Hannah Highlander

The Committee on Teaching and Scholarship is excited to announce this year’s Faculty Development Day theme, “A Globalized Curriculum: Frameworks for Respectful Engagement with People from Diverse Religious and Secular Traditions.” See below for a detailed description of the day’s theme. The morning keynote address and several late morning sessions will be centered around this theme. The remaining sessions, most of which will occur in the afternoon, are then open to a variety of topics, which may or may relate to the overall theme.

The Committee on Teaching and Scholarship is now accepting proposals from faculty who would like to organize 45-minute sessions on a topic of your choice. Please send your suggestions/requests to committee chair Hannah Highlander (tas@up.edu) no later than Friday, March 27. In your request, please include a title and abstract. If you have any other preferences or special needs, please include those as well.  The committee will make every effort to accommodate requests.

More information about the theme for the day:

As faculty members at the University of Portland prepare students to respond to the needs of an interconnected world, it is essential to navigate the terrain of increasingly globalized and diverse identities. Students come from a wide array of backgrounds and intersectional identities while faculty members, many of whom still are part of dominant groups, are faced with the opportunity to learn about their students, de-colonize their curricula, and teach in culturally responsive/relevant ways. Inclusion matters, and more work can be done on campus in exploring multiple faith-based and secular traditions. Given that our student, staff, and faculty populations identify with the breadth of religious and secular traditions, it is imperative for us to begin to incorporate religious and secular worldviews in our inclusion work.  Our students, and indeed our faculty and staff, need to learn to communicate with those whose identities are embedded within different political, cultural, and religious or secular worldviews.  Engagement with multiple perspectives is the hallmark of an educated person, and understanding how both religious and secular beliefs influence culture, domestic and foreign policy, and our own disciplinary perspectives is a critical undertaking. The keynote and workshops are designed to begin the dialogue that is necessary for better understanding our various systems of belief and how they influence our worldviews and our actions on and off campus.

This FDD theme seeks to build on that strength and uphold the core mission by exploring two essential intersecting realities that universities face today in the area of encountering those of different belief systems and worldviews. One is the issue of globalization and diversities, whether in the context of religion, secular belief, or culture, and the second has to do with how a globalized classroom functions today that brings to bear religious, secular, and cultural diversities in the formulation and delivery of the curriculum.