The program's curriculum is organized around four core pillars: institutional frameworks for student servingness, leveraging extramural funding, effective teaching practices, and broader impacts and community engagement. Through these pillars, fellows explore how research, teaching, service, and community engagement work together to advance institutional missions and student success at Hispanic-Serving Institutions. Learn more about the pillars below.
- Institutional Servingness Frameworks
This session introduces postdoctoral fellows to the concept of institutional servingness as a guiding framework within higher education. Fellows will explore what servingness looks like in practice at their own institutions, including the cultural, structural, and environmental factors that can support or inhibit its advancement.
Through guided reflection, fellows will consider their personal connection to servingness and the role they play in fostering inclusive, student-centered academic environments. The session will also encourage fellows to think strategically about their future career paths, including how to identify and contribute to institutions that prioritize servingness as a core mission. By the end of the session, fellows will be better equipped to recognize, assess, and actively engage with servingness in both their current roles and future faculty positions. - Leveraging Extramural Funding
This session highlights the role of extramural funding as both a driver of individual research advancement and a strategic tool for broader institutional and societal impact within higher education. Fellows will explore how funding opportunities can be aligned with national priorities and collective goals, including student mentorship, workforce development, and cross-disciplinary collaboration.
By examining funding through this broader lens, the session emphasizes how fellows can leverage institutional context to strengthen proposals and maximize impact. Fellows will gain insight into how extramural support can serve as a mechanism for amplifying scholarly contributions while advancing institutional missions that respond to pressing societal needs. - Effective Teaching Practices
This session explores the role and value of teaching within the faculty experience at a research-intensive institution, with a focus on effective teaching as a core component of academic practice. Fellows will gain insight into how teaching evolves over time through experience, reflection, and intentional development, as well as how faculty approach teaching within the broader context of their institutional mission.
The session also emphasizes teaching and learning as an ongoing area of professional growth. Fellows will examine key elements of effective teaching and identify strategies for building and strengthening their teaching capacity over time. Through discussion and practical guidance, fellows will consider how to set development goals, engage mentors and resources, utilize tools for continuous improvement, and establish sustainable practices that support long-term growth as educators within higher education. - Broader Impacts and Community Engagement
This session explores the evolving role of public and community engagement within the broader research ecosystem, highlighting how expectations around transparency, accessibility, and communication are reshaping the relationship between academic work and society. Fellows will examine how research has traditionally been conducted with limited direct public interaction and how shifting perspectives are prompting new approaches to connecting scholarly activity with the communities it ultimately serves.
The session also considers insights from public opinion research that point to a growing gap between strong support for science and limited awareness of how research translates into societal benefit. Fellows will explore how engagement is being interpreted as one framework for strengthening this connection, alongside national efforts that focus on communication beyond traditional academic settings. Through discussion of emerging practices, fellows will reflect on how engagement is being operationalized across the field, with an emphasis on skill-building, experimentation, and thoughtful application rather than prescriptive models.
