Hostos faculty members not only stay active teaching—they pursue research in their chosen disciplines and publish the results in influential journals and books.
 
Professors Sarah Hoiland and Antonios Varelas, members of Hostos’ Behavioral and Social Sciences Department, and Silvia Reyes, Director of Special Projects & Student Engagement and CLIP recently published “The Impact of a Supplemental Instruction Program on Diverse Peer Leaders at a Two-Year Institution.” Their study appeared in The Journal of Peer Learning, which originates in Australia and serves as a forum where high quality research, practices, or innovations in peer learning programs are shared.
 
Working with Hostos Supplemental Instruction (SI) program as a program director (Reyes), faculty liaison during the inaugural year (Hoiland), and teaching faculty with Peer Leaders in PSY 101 (Varelas) and SOC 101 (Hoiland) piqued their curiosity regarding the effect of SI on Peer Leaders at the College.
 
“Serving as a Peer Leader seemed to have a transformative effect on participating students and, as we pieced together anecdotal stories of Hostos SI Leaders, we decided to formalize our observations with surveys and in-depth interviews,” Reyes, Hoiland and Varelas explained in a group statement. “It became clear early on in our investigation that there was a relatively limited amount of research on the impact of SI at community colleges or with students like ours, and even less on SI Leaders themselves. This gave us the opportunity to make a significant contribution to the literature in this area.”
 
In their study, they found Supplemental Instruction to be transformative for many Hostos Peer Leaders in three primary areas: metacognition, growth mindset (Dweck 2006), and belonging. “We utilized open-ended interviews with Peer Leaders and extrapolated aspects of SI at Hostos, including the long-term relationships between Peer Leaders and SI Program (with some Peer Leaders staying on at Hostos for several consecutive years, as opposed to a semester or two at other SI institutions), relationships with staff and faculty, and the latent function of combating  stereotype threat (Steele 2010), particularly among adult learners, females in male-dominated disciplines, and immigrants,” the researchers said of their methods.
 
Although their research is ongoing, for the purposes of their paper, they looked at participants in the first and second cohorts of Peer Leaders at Hostos (Fall 2015 and Spring 2016). Interviews were conducted in Spring 2016 and the article was written between 2017-2018. The rigorous peer-review process took nearly two years and was further delayed by COVID-19. The article was accepted in May 2019 and published in December 2020. 
 
Professor Ernest Ialongo, Chair and Professor of History, Department of Behavioral and Social Sciences, also recently published the fruits of his labor. His essay “Visualizing Italy through a Militant Lens: F.T. Marinetti and Italy’s Military Experience” is included in the book “Italy and the Military: Cultural Perspectives from Unification to Contemporary Italy.” His contribution took a year to research, write and publish, and was an outgrowth of his previous research on the politics of the Italian avant-garde artist and Futurist leader Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. In Ialongo’s own book, “​Filippo Tommaso Marinetti: The Artist and his Politics,” he noted there was a pronounced commitment to the Italian armed forces in Marinetti's writings and political work as a means of ensuring Italian success on the great power stage. For his essay, Ialongo deepened his research into Marinetti's thinking as part of a broader investigation into the impact of the military on Italian culture. 
 
“The bulk of the new work consisted in looking at how the military was treated in Italian history from unification (1860) onward by intellectuals at the time,” he explained. “I found that Marinetti's emphasis on the military as a unifying instrument (both in the sense of protecting a newly unified nation, but also bringing recruits from all across the country to serve in a national body) had its roots in what is known as the Italian Post-Risorgimento (post-unification).”
 
In his research, Ialongo found that “Marinetti's ideas would closely mimic his intellectual predecessors, and thus runs counter to his claims that he and his Futurists were a revolutionary new movement that sought a clean break with what they claimed was Italy's unheroic recent past.”
 
“Italy and the Military: Cultural Perspectives from Unification to Contemporary Italy” is edited by Mattia Roveri and was published by Palgrave Macmillan this past December.
 
Congratulations to our accomplished and productive faculty!