hardaway: whardaway@mail.fresnostate.edu

This proposal is to provide faculty development opportunities for faculty interested in learning how to make the music they cover in their classes or ensembles better reflect the diversity of our students. As it currently stands, much music curriculum is racist and colonializes our students. This is an effort to make it so that what we deem worthy of study better reflects our students, which empowers our students.

For more information, contact Benjamine Boone: bboone@csufresno.edu

The Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) initiative is led by Dr. Jenny Krichevsky. Dr. Krichevsky is conducting several workshops throughout Summer 22 and Fall 22.  The goals of the workshops are as follows:

• Elevate the quality of writing instruction in all disciplines at Fresno State through 1-1 consultations, writing pedagogy workshops, and W certificate program
• Assess instructor support needs for writing instruction within the disciplines 
• Increase awareness within departments about GWAR transition and importance of discipline-based writing

• Offer an annual Faculty Learning Community that certifies professors in best practices for teaching writing in their disciplines.
• Transition the Fresno State campus to a fully “distributed” model for discipline-based writing at the upper division (see Appendix B). 
• Increase support for W-course instructors in developing additional W courses
• Provide on-the-ground support to faculty in refining syllabi for writing learning outcomes and connecting them with Writing Center resources

For more information, please contact Dr. Krichevsky: ekrichevsky@mail.fresnostate.edu

The Advancing Equity through Student Parent Competency project is created by Dr. Larissa Mercado-Lopez. She aims to develop student-parent competency in faculty by creating a four module Canvas competency course. The modules will educate faculty on Title IX pregnancy rights, accommodations, parenting challenges, and the implications of policy for student parents. One module will provide a demographic overview of our student parents and discuss the challenges that are faced by this population in the Central Valley, including housing insecurity and childcare insecurity. Another will provide an overview of campus and off-campus resources available for student parents. Providing a supportive environment for student parents is particularly important as we seek to re-enroll students who paused their education and truly become a student-ready campus. When faculty integrate this awareness into their classes and practices, student parents will have the support they need to persist, maintain their GPAs, grow in their awareness of resources, and feel a greater sense of belongingness.

For more information, please contact Dr. Mercado Lopez: lmercadolopez@csufresno.edu

The Service-Learning Course Redesign Intensive has been successfully offered six times over the last eight years. In 2020-21, service-learning courses enrolled 3,859 students who provided 93,864 hours of service to the community. Equally important is the research-proven benefits to our students when they are engaged in service-learning. These benefits include better retention, improved graduation rates, heightened interest in graduate school, increases in career satisfaction and employment prospects, and improved personal skills including, but not limited to, increased diversity awareness and understanding. To increase student access to service-learning courses, Chris Fiorentino created a week-long faculty and curriculum development workshop focused on the creation of "S" (service-learning) courses in GE courses that are directly related to fostering cultural competency in our students, as well as addressing equity and inclusion issues in the community.

For more information, contact Chris Fiorentino: chrisf@csufresno.edu

The MCLL Cultural Competencies of the Central Valley project will result in a four-module Canvas course. An understanding of cultural dynamics in the United States is an on-going process of engaging with other cultural practices, languages, literatures, viewpoints, religions, races, sexes, genders, and classes.  The Department of Modern and Classical Languages is well positioned to lead faculty at Fresno State towards a better understanding of some student groups and their cultural backgrounds, because our focus every day is to bridge the gaps between students and the languages and cultures we teach.  A large portion of the Fresno State student population is Mexican, but within Mexico are many different regions, dialects, and cultural practices. Descendants of Europeans, Slaves, Indigenous peoples, Hispanics span the globe including Central and South America and the Caribbean. Still other students trace their ancestry back to Italy or to the German descendants from the Volga River area in Russia. We can help our students understand their individual importance and family history. MCLL faculty will create a 4-module Canvas course that will introduce the university community to important communities in the Central Valley. There will be a presentation of the material in a Canvas module with a comprehension quiz at the beginning and end.  If faculty, staff and students complete the Canvas course, then they will receive a Culturally Competent certificate. The Canvas Course will consist of the following Modules: 1) Cultural and regional differences in Mexico, including indigenous cultures and practices - Dr. Daniel Calleros Villarreal; (2)  From the Rise of Mexican to the Golden Age of Mexican Cinema: Representation and Cultural Engineering - Dr. Daniel Calleros Villarreal; (3) Memory, Trauma and Human Rights in Central America, South America and the Caribbean  - Dr. Gloria Medina Sancho; and (4) German and Italian contributions to California: from Goethe to Ghiradelli - Dr. Amila Becirbegovic and Dr. Andrea Polegato.

For more information, contact Dr. Natalie Muñoz, nmunoz@csufresno.edu

The Tequity project aims to familiarize faculty with Apporto. A cohort of faculty will explore the benefits and uses of Apporto.  The faculty participants will be expected to use Apporto in at least one class in Spring 23 and will become advocates for Apporto in their departments and schools and colleges. A critical component of this proposal is providing time for faculty from multiple disciplines to be exposed to a diversity of topics and pedagogical approaches.

A co-hort of fifteen faculty spanning as many Schools and Colleges during Fall 2022 semester will be used to recruit and select participants based on disciplinary measures of diversity (one of the DEI aspects of the proposal). During Spring 2023, the participants will meet on an at least monthly basis to explore Apporto, develop course redesign plans for integrating Apporto, and create a deliverable to share their experience with other faculty who might be interested in learning more about Apporto.

View Tequity FLC information

DH/DS Ad Hoc Committee Certificate Program is led by Dr. Ashley Foster. The Office of IDEAS, in collaboration with the Digital Humanities/Digital Scholarship (DH/DS) Ad Hoc Committee, seeks to promote and support the new and ground-breaking field of DH/DS at Fresno State. DH/DS is a diverse interdisciplinary field that brings together the arts, humanities and sciences within the scope of utilizing and developing digital tools to support the academic and scholarly process. This project will create a diverse digital repository of the existing DH/DS resources that our faculty have created and expand these resources into other courses by engaging 25 faculty members in a certificate program. Please see the DH/DS website for more information.

Visit the DH/DS website

The Office of IDEAS at Fresno State has partnered with the Association of College and University Educators (ACUE) to offer the DESIGNING LEARNER-CENTERED AND EQUITABLE COURSES microcredential.

We will be offering one course for up to 35 Fresno State faculty members this fall, beginning mid to late September. This microcredential is part of the Effective Online Teaching Practices Course, so if you have completed the full course you are ineligible for this microcredential. Upon successful completion of this microcredential, you will earn $400 in professional development funds which will be sent to your department.

Learn evidence-based practices for designing more equitable and learner-centered course outcomes with aligned assessments, assignments, and learning experiences that prepare students for success. In addition, you’ll learn to use grading practices and syllabi design in support of equity. 

Learn more