Faculty Training
with Dr. Bob Franco

Dr. Franco is an ecological and urban anthropologist focusing on contemporary Hawaiian, Samoan, and Pacific Islander educational, employment, health, and cultural issues. He has published scholarly and policy research on Samoan political and cultural change, the meaning and management of water in ancient Hawaii, and sociocultural factors affecting Oceanic fisheries. In 2009, he led the publication of American Samoa's first written history, a required 9th grade textbook.

As Director of the Office for Institutional Effectiveness, he bridges the cultures of faculty and administration, and shapes an innovative indigenous, intercultural, and international culture on the Kapiolani Community College campus. He also leads a wide and deep array of campus-community engagements with non-profits, and public and private sector partners, and serves on the advisory board for the International Institute on Partnerships at Portland State University.

He serves as the College's accreditation liaison officer, and provides national leadership on local, national, and global diversity and democracy issues for the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) and the American Council on Education. For AAC&U he currently serves as faculty consultant for their High Impact Practices Summer Institute at the University of Vermont, June 14-18, 2011, and as a lead consultant for their Community College Roadmap project funded for three years by the MetLife Foundation.

As Senior Faculty Fellow for Community Colleges at Campus Compact, he conducts training, technical assistance and research dissemination in five states per year (37 states and 3 U.S. territories in total). In this capacity, he also assisted in the development of the Carnegie Classification of Community-Engagement. Kapiolani was Carnegie classified as Community Engaged in 2006, and in 2010 he consulted with Montana State University in their successful application for this Carnegie Classification.

He provides community college, university, and conference audiences with research-based training designed to improve student engagement, success, learning, degree completion, and transfer through service-learning, undergraduate research, industry internships, and authentic partnerships.

He currently serves as a Co-Principal Investigator on a National Science Foundation grant to integrate and institutionalize STEM innovations, and oversees the evaluation of four major NSF grants at Kapiolani. He is also a Faculty Fellow for NSF's Science and Civic Engagement initiative (SENCER.net) and leads the "Diversity, Education, and Workforce" component of the NSF HI EPSCoR program. Further, he is the Principal Investigator on two HUD Office for University Partnership projects, and one Corporation for National and Community Service project.