Getting Started with Equity in Gateway Courses

Patricia O’Sullivan

Content Manager | Every Learner Everywhere

Patricia O’Sullivan has been an educator for nearly 30 years. She has worked in higher education since 2000 as an instructor, student advisor, faculty development specialist, instructional designer, and grant manager. In her role as Content Manager, she works with Network partners to develop, update, and curate ELE resources. She taught World Religions at the University of Mississippi (UM) for 14 years, and currently teaches Health Ethics in the UM School of Pharmacy. She holds a B.A. in Communications from UMass Amherst, an M.A. in Theology from Assumption College, and an M.A. in history from the University of Mississippi.

Dr. Jeremiah J. Sims

Director of Equity, College of San Mateo | Every Learner Everywhere

Dr. Jeremiah J. Sims, inaugural Director of Equity for the College of San Mateo, was born in Oakland and raised in Richmond, California. Because of his own life experiences, Jeremiah has devoted his career to the realization of educational equity for hypermarginalized students. Jeremiah is an alumnus of the University of California, Berkeley where he earned a B.A. in rhetoric, with honors, as well as an M.A. and Ph.D. in education. Jeremiah’s work, chronicled in his first book, Revolutionary STEM Education: Critical-Reality Pedagogy and Social Justice in STEM for Black Males (Peter Lang, 2018), details his experiences as an educator working toward a revolutionary, paradigm shift in the STEM education of and for Black boys. His second book, Minding the obligation gap in community colleges…(2020), illuminates the role that community college practitioners must play in order to deconstruct the institutionalized inequities found in higher education. In two forthcoming books, The white educators guide to social justice in community colleges (Wallace, Sims, and Hotep, Forthcoming) and Towards liberation: Antiracism and the redesign of college redesign (Sims, Forthcoming), Sims works to demystify the pernicious relationship between racialized capitalism and white supremacy and the role that this unholy union plays in pathologizing poor, hypermarginalized BIPOC students, while arguing for committed educators to work towards an antiracist growth mindset. Sims is also the editor of a Peter Lang book series, Educational Equity in Community Colleges.