John Noonan, president of Bloomfield College, noted this obvious fact emphasizing the importance on his own campus of expanding faculty capacities to teach new knowledge about diversity in increasingly diverse classrooms. It attacks received wisdom, wrenches internalized values, and contests assumptions held so deeply that to challenge them feels as if one is fighting nature. When diversity is the center of faculty development, many new issues surface. Ethical issues and questions of social justice inevitably arise.
Faculty investigate their own personal experiences as sources of knowledge.
Feelings are put on the table as valuable ways of knowing and as sources for expanded understanding. Diversity also almost always creates a need for interdisciplinary perspectives. Finally, faculty cannot avoid emotionally volatile content areas that can be unsettling to many professors not prepared to teach in the face of highly contested and emotionally charged issues. Faculty and staff who participate in faculty development activities have many of the same needs as students studying diversity. Not surprisingly, the factors that allow students to flourish are also cited by faculty as contributing to their own learning and satisfaction with faculty development experiences.