Faculty of Color in the Health Professions


Book Description

This book provides the first in-depth examination of the experiences of a large sampling of faculty members of color in nursing, medicine, pharmacy, and dentistry schools across the United States. Anchoring her study in grounded theory, Dena Hassouneh draws on extraordinary interviews with one hundred diverse faculty members - together with rich contextual data - to illuminate the deeply entrenched cultural and institutional challenges to equity that they confront. She also presents practical strategies to overcome those challenges. The book documents the ways in which faculty members of color are excluded from full participation in their laboratory or department; yet Hassouneh's research shows that faculty of color can survive and even thrive. The interviews and data clearly reveal both the social, educational, and departmental contexts that determine satisfaction and success in recruitment and advancement and the impact that faculty of color have had on their students, peers, patients, schools, and communities.




In the Nation's Compelling Interest


Book Description

The United States is rapidly transforming into one of the most racially and ethnically diverse nations in the world. Groups commonly referred to as minorities-including Asian Americans, Pacific Islanders, African Americans, Hispanics, American Indians, and Alaska Natives-are the fastest growing segments of the population and emerging as the nation's majority. Despite the rapid growth of racial and ethnic minority groups, their representation among the nation's health professionals has grown only modestly in the past 25 years. This alarming disparity has prompted the recent creation of initiatives to increase diversity in health professions. In the Nation's Compelling Interest considers the benefits of greater racial and ethnic diversity, and identifies institutional and policy-level mechanisms to garner broad support among health professions leaders, community members, and other key stakeholders to implement these strategies. Assessing the potential benefits of greater racial and ethnic diversity among health professionals will improve the access to and quality of healthcare for all Americans.




Faculty of Color


Book Description

This book provides a discussion forum for the experiences of faculty of color teaching in predominantly white institutions. The knowledge and insights gained from the narratives shared across a variety of colleges and universities provide faculty and administrators in higher education with helpful strategies for recruitment and retention. The experiences documented here extend beyond teaching in general to other areas such as administration, institutional climate, mentoring, recruitment, relationships with colleagues and students, and research. More importantly, the chapters offer a variety of recommendations so that predominantly white colleges and universities can continue to ensure that institutions change in substantive ways. A hallmark of this book is the diversity of knowledge, firsthand experiences, and insights provided by the faculty of color who contributed to it. The authors represent a variety of cultures, ethnicities, identities, and nationalities—African American, American Indian, Asian, Asian American, Chamorro, Jamaican, Latina/Latino, Mexican American, South African, Muslim—as well as disciplines—business, dentistry, education, engineering, ethnic studies, health education, political science, psychology, public policy, social justice, social work, sociology, and speech, language, and hearing science. This book also has the potential to impact the dialogue in academia on affirmative action and the institutional goal of achieving parity so that the faculty ranks in higher education mirror the minority talent represented in the nation. Faculty of Color makes recommendations for faculty development, instructional development, and organizational development practice, and raises issues for commentary and investigation.




Faculty of Color in Academe


Book Description

Comprehensive, in-depth study of the inequalities based on ethnic and racial differences in the professional environment of high education.




Seeking Solutions


Book Description

Seeking Solutions: Maximizing American Talent by Advancing Women of Color in Academia is the summary of a 2013 conference convened by the Committee on Women in Science, Engineering and Medicine of the National Research Council to discuss the current status of women of color in academia and explore the challenges and successful initiatives for creating the institutional changes required to increase representation of women of color at all levels of the academic workforce. While the number of women, including minority women, pursuing higher education in science, engineering and medicine has grown, the number of minority women faculty in all institutions of higher education has remained small and has grown less rapidly than the numbers of nonminority women or minority men. Seeking Solutions reviews the existing research on education and academic career patterns for minority women in science, engineering, and medicine to enhance understanding of the barriers and challenges to the full participation of all minority women in STEM disciplines and academic careers. Additionally, this report identifies reliable and credible data source and data gaps, as well as key aspects of exemplary policies and programs that are effective in enhancing minority women's participation in faculty ranks. Success in academia is predicated on many factors and is not solely a function of talent. Seeking Solutions elucidates those other factors and highlights ways that institutions and the individuals working there can take action to create institutional cultures hospitable to people of any gender, race, and ethnicity.




