In this webinar, Dr. Melissa L. Salazar, CEO of ESCALA Educational Services, will familiarize faculty and administrators with the concept of culturally responsive instruction as applied to the specific context of Hispanic Serving Institutions (HSIs). Dr. Salazar will draw on her organization’s work with more than 300 HSI faculty and staff over the past 7 years to show how culturally responsive instruction can close achievement gaps for Latinx students. Dr. Salazar will outline the principles that underlie culturally responsive instruction and use these principles to explain why certain instructional strategies are more important than others in HSIs. Dr. Salazar will also provide attending faculty with a student survey tool that can help faculty hone in on what students need, and help them to create a learning environment that is both academically rigorous and culturally balanced. The seminar will provide concrete examples of how STEM faculty in ESCALA’s programs have used results of their student surveys to adapt their course to be more culturally responsive. Additionally, Dr. Elena Ortiz, Biology faculty from Phoenix College will share how she has implemented an ESCALA-based practice and the impacts to her classroom. Bobby Alvarado, Welding Instructor from Arizona Western College (AWC), will present practices he uses at AWC to help his students feel welcome, respectful of each other's culture and backgrounds, engaged with STEM, and/or prepared for the cultures they may encounter as they transition to the workforce.  

BIO: Melissa L. Salazar

(PhD Science Education, University of California-Davis, BS Chemistry UC Berkeley).  Dr. Salazar has over 25 years of experience in the field of STEM education as both a K-12 and two and four year college instructor. In 2013 she launched ESCALA Educational Services, a professional development company based in the U.S. Southwest, in order to address the lack of instructional support for higher education faculty who work with Latinx college students. ESCALA is the premier provider of professional development for staff and faculty in Hispanic Serving Institutions, a rapidly growing sector of higher education that enrolls more than 65% of all Latinx college students in the U.S.

BIO: Elena Ortiz

(PhD in Plant Biology from Arizona State University, MS in Biology from the University of Puerto Rico at Rio Piedras, BA in Biology from University of California at Santa Cruz). Dr. Elena Ortiz has been involved in improving environmental education in the Phoenix area for the last 16 years. She is a faculty member at Phoenix College in the Biosciences Department where she teaches environmental biology and general biology for non-majors. Dr. Ortiz is also a Co-PI on two NSF grants #DUE-1742060 and #HRD-1832543.

BIO:  Noberto “Bobby” Alvarado

(Bachelor’s degree from Northern Arizona University in Industrial Technology Management)

Bobby Alvarado is the full-time welding professor for the past three years at Arizona Western College. In addition to teaching the majority of the welding courses, he runs the welding program and collaborates with the local community on any projects that they need assistance with. Bobby is also the Welding Team Lead on NSF grant #DUE-1902599, Impact of System-Wide Contextualization of Math in Rural Arizona Colleges on Producing More Qualified Technicians.

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