Dr. Ambuter is an assistant professor for secondary education in the Elms College Division of Education. He earned his Ph.D. in Teacher Education and School Improvement, and a master’s degree in Social Justice Education from the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. He has been a teacher in Western Massachusetts, both at the high school and collegiate level, since 2004. He joined the Elms faculty for the fall semester of 2022.
Ambuter is passionate about equity-based frameworks for teaching and learning. By his own admission, he is “a big social justice nerd.”
“When I was hired to work at Elms, I definitely hoped that one of the contributions I would make on campus was in social justice working in partnership with CEUE. It feels like a nice honor to be asked to be the first faculty fellow.
Part of the work is a project to support faculty, first in the Education Department, and then campus-wide. The project is going to take a look at our syllabi and make sure that the syllabi have culturally sustaining pedagogies, have anti-racist practices and assignments and curricula. The hope is for Elms to be a campus that has an explicit, intentional anti-racist stance, and that our syllabi reflect that.
Historically, (in the preparation of teaching materials for a course) there are a lot of people and topics that are left out. They are either silenced or they’re missing. Then there’s this sort of perceived universality that because they are not in our content, they don’t matter or they don’t exist. I think it’s really important to foreground in an intentional way the voices, perspectives, (and) cultures that are often missing, and to draw from resources that are developed through an anti-racist or culturally sustaining lens.
We all bring our conscious and unconscious stuff with us into the teaching we do. So some of the work is to really intentionally and consciously craft the syllabi. It’s not coming in and saying “your syllabus is wrong and bad, and you must do this,” but it’s a collaborative process. It’s the work that has to be done if we want to teach in line with our mission. And it’s ongoing work.
I’m an educator who’s really committed to equality and social justice. I’m just a big social justice nerd and I’m excited to do this work.”