Jeffrey Milem, Dean of the Gevirtz School at UC Santa Barbara, has appointed Dr. Richard Durán as the school’s first Faculty Equity Advisor and Associate Dean. The appointment fulfills a mandate from UCSB’s Office of the Executive Vice Chancellor to create these positions that can support departmental efforts to enhance equity, diversity, and inclusion in such areas as faculty recruitment, faculty advancement and retention, and community building. In his new position Dr. Durán will serve as a liaison between the Dean’s office and the Associate Vice Chancellor for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, who will convene Advisors, help to coordinate common goals and programs, and work with Academic Personnel and the Office of Equal Opportunity and Discrimination Prevention to coordinate trainings, workshops, and other programs.
“Our School is deeply committed to enhancing the educational advancement and leadership development of the many communities we serve with special attention to those communities that have faced discriminatory social, economic, and other forms of historical or current social and economic injustice,” Durán said upon his appointment. “These are all concerns central to my new role as the new Faculty Equity Advisor and Associate Dean for our school. I am very excited by this opportunity. Executing this role will be synchronized with goals and action plans addressing equity, diversity, and opportunity access outlined in our strategic plan set for launch this fall. Key areas I will advise on in this regard include recruitment of diverse faculty with direct experiential knowledge and expertise on equity issues, promoting a positive climate and school community, and promoting best practices in faculty merit, promotion, and retention.”
“I could not be more pleased that Professor Durán has agree to take on this important post,” says Dean Jeffrey Milem. “Given the Gevirtz School’s focus is to create models of education that give all children access to an education essential to their participation in our 21st century democracy, society, and economy, we have to be sure that sense of equity begins in our own hallways. Since no one on our faculty has done more for equitable education than Richard Durán, I look forward to his sage advice.”
Richard Durán is a Professor in the Department of Education. Most of his research interests are centered on literacy and learning of persons from varied language and cultural backgrounds, but they are not confined solely to learning in school settings. Since joining the GSE faculty in 1984, Professor Duran has carried out a research program investigating learning and culture itself as socially constructed. His research teams have investigated how classroom interaction leads to the construction of learning expertise, how teachers design and implement constructivist learning activities for students, and how students’ self-awareness of their performance leads to new notions of assessment.
As his team has pursued research in classrooms, it has realized the value of a more ecologically complex approach to improving educational outcomes. Accordingly, in collaboration with Prof. Betsy Brenner he and his team have pursued research on children’s learning in after-school computer club settings with support from the UC LINKS after-school computer club network. Another strand of research is working with the immigrant parents of students to help them acquire knowledge of how to use computers and how to work with their children on research and publication projects. Concern for electronic technology and its facilitation of learning as a social process is a unifying theme across his research projects.