Honoring International Faculty

International faculty bring with them diverse perspectives and worldviews that can potentially enrich the university in a higher-education environment that is increasingly global in orientation. (Kim, et al. 2011).

The “Honoring International Faculty” project gives UW international faculty opportunities to share their teaching experiences and practices. By giving space for international faculty to share their experiences, the UW Center for Teaching and Learning can deepen its commitment to and enhance its support of cross-cultural and global learning and inclusive teaching.

If funded, the “Honoring International Faculty” project team will interview 20 UW international faculty during the 2024-25 academic year. Interviewees will include international faculty from all three UW campuses and across all ranks. To help capture the diverse experiences and perspectives of UW’s international faculty, the project team will intentionally seek out faculty at different points in their careers and from a range of disciplines and levels of experience.

Funding will be used to compensate interview subjects for their time and effort. Interviews will focus on better understanding the experience of UW international faculty, including the challenges they encounter in the course of their teaching, as well as the strategies they have developed to navigate and meet those challenges. Interviewers will also ask interviewees about their instructional support needs.

The project team hopes to use data from the interviews to enhance its portfolio of pedagogical resources to ensure that it remains relevant to and meets the expressed needs of international faculty. It is our belief that by better attending to the needs of international faculty, the UW Center for Teaching and Learning will strengthen its support for all UW faculty and move closer to its goal of advancing reflective, inclusive, evidence-based teaching across the University of Washington.

Project Goals:

1. Provide UW international faculty opportunities for self-reflection and space to share their unique teaching experiences
2. Foster community among UW instructors by sharing experiences and stories that connect instructors from different backgrounds and disciplines.
3. Develop teaching strategies and resources for the Teaching@UW website and other CTL resources based on interview materials. The

“Honoring International Faculty” project contributes to at least two of the goals described in the UW Diversity Blueprint:

• Goal 1: Cultivate An Accessible, Inclusive, And Equitable Climate 
  • “The University must actively work to create and maintain learning, working, living, and healthcare spaces in which students, faculty, and staff from diverse backgrounds believe they can thrive.” By interviewing international faculty, learning about and highlighting their experiences, we will be able to contribute to creating a more inclusive climate at the UW.
• Goal 3: Attract And Retain Diverse Academic Personnel
  • “The University must increase efforts to recruit faculty, post-docs, librarians, and other academic personnel from backgrounds that are underrepresented in higher education, including those who identify as Indigenous, Black, and People of Color.” By increasing the visibility of international faculty, we hope to contribute to this particular UW diversity goal.
  • “The University must increase efforts to retain diverse faculty at all ranks and to support the success of diverse academic personnel across the full arcs of their careers.” Intentionally seeking out faculty across campuses, at different stages of their careers, and intersectional identities, we hope to be able to create resources that help retain faculty across disciplines and fields around the university.

Our project aligns with several Resilience and Compassion Seed Grant goals: 

• Fosters connectedness, belonging, and community. Positioning international faculty at the center of their own stories helps empower them and foster a sense of inclusion and belonging in the wider UW educational community.
• Embraces both commonalities and diversity within the human experience. Our project is designed to help us produce resources that shift mindsets from thinking about the challenges that international faculty have to the contributions that they make to our university.
• Cultivate kindness, compassion, and gratitude toward each other and ourselves. The CTL resources we create based on the experiences of international faculty will help us create more inclusive and supportive environments for all faculty, irrespective of their identities. Raising awareness of the needs and strengths of international faculty helps cultivate kindness and compassion towards all faculty.