Professional Bio

Dr. Roby is the interim department chair of the Education Department in the College of Education and Integrative Studies at California State Polytechnic University. The Education Department consists of the Doctoral Studies Program in Educational Leadership, Master of Arts in Education Programs and Options, and the Teacher Education Credentials Programs in Single-Subject, Multiple-Subject, Special Education, and Education Administration.

As an associate professor in the College of Education and Integrative Studies at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, Dr. Roby teaches doctoral studies courses in Equity and Advocacy, graduate courses in multimedia development and instructional design in the Educational Multimedia program; undergraduate courses in culture, identity, and technology in the Ethnic and Women’s Studies department; and an educational technologies integration course in the Teacher Education credentials program.

Dr. Roby is a Cal Poly Pomona Provost’s Teacher-Scholar with research interests in:

• Inclusion of culture and whole-student involvement as a pedagogical philosophy
• The classroom implications of digital storytelling from both the instructor and student perspectives
• Effective educational uses of collaborative, emergent, and social technologies
• Implementation of successful active learning and group collaboration opportunities in classroom, online, and distributed teaching and learning environments.

Dr. Roby is the faculty chair of the University's Graduation Initative, an institution-wide program with the mission of decreasing time to graduation for all students and decreasing the graduation achievement gap for under-represented students, including programs such as the LinC Learning in Communities Program. She is also the facilitator for the Content-Related Digital Storytelling (CoRDS) Faculty Development Learning community; a member of the Cal Poly Pomona Doctoral Program core leadership team; served as the faculty consultant and co-facilitator for the Teaching and Learning with Web 2.0 Technology Faculty Learning Community at Cal Poly Pomona, a program funded and sponsored by Teacher Quality Enhancement Grant; and is the founder of the OPUS Collective, a collection of culture- and identity-inclusive digital stories created by students and educators.

From her academic, professional, and personal experiences, Dr. Roby believes that acknowledgement and acceptance of the whole learner within the classroom setting promotes shared understanding and academic efficacy.  She explains her perspective as follows:

Every student at every educational level in every discipline benefits from exposure to the viewpoints, identities, and home cultures of the members of the learning community within the context of the curriculum and beyond.  Authentic inclusion of the whole learner not only increases confidence and enhances knowledge transfer, but it also promotes social transformation among the members of the learning community.