Carol Hernandez, Senior Instructional Designer

This year CELT introduced a new award, the David L. Ferguson Award for Inclusive Teaching.

The inaugural awardee is Joseph M. Pierce from the Department of Hispanic Languages and Literature. Dr. Pierce focuses his teaching on transparency and invites students into a conversation where they can engage critically with difficult topics. In doing so, it allows students to situate themselves in relation to an author, a body of work, a canon, or a discipline. In his Decoloniality and Queer Studies course, he challenges students to question some of the disciplinary boundaries that he learned in graduate school. Dr. Pierce stated that, “the knowledge that is taken as standard and normative has often been produced through violence and erasure, and by questioning intellectual standards, it opens up the possibility to ask questions that students haven’t had the opportunity to ask, but that brings students into a more ethical relationship with the scholarship.” 

Dr. Pierce is Associate Professor of Latin American and Indigenous Studies. For his course, SPN 405 Issues in Hispanic Cultural Studies/SPN 532 Interdisciplinary Approaches to Hispanic Studies, he demonstrates all of the criteria for this award. Beyond the content, which focuses on Hispanic Visual Cultures/Decolonial Visuality in Latin America, he demonstrates a commitment to inclusive teaching and learning in his practice both inside and outside the classroom. For example, in the syllabus for this course. He is explicit in his own self-reflection on the choices he makes in the course content. He explains why he is choosing to assign readings in Spanish rather than the English translation as a way to address privilege in the academic publishing industry. He provides metrics on gender, race, and ethnicity of the authors assigned. As a way of helping students to feel ownership and a sense of belonging in the learning process, he assigns them to grade their own participation based on written expectations. His assignments include a variety of activities for students to read, annotate, write reflections, study images, and create cognitive maps. He provides an opportunity to submit one late assignment and calls it a “life happens” exception that students can opt for without needing to provide an explanation. In addition to the evidence in his syllabus, Dr. Pierce is a generous public scholar who works to inform the SB community on issues related to diversity, underrepresented populations, and white privilege in the academy.

This award was named after the late David L. Ferguson, who was a Distinguished Professor, former Chair of Technology and Society, and the founding director of Stony Brook’s Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching. Dr. Ferguson was a leader in and out of the classroom, driven by his lifelong interest in building diversity in STEM disciplines, and in securing the federal funding to achieve that goal.