For more photographs of the New Faculty Traveling Seminar, click here.
For additional faculty interviews and to take Rutgers Magazine’s Garden State 101 quiz, click here.
Each
year in late May, a group of new faculty members, led by President Richard L.
McCormick, take a bus across the state to get a five-day crash course in New
Jersey’s history, economics, culture and government to visit the communities
that many Rutgers students call home.
This year’s third annual New Faculty Traveling
Seminar – in which 32 faculty members from all three campuses took part – covered
some vast terrain. Stops included the Statehouse in Trenton, the Pinelands and
Long Beach Island (and that was just the first day); a Portuguese restaurant in
the Ironbound section of Newark; a mining museum in Ogdensburg; an agricultural
creamery in Long Valley; and a 35-acre sculpture garden in Mercer County.
The tour gives faculty members hired in the past three years a chance to
consider research opportunities within the state and to better understand the
backgrounds and cultures of their students. Faculty from diverse academic
disciplines get an opportunity to interact with one another and meet with
government officials, health economists, farmers, environmentalists and
entrepreneurs at their work sites.
Yana
Rodgers, an associate professor of women’s and gender studies, said she had an
amazing time. “I don’t do these things on a daily basis,” Rodgers said. “Visiting
a farm and being underground in a mine were not only educational, but downright
fun.” Rodgers, originally from Rozenburg, Netherlands, was a professor at the College of William and Mary in Virginia
before arriving at Rutgers. She said she and other
faculty marveled at the diversity of the state. “Seeing is believing. So going from corporate to agriculture to art to
park sites all in one day, and then a different mix the next day, firmly rooted
in our minds the diversity of New
Jersey and all the state has to offer.”
The tour also promoted professional
interaction among faculty members and future possibilities for
co-authoring. Rodgers hopes to work
together with Nurgul Fitzgerald, another new faculty member on the tour, to
analyze data from the Visiting Nurse Association of Central New Jersey, one of
the stops during the trip. The tour also
gave her a new perspective on how to incorporate New Jersey knowledge into her feminist
statistics class.
Prior to the tour, Rodgers learned that some
of New Jersey’s cities are among the most
densely populated in the nation – Union
City, for example, has 53,000 people per square mile.
The tour revealed the people behind such numbers, especially the flows of
immigrants from different countries, and how local government has stepped in to
help these residents adjust to their continually changing surroundings.
“Think globally, act locally. Everyone knows
students like to use real world applications, and what better way to learn than
by using statistics from New Jersey,”
Rodgers said.
Sonali Perera, an assistant professor of English in New Brunswick, said that the lessons she
took away from the seminar will inspire her teaching. Perera joined Rutgers in
2004 after completing a Ph.D. at Columbia
University and postdoctorate studies at Duke University.
She teaches postcolonial theory, South Asian literature, and working class literature.
“Not only did I get to know some of the places that my students call home, but I also got a feel for the local politics and spirit that exist within these communities,” said Perera, who lives in Manhattan and is contemplating a move to New Jersey. “For me, the high point of the seminar was getting to hear Pastor William Howard [a member of the Rutgers Board of Governors] and Professor Clement Price talk about the history of community organizing in Newark. As someone who is constantly urging my students to make connections between ethics and politics at home and on a global level, I felt I learned something profound during that evening spent in the racially and culturally diverse Ironbound area. Overall, I was really struck by the clarity and commitment of the many activists, cultural workers, scholars, and community representatives that we met along the way,” Perera said. “The tour instilled in me a sense of responsibility and privilege in regard to my role as a teacher in a public university.”