In this episode, we speak with Stacy Grooters, the current President of the Professional and Organizational Development (POD) Network in Higher Education. Stacy shares her vision for leading POD, reflects on its history of diversity, equity and inclusion efforts, and discusses how educational developers can advocate for higher education.
Stacy Grooters is currently the Executive Director of the Center for Teaching Excellence at Boston College and the President-Elect of the POD Network. She earned her PhD in English literature, with a concentration in Women’s Studies, from the University of Washington, where she also taught in the departments of English, American Ethnic Studies, and Women Studies. She then spent eight years at Stonehill College, a small liberal arts, Catholic college in Massachusetts, where she founded the Center for Teaching and Learning and co-directed the Gender and Sexuality Studies Program. Stacy’s research focuses on the ways that commitments to diversity, equity, and inclusion are practiced within the field of educational development. Her 2014 article, “Tracking POD’s Engagement with Diversity,” analyzes 35 years of POD conference sessions and journal articles to track changes in how questions of diversity have been taken up by the field. Her current project seeks to define what it means to be an “equity-minded educational developer” and identify the pathways that educational developers take towards growing an equity-minded practice.