The Right Thing to Do, The Smart Thing to Do


Book Description

The Symposium on Diversity in the Health Professions in Honor of Herbert W. Nickens, M.D., was convened in March 2001 to provide a forum for health policymakers, health professions educators, education policymakers, researchers, and others to address three significant and contradictory challenges: the continued under-representation of African Americans, Hispanics, and Native Americans in health professions; the growth of these populations in the United States and subsequent pressure to address their health care needs; and the recent policy, legislative, and legal challenges to affirmative action that may limit access for underrepresented minority students to health professions training. The symposium summary along with a collection of papers presented are to help stimulate further discussion and action toward addressing these challenges. The Right Thing to Do, The Smart Thing to Do: Enhancing Diversity in Health Professions illustrates how the health care industry and health care professions are fighting to retain the public's confidence so that the U.S. health care system can continue to be the world's best.




Teaching Writing in the Health Professions


Book Description

This collection provides a research-based guide to instructional practices for writing in the health professions, promoting faculty development and bringing together perspectives from writing studies, technical communication, and health humanities. With employment in health-care sectors booming, writing instruction tailored for the health professions is in high demand. Writing instruction is critical in the health professions because health professionals, current and aspiring, need to communicate persuasively with patients, peers, mentors, and others. Writing instruction can also help cultivate professional identity, reflective practice, empathy, critical thinking, confidence, and organization, as well as research skills. This collection prepares faculty and administrators to meet this demand. It combines conceptual development of writing for the health professions as an emergent interdiscipline with evidence-based practices for instructors in academic, clinical, and community settings. Teaching Writing in the Health Professions is an essential resource for instructors, scholars, and program administrators in health disciplines, professional and technical communication, health humanities, and interdisciplinary writing studies. It informs the teaching of writing in programs in medicine, nursing, pharmacy and allied health, public health, and other related professions.




The Racial Crisis in American Higher Education


Book Description

"Why is it that as we enter the twenty-first century, the nation's predominantly white colleges and universities continue to be settings where people of color feel unwelcome and marginalized? The contributors to this volume dissect a variety of structural and attitudinal factors that are prevalent in the higher education community, organizational constructs and value orientations which seem to hark more to the past than to the future. They comment on the political, social, and economic factors that have shaped academic culture, and buttressed its quietly efficient maintenance of racially discriminatory practices. "The American system of higher education is often regarded as the best in the world. Smith, Altbach, and Lomotey have edited a volume that implicitly asks how much better still it could be if it embraced people of color and provided them with a supportive and nurturing environment, one which encouraged them to reach their fullest creative and intellectual potential. Indeed, this will probably be the most significant challenge that the academy faces in the twenty-first century." — William B. Harvey, Vice President and Director, Office of Minorities in Higher Education American Council on Education, Washington, D.C.




Unequal Treatment


Book Description

Racial and ethnic disparities in health care are known to reflect access to care and other issues that arise from differing socioeconomic conditions. There is, however, increasing evidence that even after such differences are accounted for, race and ethnicity remain significant predictors of the quality of health care received. In Unequal Treatment, a panel of experts documents this evidence and explores how persons of color experience the health care environment. The book examines how disparities in treatment may arise in health care systems and looks at aspects of the clinical encounter that may contribute to such disparities. Patients' and providers' attitudes, expectations, and behavior are analyzed. How to intervene? Unequal Treatment offers recommendations for improvements in medical care financing, allocation of care, availability of language translation, community-based care, and other arenas. The committee highlights the potential of cross-cultural education to improve provider-patient communication and offers a detailed look at how to integrate cross-cultural learning within the health professions. The book concludes with recommendations for data collection and research initiatives. Unequal Treatment will be vitally important to health care policymakers, administrators, providers, educators, and students as well as advocates for people of color.




Teachers of Color


Book Description

Teachers of Color describes how racism serves as a continuous barrier against diversifying the teaching force and offers tools to support educators who identify as Black, Indigenous, or people of Color on both a systemic and interpersonal level. Based on in-depth interviews, digital narratives, and questionnaires, the book analyzes the toll of racism on their professional experiences and personal wellbeing, as well as their resistance and reimagination of schools. Teacher educator and educational researcher Rita Kohli documents the hostile racial climate that teachers of color experience over the course of their academic and professional lives--first as students and preservice teachers and later in their classrooms and schools. She also highlights the tools of resistance these teachers employ to challenge institutionalized oppression and the kinds of professional development and support they need to thrive. Analyzed through the lens of critical race theory, Teachers of Color exposes the ongoing racialization via counter-stories from thirty racially, geographically, and professionally diverse educators. The book concludes with recommendations that various education stakeholders can employ to improve the racial climates of schools and support the growing diversity of the teaching force. At this critical moment, Kohli offers readers an opportunity to strengthen their racial literacies and better understand the strengths, struggles, and power of teachers of color.