Jose Bitmoji.jpeg Message from your peer facilitator:

Teaching at CSUN is a treasured and privileged experience. Give yourself this first year to really listen to our students and understand what they are experiencing and navigating. Rigidity and overcontroling approaches, especially in this unique moment, are likely to backfire. Find commonalities, build community and find ways to personalize the learning experience for all. Faculty who complete our programming are sharing with us the deep level of empathy and understanding that is emerging for them resulting with a pathway for effective learning to unfold.

2.4 WHO ARE CSUN STUDENTS?

Student Voices

Our students are amazing. Perhaps at one point you were even a CSU student yourself. If you have never worked in the CSU or within a community college system you might discover some nuanced differences in the path our students must navigate as compared to your prior experiences. Sometimes preconceived ideas and assumptions about our students can result; we encourage you to work through these biases.

One powerful way to connect with students is to listen to their stories, learn about their perspectives, and cultivate an environment where their existing strengths are valued. We believe a greater sense of belonging and student success can result with these efforts.

Let's have a Discussion

Watch the video below, about a group of CSUN students speak candidly about their lives and experiences at CSUN. Now, we want to invite to have a conversation about aspects of your teaching and how you relate to your students.

We embedded this video using a tool to create video lessons called CANVAS STUDIO. This tool is brand new to CSUN's tool repertoire and you will hear more about it through CSUN- IT later in the Fall. Here is how our discussion will go:

Play the video and notice that some comments will pop up at certain areas of the video timeline. You make click in the comments and see them in the comments session (below the video) or you can keep watching the video and read the comments afterwards.
Go to the COMMENTS tab to view all the comments.
Hit REPLY to any comment and type in your ideas.
Feel free to add comments to other parts of the video that you found interesting.

Data About CSUN Students

CSUN has a diverse student population spanning different ethnic, social, and economic backgrounds. Did you know that more than half of our undergraduates are the first in their immediate family to seek and obtain a degree from a four-year institution? Learn and discover how awareness of that and the varied identities our students hold is relevant and beneficial. A colorblind approach that claims race/gender/etc. has nothing to do with what and how we teach will eventually be obvious; students don't leave their identities "at the door" when they learn.

What do we know about our students and can I look up this information myself?

Yes! We are fortunate at CSUN because one of our campus leaders, Institutional Research Senior Director Janet Oh, advocated for us to adopt a dashboard tool which allows us incredible access to data about the characteristics of our students, rates of graduation and retention, and countless other data points and data reports.

For an overview of data about our CSUN students (like the table below), visit Institutional Research's (IR) CSUN Counts website.

Graphic representation of CSUN's students according to the numbers of those who are the first in their family to attend college.

Data from the Institutional Research's CSUN Counts website

What if I need student data for a grant proposal?

What is especially nice about these open access dashboards, is that if you find yourself applying for a grant, you can quickly access much of the data you may need by using these dashboards. There are also additional dashboards available to dive deeper into data about our students that are available to the CSUN community only (accessed with your CSUN login credentials).

What if I need help learning how to use these dashboards?

If data is not your jam, or if you looked at these dashboards and don’t know where to start, we get it. Institutional Research and Faculty Development team up together to provide professional development and workshops for faculty to learn how to navigate these dashboards. In fact, at some point you'll meet Grishma Bhavsar who holds an IR-FacDev position dedicated to organizing these efforts.