NOVA’s Liberal Education across the Curriculum
It’s good to start the new year with a posting on NOVA, the Community College of Northern Virginia. NOVA is a multi-campus community college, with seventy-five thousand full- and part-time students. It is the largest institution of higher education in Virginia, and the second largest community college in the country. Located on campuses and sites from Alexandria to Woodbridge in the greater Washington, DC, area of northern Virginia, NOVA faces many of the leadership challenges confronting large multi-campus colleges: How to keep faculty and staff on the several campuses and sites connected? How to manage communication when campuses and sites have different programs and serve different populations, including large numbers of international students? How to bring about shared work on student learning outcomes and student success? Among many things to admire about NOVA is their success in keeping the curriculum united. By that I mean uniting the liberal arts transfer and the career and technical education (CTE) programs—certificates and associates’ (AA and AS) and applied associates’ (AAA and AAS) degrees, all together.
Not to say it isn’t hard work. NOVA has made an investment in learning across the curriculum, in liberal education across the curriculum. They’ve made it a priority to “look both ways,” to work with local schools and with George Mason University through an innovative program called Pathway to the Baccalaureate. They see the AAA/AAS not as “terminal” because NOVA and the Virginia Community College System have partnered with a number of universities to create transfer pathways for students in CTE programs. They’ve been working for years with student learning outcomes for all programs. To keep things together, they’ve put responsibility and authority for the curriculum in one office, led by Sharon (Sheri) Robertson, associate vice president for academic services.
Sheri Robertson likes that design: “It’s intentional. We know that many students come to NOVA because they need work right now. Many self-place into applied programs for employment—when they know they want to transfer in the future. We see it all the time. Lives change; people move on. Faculty know that, and they care about the students. It’s my job to find ways to bring the CTE and transfer faculties together. Our automotive and air conditioning technology faculty are thinking about transfer. English faculty and nursing faculty have worked together to give nursing students the communications education they need to transfer. Faculty in the information systems technology program, an applied degree, decided to create a sister IT program that’s a transfer degree. They worked with George Mason to do it. The result: the AS degree in IT is one of the biggest programs that we have.
“We had one program in recreation and parks that had a single faculty member and offered an applied degree. That faculty member wrote a proposal to close her own program and develop a transfer specialization in general studies in its place. That’s what her students needed. They told her they needed a course or two or they needed a master’s degree. At the curriculum committee meeting on the program change, thirteen students came to support the faculty member—with tears in their eyes. Talk about commitment to students!”
“Students come to NOVA to get their hands dirty,” Robertson tells me. “That emphasis on application crosses the liberal arts and the applied programs. It fosters unity and respect for liberal arts and applied fields in CTE. NOVA values both, not one primary, the other secondary. That’s one of the things I like about my job. I get to work with the whole curriculum. I’m also a horticulturist. The metaphor works well in my field and it carries a larger meaning.” She tells me that she’s had students with degrees in horticulture from large research universities who come to NOVA as she herself did—literally to get their hands dirty for the first time. “They never had a chance to do that very much before; I didn’t, either.”
But there’s another side of the story. She tells me about a horticulture student who’d never been to college. He’d been working in landscaping, “plugging trees into holes in the ground by the light of truck headlamps, cramming in the roots, stuffing in some mulch. Work experience, muddy boots, yes, but what a way to kill a tree!” A blend of theory and practice is what these students need most for career success and lifelong flourishing. Liberal arts and sciences and applied work need to go hand in hand.
My visit to NOVA opened the door to a new understanding of the ways in which this large and complex institution innovates. Higher education generally, but especially four-year institutions, needs to hear more about what community colleges are doing. Like other strong institutions, NOVA is developing faculty and staff communication and leadership across the campuses. They are organizing and integrating programs located on different sites. They are bringing together the transfer liberal arts and career and technical education (CTE) curricula. They are addressing the plethora of mission-driven demands, including the long-standing commitment to community-based education that is open to all. They do all this in the face of declining public investment in education and while under pressure to produce more workforce-ready degrees and certificates. Challenged to serve more students with fewer resources, resolutely committed to finding more powerful lifelong education—including liberal education for more students—this is the condition of many community colleges these days.
